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. The US has increased its naval presence in the Caribbean over the past weeks 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. 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 that his team has labeled terrorist organizations, and that suspected smugglers for such groups are "unlawful combatants." 

US officials, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe, are reported to be pushing plans to overthrow Maduro. 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."

This is somewhat contradicted by the findings of Washington's own intelligence establishment. A recent National Intelligence Council 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 described as "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 transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).

The much-hyped "Cartel de los Soles," portrayed by the Trump White House as a centralized TCO run by key figures in the Venezuelan government, may not actually exist, and rates not even a mention in either the NIC or DEA reports.

The reality appears to be somewhat more complicated. 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." It points to the role of a former guerilla group, the Bolivarian Forces of Liberation (FBL, also called Los Boliches), which was integrated under Hugo Chávez into the government's Bolivarian Militia—bringing along its ties to the underground narco economy. The Boliches' political arm, the Bolívar & Zamora Revolutionary Current (Corriente Revolucionaria Bolívar y Zamora–CRBZ), now rules areas of those two states in a kind of partnership with Maduro's United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela–PSUV), with CRBZ figures serving in local governments and the bureaucracy. The narco economy is helping to prop up a state weakened both by endemic mismanagement and corruption and by US sanctions. (Adopted from TNH)