Depiction of US Navy deployment off the coast of Venezuela. Source: @Cecilroja, edited by Orinoco Tribune.
The United States is planning a decapitation strike in Venezuela to eliminate President Nicolás Maduro, stated popular UK-based political analyst Alexander Mercouris in a recent discussion with his colleague at The Duran, Alex Christoforou.
“Where this is clearly leading to is air strikes, missile strikes intended to decapitate the Venezuelan leadership,” said Mercouris in a discussion that was published on September 10. “And the calculation is if that happens and happens successfully, and Maduro and other people who are key members of the leadership are killed in these missile and air strikes—and one must assume that the United States is conducting an intelligence operation in Venezuela in order to prepare the ground for that—then the assumption is that the entire government of Venezuela will simply implode. And you can then perhaps wheel out Guaidó—I believe the Trump people still recognize him as the president of Venezuela—or someone else, and you can take over and things can go back to the way they were. I think this is exactly the plan. It is not based on boots of the ground. There are not enough boots on the ground, but there are enough missile and air assets to mount exactly that kind of campaign. And that is exactly where we’re heading.”
Mercouris, like other analysts familiar with international law, described the US attack on a small boat allegedly carrying narcotics, in which 11 people were purportedly killed, as a flagrant criminal act.
“I have this to say about the attack on the speedboat,” said Mercouris. “I think it was outrageous. I think there is a very strong case to say that it was outright murder on the high seas. Quite plausibly, the people on that speedboat were drug smugglers, trafficking drugs… But I don’t think that there is conclusive evidence that that was the case… And if there were strong reasons to think that was the case, the United States should have given the people on the speedboat a warning, told them to stop, sent people from the US Navy—which is enormously powerful in the region now—to board the boat, all of those kinds of things, and bring criminal prosecutions against them for the crimes that they were alleged to have committed. Instead, what we had was an attack, and the destruction of this boat and the people on it. To me, frankly, it looks like murder. It looks like a hit.”
US propaganda attempts to soften the ground
The attack on the boat, Mercouris commented, was likely part of a plan to strengthen the US narrative that is attempting to portray Venezuela as a hotbed of drug trafficking. The US is attempting to pass this off despite the fact that a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report ratified in 2025 that “Venezuela has consolidated its status as a territory free from the cultivation of coca leaves, cannabis and similar crops, as well as from the presence of international criminal cartels”—in the words of former executive director of the United Nations Drug Control ProgrammeExecutive Director of the United Nations Drug Control Program, Pino Arlacchi.
The attack on the small boat “served a purpose,” Mercouris explained, “a political purpose, which was that it was another brick in the narrative that is being constructed: that there is a massive problem of drug smuggling from Venezuela, that the people who run Venezuela—the Maduro government—are not really a government, properly speaking, at all, that they are a drug cartel… That this is an organized crime group that has basically taken control of a country that is acting in a way that is hostile to the United States and is engaging in criminal activity against the United States. So, you attack ships, boats. We don’t even know what the connection of this boat was to Venezuela itself, who owned it there, who was running it, and who was operating it. You attack this boat. You say it is part of the criminal activity of this cartel. You present it as evidence, in effect, that this cartel is doing all of the things that it is supposed to be doing. You move more ships into the area. You provoke the Venezuelans into counter-measures. The Venezuelans send up F-16 fighter jets. You say that those fighter jets were buzzing American warships. You give orders to have those F-16 fighter jets operated by Venezuela shot down. You move F-35 fifth-generation stealth fighters to the area.”
“It served its purpose,” Mercouris added, “and it prepares the ground for what is going to come. I have no doubt about this. If you wanted to conduct a genuine anti-drug smuggling operation, you wouldn’t be deploying missile destroyers and F-35 fighter jets to the region. It is absurd to think that you would do a thing like that.”
Despite the intense military activity carried out in the region by the US Navy and Air Force, Mercouris did not envision a full-scale invasion of Venezuela.
“To me, all of this looks like a gradual buildup to some kind of military campaign,” noted Mercouris. “I cannot see any other explanation for this. Yes, 4,000 US troops are not enough to occupy an entire country like Venezuela. That is inconceivable. But maybe the Trump administration believes that if there is an attack on Venezuela, if there are military strikes against Venezuela, if there are air strikes against the government in Venezuela, that will precipitate a crisis, a split in part of the military. The government might collapse, and that would be enough to achieve the outcome that the United States wants.”
