President Donald Trump has set the stage for precision strikes inside Venezuela on military facilities the United States says protect and empower one of the globe’s most dangerous criminal syndicates, Cartel de los Soles.
The strikes reportedly could begin within hours.
The White House has intimated that Nicolás Maduro isn’t just Venezuela’s dictatorial ruler — he’s the head of the Soles cartel. “Cartel de los Soles is a Venezuela-based criminal group headed by Nicolas Maduro Moros and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals in the Maduro regime that provides material support to foreign terrorist organizations threatening the peace and security of the United States, namely Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel,” the Treasury Department reported in July.
According to a source who spoke to the Miami Herald, “Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to. What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”
The strategic focus of the attacks is decapitating the cartel hierarchy that, Washington says, moves half a thousand tons of cocaine to American and European markets each year. Though officials haven’t confirmed if Maduro himself is a target, one source put it bluntly — “his time is running out,” the Miami Herald reported.
This escalation follows months of buildup ordered directly by President Trump upon returning to the Oval Office in January 2025. He executed a multipronged campaign to dismantle the crime-terror pipelines running from Caracas to Central America. Trump’s first move was to designate the Cartel de los Soles and its enforcer gang, Tren de Aragua, as terrorist organizations.
That classification signaled that the U.S. now treats Venezuela’s military-backed cartel as a global threat on par with al-Qaeda. Backing that declaration is a Joint Task Force of U.S. destroyers, Marines, and advanced aircraft patrols the Caribbean with pinpoint reconnaissance and reconnaissance drones tracking smuggling routes.
The arrival of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, along with her full strike group, marked the largest U.S. naval concentration in the region in decades. Former Venezuelan officers call it the “final phase” — a buildup designed for precision strikes, not occupation.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth greenlit the deployment of F-35B fighters and MQ-9 Reapers to Puerto Rico, capable of destroying clandestine drug labs and airstrips in Venezuelan territory. Meanwhile, President Trump doubled the bounty for Maduro’s capture to $50 million — the largest such reward in U.S. history — and offered $25 million apiece for his cartel lieutenants, including Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, both indicted in U.S. courts on narcotics charges.
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Attorney General Pam Bondi, announcing the reward increase, accused Maduro of running the Cartel de los Soles “as a military drug empire” allied with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel and transnational gangs. Administration officials make no effort to hide their intent: destroy the cartel’s infrastructure and cripple Maduro’s power base. Trump, who has long pledged to stop the flow of deadly narcotics into the United States, views the Venezuelan campaign as the next front in his war on drugs — a continuation of his promise to use every element of American power to defend the nation from foreign narco-terror.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly put it bluntly: “The President is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our homeland.” Behind the naval armada, U.S. intelligence operations have intensified. Trump recently confirmed that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela — a rare presidential admission that signals just how personal this mission has become.
Pentagon sources reveal that B-1 and B-52 bombers have made repeated flights along Venezuela’s coast, probing its Russian-built S-300 missile systems and mapping air-defense weak points. Maduro bragged last week that his forces possessed 5,000 Russian-made surface-to-air missiles. But analysts note that the overwhelming American presence — from electronic-warfare Growlers to missile-equipped destroyers — gives Trump unmatched tactical options. Former Commander of U.S. Southern Command Admiral James Stavridis called the buildup “a hammer poised over Caracas.”
Trump insiders echo the same strategic philosophy that guided earlier operations against Iranian General Qasem Soleimani: swift, targeted, devastating action. Elliott Abrams, Trump’s former Venezuela envoy, noted, “What he favors are high-impact strikes, not long occupations.” The force assembled in the Caribbean — roughly 10,000 personnel and over 100 combat aircraft — is optimized for surgical strikes, not invasion.
The administration’s goal, officials say, is not to occupy Venezuela but to break the nexus between Maduro’s regime and the international drug trade — through relentless, decisive pressure. Should Maduro’s own generals turn against him, the end could come swiftly. As one source told the Herald, “There’s more than one general willing to hand him over. Talking about death is one thing. Seeing it coming is another.”
