As U.S. naval forces enforce a blockade off Venezuela, U.S. President Donald Trump calls it law enforcement. But the math of the "war on drugs" has never added up in the Caribbean. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's (UNODC) World Drug Report 2025 shows that the main cocaine flows to North America originate in the Andean producing states and move through multiple corridors. As Venezuela’s ambassador to Türkiye, Freddy Eduardo Molina Gutierrez, said in an interview, “Venezuela simply does not play an important role in the equation of global drug trafficking."
The deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group off the coast of La Guaira as part of "Operation Southern Spear" is a vastly disproportionate response to the stated trafficking threat. We are witnessing the violent operationalization of the "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. This is a strategy where the "drug war" is merely a convenient smokescreen for a geoeconomic siege designed to evict China from the Western Hemisphere and tighten U.S. leverage over the world’s largest oil reserves for American re-industrialization.
'Keeping the oil'
The true objective of this blockade became harder to deny on Dec. 20, 2025, when U.S.
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