US has repeatedly failed in Venezuela
Considering that the US regime has been attempting, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Venezuela since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, Mercouris was not overly confident that this new strategy would pan out.
“At the time when they came up with the Guaidó operation,” Mercouris recalled, “I thought that it had been carefully prepared and might succeed. It turned out that it wasn’t well prepared at all, that Guaidó had minimal support within Venezuela and that a critical mass of people in Venezuela—for all the economic problems—still supported the government of Venezuela against this kind of external pressure that was being mounted against it, and the Guaidó affair ended in a total debacle. Perhaps it will be the same this time; in which case, the debacle will be much, much bigger. But that seems to be, to me, the direction of travel. The United States is trying to engineer ‘regime’ change in Venezuela. There is no other explanation for what it is doing.”
Rubio is rabidly anti-Venezuela and anti-Cuba
To those who watch Latin America, it is well known that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been frothing at the mouth to overthrow the governments of Cuba and Venezuela for as long as he has been involved in politics. In 2021, Cuba’s intelligence chief Fabián Escalante warned that Rubio was readying weapons to deliver the “final blow” to the Cuban revolution. Venezuelan opposition ringleader Maria Corina Machado has been working closely with Rubio for years, and in 2019, a controversial tweet by Rubio, depicting the murder of Muammar Gaddafi was widely interpreted as a call for President Maduro’s assassination.
Regarding Venezuela, the Associated Press recently wrote that “escalating pressure on the South American nation has defined much of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s quarter-century in politics.” As the legacy press agency noted, “Rubio has consistently pushed for the ouster of its leader, Nicolás Maduro, advocated for economic sanctions and even argued for American military intervention.”
“This is clearly an operation,” continued Mercouris. “Rubio… is driving it because he’s obsessed with Venezuela, and probably, by the way, if he succeeds in Venezuela, he’ll transfer his interests to Cuba.”
“Trump doesn’t like Maduro,” added Mercouris. “He didn’t like Hugo Chávez before… He doesn’t like any of that kind of Latin American socialism. He’s talked about it many times in very critical ways. And the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, absolutely hates Venezuela and Maduro. In his case, it is clearly partly personal, and I think that drives it as well. So yes, I think there is a measure of grand strategy here. But there are also other more simple factors—and of course, let’s never forget the oil, Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves, which is so important to secure America’s energy future.”
Unfortunately, many in the US have been conditioned for this type of scenario and make facile associations between narcotics, particularly cocaine, and South America due to years of exposure to crime fiction films. The US is the world’s largest consumer of cocaine. Incidentally, according to a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report published in 2024, approximately 90% of the cocaine in the United States originates in Colombia.
US has a widespread drug problem
“Drugs, illegal drugs, have been a massive scourge in the United States,” noted Alexander Mercouris on this topic. “It is something that many people in the United States have come up against, and they know all about that. They know about the fact that many of these drugs come from South America, from Colombia, from Mexico. There are lots of Hollywood films, we all know them, discussing all of this. So this fits into a picture that Americans already have about bad things happening in the South American, Latin American world and [about] bad things that affect them personally. Many people in America have been involved, or have been affected by, or have seen their lives destroyed by drugs. So, you build this narrative: Maduro, drugs linchpin, cartel. He’s smuggling drugs into the United States. It explains why there are all these problems in your neighborhood. It’s a compelling story and one which many people are going to buy into… And a lot of people will say ‘this is the proper use of the US armed forces. Not, you know, going off to Iraq.’”
For these reasons, the information battleground will continue to be a critical front in the hybrid war carried out against Venezuela and against other nations targeted by US imperialism.
Image: Depiction of US Navy deployment off the coast of Venezuela. Source: @Cecilroja, edited by Orinoco Tribune.
Steve Lalla
Steve Lalla is a journalist, researcher and analyst. His areas of interest include geopolitics, history, and current affairs. He has contributed to MR Online, Counterpunch, Resumen LatinoAmericano English, ANTICONQUISTA, Orinoco Tribune, and others.
