U.S. Military Forces conduct a strike against Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists, 2 September 2025.

On September 2, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio separately reported that a U.S. attack on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast destroyed illegal drugs and killed 11 passengers identified as members of the Tren de Aragua terrorist gang. Trump showed a video on social media displaying the boat’s fiery destruction.

For a week or so previous, eight U.S. naval vessels with 4,500 marines aboard, a nuclear-powered submarine, and F-35 stealth aircraft had been patrolling in nearby Caribbean waters.

Commentators denounced the illegality of an attack without a declaration of war. They condemned the executions of alleged drug traffickers who are not identified or subjected to criminal proceedings.

Maybe the attack never happened. La Jornada journalist Carlos Fazio argues the video offers no information as to the boat’s location, where it came from, or where it was heading. Trump and Rubio mentioned different destinations. “[W]hy deliberately degrade the sharpness and clarity of the video to the point of rendering it useless for analysis,” Fazio asks.

Information Minister Freddy Ñáñez in Caracas claimed the video was generated by artificial intelligence and that sections of the video show differing numbers of the boat’s outboard motors and variations as to daytime and nighttime.

Analyst Vijay Prashad shows that the Tren de Aragua gang, having originated in 2012 as a prison gang in Venezuela, has committed many crimes but never narco-trafficking. Nothing has appeared suggesting the supposed victims were part of that gang.

Pino Arlacchire, a former Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), rejects the U.S. portrayal of Venezuela as narco-trafficking giant. The Cartel de los Soles, alleged to be a drug-trafficking operation managed by Venezuela’s government, is really “a creature of Trumpian imagination.” The UNODC 2025 report, he recalls, declared Venezuela to be “a marginal player in the great theater of international drug trafficking.”

US in Charge

The context traces........

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