Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced Sept. 30 that he is ready to declare a state of emergency in response to aggression by the United States. Such a declaration would give the army control over public services and the country's oil industry, which Venezuelan leaders say the US is preparing to grab. US officials, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe, are reported to be pushing plans to overthrow Maduro. The US has increased its naval presence in the Caribbean and launched repeated deadly strikes on civilian vessels in international waters off Venezuela. President Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the vessels were carrying drug traffickers. Rubio recently described Maduro as a "fugitive from American justice" who leads a terrorist and criminal organization bringing narcotics into the US, posing an "imminent, immediate threat."

In a confidential notice sent to several Congressional committees and obtained by the New York Times, the White House said that the US is engaged in a formal "armed conflict" with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are "unlawful combatants."

This is somewhat contradicted by the findings of Washington's own intelligence establishment. A recent National Intelligence Cpuncil memo released by the New York Times found that Maduro's government does not control or cooperate with Venezuela's main criminal gang, the Tren de Aragua, which was descirbed as a "decentralized" and made up of "loosely organized cells of localized individual criminal networks." The US Drug Enforcement Agency's latest National Drug Threat Assessment describes Tren de Aragua as involved in "small-scale drug trafficking activities," subsidiary to the Mexican trnasnational criminal organizations (TCOs).

However, while the much-hyped "Cartel de los Soles," the supposedly centralized TCO run by key figures in the Venezuelan government, may not actually exist, an analysis by Insight Crime suggests that Venezuela has become a "hybrid state, where the line between governance and criminality has blurred or even disappeared altogether." A former guerilla group, the Bolivarian Forces of Liberation (FBL, also called Los Boliches), was integrated under Hugo Chávez into the government's Bolivairan Militia—bringing its ties to the underground narco economy with them. The Boliches' political arm, the Bolívar & Zamora Revolutionary Current (Corriente Revolucionaria Bolívar y Zamora–CRBZ), now rules areas of these states in a kind of partnership with Maduro's United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela–PSUV). (Adopted from TNH)