US Navy targets Venezuelan drug ships while avoiding raids in Mexico

Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a U.S. Navy radar attaches itself to a fast ship flying over the Caribbean. The ship, which was believed to be carrying cocaine bound for the United States, is one of dozens targeted by Washington’s maritime anti-drug campaign, a series of deadly interdictions that have brought the U.S. military’s battlefield back to the Western Hemisphere.

But while the United States cracks down at sea, the cartels are already adapting. “They’re going to try to stay alive by carrying cargo on planes,” said Brent Sadler, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Navy officer. “But it’s more expensive, and you can’t move as much volume, so it’s going to hurt their business model.”

Sadler said the shift shows how U.S. pressure on maritime smuggling routes is forcing traffickers to find new ways to move their products — and new vulnerabilities that Washington can exploit.

Yet just across America’s Gulf, where almost all of America’s fentanyl supply comes from, America’s military presence is being silenced. There are no naval raids off Mexican ports, no drone strikes on cartel compounds, no discussion of “narco targets” inside Mexican territory. The fight ends there – on purpose.

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The suspected drug trafficking vessel is pictured at left, moments before it was destroyed in a U.S. strike on Tuesday, October 21, 2025. (X.com/SecWar)

A 2024 Drug Enforcement Administration report found that “almost all methamphetamines sold in the United States today are manufactured in Mexico, and are purer and more potent than in years past.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it seized 27,275 pounds of fentanyl along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2023.

Border Patrol agents reported the lowest number of apprehensions in fiscal year 2025 since 1970, at 283,000.

China remains a key source of precursor chemicals for fentanyl and methamphetamine, but Mexico is the main production and trafficking base. Exports from Venezuela and neighboring Colombia are still dominated by cocaine.

“Once on land, now you have sovereignty issues, collateral damage and all kinds of complications,” Sadler said. He argues that the United States should focus where its legal base is strongest – at sea and in international airspace – by cutting off the cartels’ finances and trade routes. “The cartels will collapse under their own weight if their money supply is cut off,” he said.

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During his first term, Trump allegedly favored the idea of ​​bombing Mexican pharmaceutical labs, according to a memoir by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Some Republicans have since discussed the use of military force for counternarcotics missions in Mexico.

But analysts say these calls clash with legal and political realities that fundamentally differentiate Mexico from countries where the United States has exercised its military power.

“The Venezuelan military is relatively weak,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And Congress passed a law a few years ago declaring them narcoterrorists. None of that exists for Mexico… You would have that much less justification.”

Lester Munson, a former congressional foreign policy adviser, said the broader U.S.-Mexico relationship also makes overt force politically implausible. “Mexico is very different from Venezuela,” he said. “We generally have excellent relations with Mexico.”

Customs and Border Patrol agents seize drugs at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Loren Elliott/Reuters)

This relationship, added Ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne, extends well beyond security. “Mexico maintains a wide range of relations with the United States, making it our largest trading partner,” he said. “That makes it very different from Venezuela and even very different from Colombia.”

Experts agree that any military strike or unilateral operation inside Mexico would risk destroying that partnership — and with it, U.S. cooperation on migration and counter-drugs, which Washington depends on to keep the border stable.

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Even without open military strikes, U.S. officials are not sitting idly. The war on drugs has moved to quieter fronts – at sea, in the air and in the intelligence channels that connect Washington and Mexico.

“You can put cartels out of business by hitting them where they are most vulnerable and where the legal precedents are strongest,” Sadler said. “It’s at sea and in international airspace.”

These areas, he added, give the United States room to act without crossing the political red lines that accompany operations on Mexican soil. “Once you go on land, now you have local populations, you have potential for collateral damage, you have sovereignty issues,” he said. “This is not necessary: ​​the cartels will collapse under their own weight if their money supply is cut off.”

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This approach has reinforced a growing model of cooperation. Wayne said the Mexican government was “trying to be very cooperative on migration and drug trafficking.” He said Mexican authorities have authorized U.S. surveillance and intelligence sharing to support operations, but it would be politically untenable for Mexico to invite the United States to participate in direct strikes against the cartels.

“We’ve seen cases in the past where overflights have been authorized for U.S. surveillance purposes, satellites and other things,” Wayne said. “But the main operations remained in Mexican hands.”

Analysts suggest that Washington’s selective campaign against narcotics in the Caribbean is not limited to banning drugs: it is also part of a broader effort to put pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. (AP)

Analysts suggest that Washington’s selective campaign against narcotics in the Caribbean is not limited to banning drugs: it is also part of a broader effort to put pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Trump authorized the CIA to take action against Maduro, and Washington’s stance toward the Venezuelan leader — whom the United States does not recognize as legitimate — has become increasingly combative.

“The Venezuelan army is relatively weak,” Cancian said. “We can operate off their coast without much hassle.” This weakness has made Venezuela one of the few countries in the hemisphere where the United States can use its counternarcotics missions to exert political pressure — a show of force just beyond the country’s territorial waters that also targets one of its main economic lifelines: cocaine exports.

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Sadler noted that traffickers have also exploited lax EU customs rules in French Guiana, a French overseas territory on the northeastern coast of South America. Since shipments entering French Guiana technically move within the open border zone of the European Union, they can reach Europe with minimal checks.

This loophole, he warned, allowed human smugglers and illicit goods to move cocaine and other narcotics into Europe under EU protection – a vulnerability which, in his words, “must be closed”.