As the U.S. Navy remains primed for action in the Southern Caribbean, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro prepares for what could be an American attempt to remove him. And as President Trump alternates between calling Maduro on the phone and authorizing air strikes, a bevy of misinformation is being peddled by public figures with an agenda. There are so many claims and counter-claims on the air waves right now that it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction.
A sizable chunk of this disinformation is of course being sold by Maduro himself, a man who has learned from his predecessor and mentor, the late Hugo Chávez, that it’s easier to blame the United States for all of your problems than own up to your own catastrophic policy errors. Maduro’s biggest fraud occurred in the summer of 2024, when he lost the Venezuelan presidential election to former diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia in astounding fashion but claimed victory anyway.
Maduro, however, is hardly the only one throwing falsehoods into the air. The Venezuelan opposition movement led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado and a vocal group of far-right Venezuelan exiles in Miami are just as guilty. Machado, whose entire career has been devoted to ending the Chavismo politics that have ruled Venezuela for a quarter-century, has given countless interviews in the American press about how Maduro rigged the 2020 U.S. presidential election, unleashed the Tren de Aragua gang and directed a massive criminal organization dubbed the Cartel de los Soles, with the express purpose of weakening America by turning its citizens into drug addicts. “Everybody knows that Venezuela is today the main channel of cocaine,” Machado told CNN last month, “and that this is a business that has been run by Maduro.”
Machado is hardly the only one making claims designed to push the Trump administration into military action. Emmanuel Rincón, a writer and activist, alleged on Fox News this week that Maduro declared war on the United States long ago and is “one of the main architects” of the drug epidemic in the U.S. Ryan Berg of the Center for Strategic and International Studies went on the same network and called Maduro a dire threat who was turning Venezuela into a Russian and Chinese colony only 600 miles from the U.S. mainland.
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Events on Venezuela
