OPINION:
Nicolas Maduro, like Hugo Chavez before him, has waged a sustained campaign against the United States. He has turned cocaine into a weaponized export, sheltered the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army and given haven to groups that have killed and kidnapped Americans from the 2003 FARC shoot-down and hostage crisis to the abductions of missionaries and oil workers.
For years, Washington answered with sanctions that were necessary but insufficient. Now, the Trump administration has moved into the military domain. A Venezuelan smuggling vessel lies at the bottom of the Caribbean with 11 dead aboard; 10 U.S. F-35s now sit ready in Puerto Rico.
The legal record already exists. In March 2020, the Justice Department indicted Mr. Maduro and lieutenants on narco-terrorism charges, alleging a two-decade conspiracy with the FARC to “use cocaine as a weapon to flood the United States.” In 2025, the administration designated Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, sanctioned its leadership and placed the Cartel de los Soles, the military police protection network, on the list of specially designated global terrorists. These actions activate material support prohibitions and propagate sanctions through the financial system, casting Mr. Maduro not as a corrupt sovereign but as commander of a hybrid terrorist-criminal entity.
The flows confirm it. Just last month, the U.S. Coast Guard offloaded more than 61,000 pounds of cocaine in Florida, a record haul. At home, cocaine-involved overdose deaths rose from 4,681 in 2011 to 29,449 in 2023, with provisional 2024 figures still historically high. The indictment’s claim — that cocaine was weaponized strategically — maps onto those harms.
Congress should turn this record into a carefully bound authorization for use of military force. Properly drafted, it is not a discretionary war but enforcement when extradition is impossible. It also disciplines the blur between Title 10 (military) and Title 50 (covert) authorities. In Laos and Nicaragua, covert architectures metastasized into proxy wars with scant oversight; tethering force to an indictment and channeling it through Congress prevents that drift.
International law is harder terrain, but not empty. Heads of state enjoy immunity, yet precedents crack when crime and terrorism are at issue. The 1989 capture of Panama’s Manuel Antonio Noriega proceeded on indictment; the 1945 Yamashita judgment clarified command responsibility; Lockerbie bent sovereignty until Libya surrendered suspects. U.S. practice — from the 1943 interception of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto to strikes on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — treats leaders of organized armed groups with continuous combat functions as lawful targets. Drawn tightly — with indictment, designation, capture-first discipline and multilateral validation — such a rule strengthens law.
The “unable or unwilling” doctrine reinforces the case: The U.S. may strike when a state cannot or will not prevent its territory from being used against America. Venezuela is stronger still. The state is complicit, and its security services are fused with the Cartel de los Soles. Even so, legitimacy in Latin America requires process. The inter-American system provides it. TIAR, the Rio Treaty, permits collective defense against irregular aggression and was invoked after 9/11.
Colombia is the stress test. Under President Gustavo Petro, extraditions have been suspended, warrants lifted and traffickers engaged under “total peace,” dismantling cooperation that once bound Bogota to Washington. Any authorization must extend beyond Venezuelan borders, under strict statutory thresholds and regional consultations, to associated forces on Colombian soil. This recognizes where the networks operate.
The normative line is bright. Executive orders banning political assassination bar clandestine killings, not lawful targeting in armed conflict. A statute codifying indictment-tethered targeting with capture-first discipline preserves that distinction and raises the threshold for action. Sovereignty is not a shield for cartel-states but a status conditioned on refusing to convert institutions into criminal-terrorist networks. Codifying indictment-based enforcement narrows, rather than loosens, precedent.
Congress should take the record it already has — the indictment, the designations, the measurable harm — and legislate a narrow, time-bound authorization that turns judicial fact into disciplined power. That is how a republic enforces its laws against a narco-terrorist state without sacrificing the restraints that distinguish it from the regimes it confronts.
• Carlo J.V. Caro is a strategic analyst trained in international security at Columbia University. He is also a former vice president of a real estate and sustainability firm overseeing work across Latin America and Asia.
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