In dealing with Venezuela, the second Trump administration for months oscillated between dealmaking and regime change. More recently, however, an unprecedented military buildup in the Caribbean appears to be aimed at toppling Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. The regime-change faction, in other words, has got the upper hand. But how? Blame the regime-change capital of the Americas, Miami, and its native son, Marco Rubio.
Early on, there was some hope that the White House would forgo the first term’s amateur coup attempts and moralistic posturing against Maduro. Among his first acts in 2025, President Trump dispatched special envoy Richard “Ric” Grenell to broker an America First understanding with the Caracas regime.
Under the deal, Chevron could continue to export Venezuelan crude Stateside through the renewal of a Biden-era oil license. In exchange, Caracas agreed to accept deportation flights of its citizens — a vital priority given the subsequent suspension of Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the US homeland. The administration thus made good on two campaign pledges: boosting fossil fuels and deporting illegal migrants.
Sadly, this understanding underwent a series of erratic twists in the ensuing months, a turn of events caused mostly by Miami’s community of Right-wing Latin-American exiles.
Fly to Miami from the American heartland, and you’ll find what can appear like a Right-wing foreign country, where Spanish prevails over English; and where denizens of Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and, especially, Cuban extraction pray at the altar of neoconservative ideology. This, even as they have recreated the clientelist politics of their homelands within the city council.
Drug trafficking, money laundering, as well as state- and nonstate-sponsored regime-change operations across the hemisphere form part of the city’s past and present mythology. Influencers like Alexander Otaola grandstand in the form of three-hour, Castro-esque rants on YouTube, offering any and all justification for toppling regimes from Havana to Tehran.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s initial pragmatism on Venezuela didn’t play well in Miami. Similarly, many were also blindsided by the administration’s DOGE-era austerity drive. In tandem with the virtual dismantling of USAID, the White House slashed more than $100 million in grants for the National Endowment of Democracy and related South Florida NGOs set up to combat the Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan regimes. In March, two of the city’s hawk honchos — Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat, the spokesperson for the NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart — assured the Spanish-language network Telemundo that the administration would restore funding for the city’s neoconservative jobs programs.
Sure enough, Miami elites deployed their man on the inside, Marco Rubio, as well as the Miami-Dade trio of lawmakers Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez, and Maria Elvira Salazar. The secretary of state (and later acting national-security adviser) quickly got to work restoring the various regime-change programs and helping appoint a list of allies to key government offices, including Miami native Mauricio Claver-Carone as special envoy to Latin America, former Miami-Dade Commissioner Kevin Cabrera as ambassador to Panama, Florida neoconservative Mike Waltz as national-security adviser and later UN ambassador, and longtime hemispheric hawk Christopher Landau as deputy secretary of state.
The trio of representatives threatened to sink Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill in Congress unless the administration rescinded Chevron’s oil license. The White House caved, with severe consequences for the welfare of the oppressed Venezuelans that Miami neocons claim to represent.
Unable to deport them to their home country after the deal was nixed, the administration labeled 238 Venezuelan nationals as “narcoterrorist” combatants, deporting them to El Salvador’s gruesome Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Yet 87 percent of the deportees lacked criminal records, which reportedly infuriated Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, who had explicitly insisted that only hardened criminals be sent for imprisonment in the CECOT.
All the more ironic was the revelation that many of the same deportees qualified as Venezuelan dissidents, having suffered persecution from the regime after participating in anti-Maduro demonstrations during the 2010s. Beyond the Salvadoran debacle, the administration’s draconian treatment of legal and illegal immigrants — and in some cases, US citizens — has stirred animosities in South Florida.
“Quagmires in Latin America are no more pleasant than those in Mesopotamia.”
Historically, Florida Republicans have been more than willing to “import voters” via an open border with Cuba through the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Activists like Gutierrez-Boronat have argued that any and all Cubans are eligible for asylum on account of the island’s repressive conditions as a Communist country. Similarly, Rubio was an ardent defender of the Biden administration’s Temporary Protected Status program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans up until he joined the Trump administration.
