Caracas’s Crime Hub

By Michael Baumgartner

Saturday, November 08, 2025

 

Long before I became a member of Congress, I frequently traveled to and advised international mining companies in Venezuela. I saw the country’s potential: blessed with the world’s largest oil reserves, talent, and the rule-of-law foundations to turn natural wealth into broad prosperity.

 

I saw how socialist thugs Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro brutalized its people and impoverished a nation that once led Latin America in living standards. Their predatory policies now export disorder beyond Venezuela’s borders.

 

We have to ask: Is Venezuela today a threat to international peace and security — and a direct threat to the United States? Yes, on both counts.

 

More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled a collapsing economy and an abusive security state, stressing every country between the Orinoco and our southern border. These migration routes also carry contraband, weapons, and cash, where a new generation of gangs has flourished — most notoriously, Tren de Aragua.

 

A normal country suppresses organized crime. In Venezuela, the state is the business partner: senior officials sanctioned or indicted abroad; intelligence services repurposed to protect rackets; ports and papers “taxed” to move illicit oil, gold, drugs, and people. In the Orinoco mining arc, toxic illegal mining finances armed groups and poisons rivers. This is a system that monetizes sovereignty and sells it to America’s enemies.

 

Caracas is not a Hollywood “ops center” where our adversaries plot around a shared table. It’s something more practical, and more dangerous: a permissive hub where state power, transnational crime, and extra-hemispheric rivals intersect. Marxist terrorists find sanctuary. Hezbollah-linked facilitators use regional finance and trade channels. Russia gets an arms market. China provides surveillance tech to enable the regime to police dissent.

 

Maduro’s narco-governance model risks spreading across the region to Mexico and beyond. U.S. personnel and facilities in the region face elevated risk from regime-enabled armed groups. Maritime and air interdiction are strained by dark-fleet oil movements and drug routes radiating from Venezuelan territory and waters. Our financial system is exploited to launder illicit oil, gold, and narcotics revenues.

 

When hostile networks enjoy access, safe passage, and state protection in our hemisphere, American neighborhoods absorb the downstream effects. If “direct threat” means predictable harm to American families and government interests, the Maduro regime and its proxies qualify.

 

The previous administration foolishly thought it could entice the Maduro regime to hold free elections in exchange for increased oil production. The predictable result was funneling money into regime coffers while the election was rigged.

 

It’s time to end appeasement and apply maximum pressure.

 

America has used force in the hemisphere many times before. In 1989, Panamanian strongman Noriega posed an acute, localized danger: U.S. personnel were attacked, and our canal obligations were at risk. The trigger was clear and the remedy quick.

 

Venezuela’s threat is broader and more durable. It’s a chronic, multi-vector threat — crime, migration pressure, terrorist finance, foreign adversaries, and digital repression tools. That makes today’s problem more consequential for peace and security than smaller, bounded crises like Panama. Here’s a clear-eyed game plan for Congress and the president to discipline the use of force:

 

·        Lead with moral clarity. The Venezuelan people aren’t the enemy; the regime is. Opposition figures such as Nobel Peace laureate María Corina Machado show the country’s potential.

 

·        Follow the money. Squeeze oil-for-cash brokers, illicit-gold buyers, dark-fleet shippers, and shell/free-trade-zone laundries. Treat Tren de Aragua and allies as hemispheric crime and terrorist syndicates: Disrupt their logistics, finance, and communications.

 

·        Cut off foreign patrons. Russia, Cuba, Iran, and China enable Caracas with weapons, advisers, surveillance tech, and cover. Build a coalition to choke financing, parts, and political shelter.

 

·        Use the right tools. Keep lawful military force on the table and use it with precision. Run a sustained campaign to degrade the Caracas hub: smarter maritime interdiction, tighter sanctions, aggressive anti–money laundering, and visa/asset bans on profiteering security officials — backed by partners willing to share risk.

 

·        Stay the course. This is an endurance fight; letting a criminalized state entrench as a hemispheric staging ground will cost far more later.

 

After my time in Venezuela, I worked in counterinsurgency in Iraq and counternarcotics in Afghanistan. The threats festering in Venezuela risk spreading into the sort of problematic challenges America faced in both of those countries. The difference, of course, is Venezuela is in our own backyard and its disease risks infecting our direct neighbors.

 

Calling Venezuela a threat to international peace and security isn’t chest-thumping; it’s clarity. And clarity is where sound policy starts.