Trump casts Maduro as ‘narco-terrorist.’ Experts have questions

In announcing the US attack on Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro, President Trump accused Maduro and his wife of waging a “deadly campaign of narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens” and Maduro of being “the ringleader of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking massive amounts of deadly and illegal drugs into the United States.”

“Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died over the years because of him,” Trump said, hours after U.S. special forces dragged Maduro from his bedroom during a raid that killed more than 50 Venezuelan and Cuban military and security forces.

Regional drug trafficking experts said Trump was clearly trying to justify the United States’ impeachment of a sitting president by arguing that Maduro is not just a corrupt foreign leader harming his own country but also a major player in the overdose epidemic that has devastated American communities.

They also said they were highly skeptical of the claims, which are presented with little evidence and run counter to years of independent research into regional drug trafficking patterns. The research shows that countries like Mexico and Colombia have taken on much larger roles, and that fentanyl, not the cocaine Maduro is accused of trafficking, causes the vast majority of American deaths.

Maduro’s indictment details some of the overt criminal acts allegedly committed by him; these include selling diplomatic passwords to known drug traffickers so they can evade military and law enforcement scrutiny in Venezuela.

Maduro and his wife are alleged to have committed other far-reaching crimes, such as allegedly ordering “kidnappings, beatings, and murders” against people who “undermined drug trafficking operations.”

But experts said Trump’s claims about the scope and impact of Maduro’s alleged actions go far beyond the details of the indictment.

“It’s very difficult to respond to the level of bullshitting being encouraged by this administration because there is no evidence presented and it goes against what we think we know as experts,” said Paul Gootenberg, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at Stony Brook University who has long studied the cocaine trade. “All of this goes against what we think we know.”

“President Trump’s claim that hundreds of thousands of Americans have died due to drug trafficking linked to Maduro is not true,” said Philip Berry, the former UK counter-narcotics officer and visiting senior lecturer at the Center for Defense Studies at King’s College London.

“[F]”Entanyl, not cocaine, has been responsible for most drug-related deaths in the United States in the last decade,” he said.

Jorja Leap, a social welfare professor and executive director of the UCLA Social Justice Research Partnership who has interviewed gang members and drug dealers in the Los Angeles area for years, said Trump’s hyperfocus on Maduro, Venezuela and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as driving forces in the U.S. drug trade not only belies the truth but also belittles the work of researchers who know better.

“In addition to making this a political issue, it disrespects the work of researchers, social activists, community organizers, and law enforcement who are working on this problem on the ground and understand every aspect of it,” Leap said. “This is political theatre.”

Venezuela’s role

The U.S. State Department’s 2024 International Narcotics Strategy Report calls Venezuela “a major transit country for cocaine shipments via air, land, and sea routes;” Most drugs come from Colombia and pass through other Central American countries or Caribbean islands on their way to the United States.

Federal officers stand guard outside the Metropolitan Detention Center.

(Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty Images)

However, the same report noted that recent estimates indicate that the volume of cocaine trafficked through Venezuela is approximately 200 to 250 metric tons per year, or “roughly 10 to 13 percent of estimated global production.” According to the United Nations World Drug Report 2025, most cocaine from Colombia is trafficked “northward along the Pacific Rim,” including Ecuador.

The same report and others make clear that Venezuela does not play a significant role in the production or trade of fentanyl.

The State Department’s 2024 report said Mexico was “the only significant source of illicit fentanyl that significantly impacts the United States,” and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment said Mexican organizations “dominate the transportation of fentanyl into and through the United States.”

The Trump administration has argued that Venezuela has played a greater role in cocaine production and transportation under Maduro, who it alleges has partnered with major trafficking organizations in Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico in recent years.

Maduro pleaded not guilty at a hearing in Manhattan federal court this week, saying he was “kidnapped” by the United States.

While many experts and other political observers acknowledge Maduro’s corruption and believe he profits from drug trafficking, they question the Trump administration’s characterization of his actions as a “narco-terrorist” attack on the United States.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Trump ally who left her House seat this week, condemned the raid as more about controlling Venezuela’s oil than about dismantling the drug trade, in part by noting that much larger volumes of far more lethal drugs are coming into the United States from Mexico.

“If it was about drugs killing Americans, they would bomb the Mexican cartels,” Greene said.

Although Trump has threatened other countries in the region, the Trump administration has disputed such claims.

US Drug Enforcement Administrator Terry Cole said on Fox News that a “low estimate” of 100 tons of cocaine had been produced and shipped to the US by groups working with Maduro.

Expert input

Gootenberg said there was no doubt some Colombian cocaine crossed the Venezuelan border, but most went to Europe and growing markets in Brazil and Asia, and there was no evidence large quantities reached the United States.

“This is all a fiction, and I believe they know it,” he said of the Trump administration.

Berry said Venezuela is a “transit country for cocaine” but overall “a relatively small player in the international drug trade” with only a “small fraction” of cocaine reaching the United States.

Both also questioned the Trump administration’s labeling of Maduro’s government as a “narco-terrorism” regime. The term emerged decades ago to describe governments whose national income depended heavily on drug revenues, such as Bolivia in the 1980s, but it was always a “propaganda idea” that has become “defunct” as modern governments, including Venezuela’s, diversify their economies, Gootenberg said.

The Trump administration’s move to revive the term comes as no surprise “given the way they choose atavistic labels that they think will be useful, like ‘Make America Great Again,'” Gootenberg said. But “it’s not there.”

Berry said the use of the term “narcoterrorism” oversimplifies the “diverse and context-specific connections” between the drug industry and global terrorism, resulting in “the conflation of counternarcotics and counterterrorism efforts, often resulting in overly militarized and ineffective policy responses.”

Gootenberg said Maduro is a corrupt authoritarian who stole the election and is certainly knowledgeable about drug trafficking in his country, but the idea that he would somehow become a “mastermind” with influence over transnational drug organizations is far-fetched.

Some experts said they doubt his capture would have a major impact on the U.S. drug trade.

“Negligible. Marginal. Whatever word you want to use to describe the smallest effects,” UCLA’s Leap said.

The Sinaloa Cartel, one of Maduro’s alleged associates, was a major player in Southern California’s drug trade, according to its indictment, and the Mexican Mafia served as intermediaries between the cartel and local drug gangs, Leap said. But “if someone tries to connect this to what’s going on in Venezuela right now, they don’t understand the nature of drug distribution, the street gangs, the Mexican Mafia, everything that’s going on in Southern California. There’s no connection.”

Berry said that after Maduro’s capture, “many state and non-state actors involved in the illegal drug trade were unaffected.”