Like Rubio, local influencers and elected officials have since attempted to spin mass deportation to a conflicted South Florida constituency; in my hometown of Coral Springs, Fla., agents in military gear surrounded a home with rifles to arrest an unarmed handyman with no criminal record. Accordingly, Rep. Salazar cosponsored the bipartisan Dignity Act, pairing national and mandatory E-Verify with a path for certain illegals to obtain legal status. For this crime, MAGA luminaries like Ryan Girdusky called for Salazar to be primaried.
But amid the back and forth, Rubio again got busy cultivating his influence operation. Miami’s dutiful son is today simultaneously serving as secretary of state, national-security adviser, and US archivist. Seeking to placate Bukele and to outflank Grenell, Rubio brokered a three-way prisoner swap repatriating CECOT’s Venezuelan nationals in exchange for the release of 10 US citizens under Venezuelan custody. Chevron’s oil license was once more renewed, which subsequently led to the resumption of deportation flights to Venezuela in July.
But apparently, to Rubio’s mind, this was a temporary reprieve. The secretary soon focused his efforts on persuading MAGA’s militarist and Jacksonian factions, which have long yearned for cartel wars in Mexico, to redirect their fire and fury toward Venezuela. In addition to Rubio and his allies, it’s worth noting that Trump is surrounded by Florida natives well versed in the narrative of Venezuelan “narcoterrorism,” including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.
The secretary has likely persuaded the president as well as Stephen Miller that removing Maduro would not only halt drug flows, but also enable further deportations by installing the subservient Venezuelan opposition. And while Maduro has allegedly offered to hand over all of Venezuela’s resource wealth to Washington, the hawks no doubt argue that the opposition, once in power, would hand over the country’s oil anyway; in October, Trump ordered Grenell to halt further outreach to Caracas.
Finally, the White House’s about-face on Venezuela also serves a clear electoral logic. In 2024, Trump won a historic 45% of Latinos, including 70% and 50% of Cuban- and Venezuelan-Americans, respectively. A year later, the president’s approval rating with the same group has fallen to just 27%, including an 18-point drop among Latino Republicans. Electorally, regime change in Venezuela provides a strong incentive for Latino neocons to overlook abuses like deporting a Cuban national without charge or process to a maximum security prison in Eswatini. When I asked my Venezuelan neighbor on the subject, he said he resented Venezuelans being treated like animals but would look the other way if Washington deposed Maduro.
Yet there are significant flaws in the plan. Venezuela has been on the cusp of failed-state status for more than a decade and is the third most corrupt country on the planet. Regime change via foreign military intervention could trigger complete state collapse, inviting warlords and armed groups to carve up the country into criminal fiefdoms. Leftist guerrillas like the ELN and FARC are deeply entrenched within Venezuelan society and have pledged to defend the regime’s “Bolivarian Revolution.” A violent insurgency of the kind waged by both groups during the Nineties in neighboring Colombia against a US-installed government would likely lead to calls for further interventions from Washington; quagmires in Latin America are no more pleasant than those in Mesopotamia.
Such a scenario could trigger more emigration to neighboring countries and eventually the United States, not to mention jeopardize oil production and ironically strengthen the drug trade. Trump has claimed that for every boat bombed in the Caribbean, 25,000 lives were saved in the homeland. Yet Venezuela acts mainly as a transit country for no more than 13% of Colombian cocaine and zero percent of the far deadlier fentanyl.
Under Trump, fentanyl flows through the southern border have declined by more than 40% thanks to the president’s border policies and historic cooperation with the government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. So far this year, Sheinbaum has extradited nearly 60 drug lords north of the border, including Chinese fentanyl kingpin Zhi Dong Zhang on Friday; fentanyl precursor chemicals are known to originate in China before being shipped to Mexico. Why divert energy and focus from these efforts to a regime-change war in a country that, though misruled, has little to do with fentanyl?
As for regime change, in 2019, Marco Rubio posted a bloodied image of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi in response to protests against Maduro. But Gaddafi’s overthrow was in retrospect a disaster, creating state failure and disorder that continues to radiate in North Africa and Southern Europe. Overthrowing Maduro willy-nilly could create similar conditions — only much closer home. Rather than enable a post-Gaddafi Libya in our hemisphere, the Trump administration would do well to sideline Rubio and his allies and cut another deal with Maduro.