I’ve been waiting for a “hook” before expressing my opinions about the bombing of boats setting off from Venezuela, allegedly smuggling narcotics to the United States. Since so little opinion has been expressed on the subject by major outlets and no real news “hook”, just the occasional announcement of the boat’s destruction or speculation about President Trump’s intentions, I’ve decided just to go ahead and give my opinion.
Yes, boats from Venezuela have been ferrying illegal drugs to the United States. Have the boats that have been destroyed been doing so? We’ll probably never know. Occasionally, the families of men killed in the boats’ destruction have admitted that, yes, the boat was smuggling drugs, also asserting that they weren’t “narco-terrorists”, they were just poor guys trying to make a buck smuggling drugs. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Yes, Maduro is a bad guy and is bad for Venezuela. He’s a crook and an authoritarian just like his mentor, Hugo Chavez.
No, destroying the boats isn’t legal. It’s not an emergency by the normal non-federal government standard. The smuggling has been going on for years. Yes, destroying the boats is an act of war and the president is not empowered to make war on other countries except in an emergency or when authorized by Congress. To its discredit, Congress has been abrogating that responsibility for the last 65 years. This would be a splendid opportunity for Congress to reassert its prerogatives but I don’t expect that to happen with this president and this Congress.
Furthermore, destroying smuggling boats in the international waters of the Caribbean without specific Congressional authorization is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. Monitoring boats setting off from, say, Venezuela would be a splendid opportunity to use drone aircraft to monitor the boats until they’ve entered the U .S. EEZ at which point the Coast Guard could be deployed to apprehend the craft once they’d entered U. S. territorial waters. Or the drones themselves could destroy the boats at that point—the act of war would be Venezuela’s at that point. That’s the way of war that’s emerging since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Some of the reports I’ve read have claimed that the boats are being destroyed using MQ-9 Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles. As I understand it those missiles cost from $150,000-$200,000. A back-of-the-envelope estimation of the cost of each boat strike is about $1 million. While it would be using drone technology, using Hellfire missiles is a pretty expensive way to sink a smuggling boat. It also raises the question of why the attacks are being carried out in international or even Venezuelan waters. And why we’ve deployed the flotilla pictured above to the Caribbean.
We absolutely, positively should not be preparing to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela. We are unpopular enough with our Central and South American neighbors for such unilateral interventions as it is. Hardly the material for a Nobel Peace Prize.
I should add that I do not think most of those fleeing Venezuela are political refugees so there’s no emergency there, either. There’s hardly a better example in the world today of self-inflicted harm than Venezuela. Why we should provide a haven for people who’ve harmed themselves through their own fecklessness eludes me. “One man, one vote, one time” is a completely foreseeable consequence of electing a figure like Chavez. It reminds me of that scene in Blazing Saddles when Cleavon Little has a gun pointed at this own head.
