Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the head of Venezuela’s only right-wing opposition party Vente Venezuela, warned the armed forces of her country in a recent interview to reconsider their loyalty to dictator Nicolás Maduro lest they incur the wrath of the U.S. government.
“There are strong fractures” among the top brass of the Venezuelan armed forces, Machado claimed, “very few high-ranking soldiers still support Maduro and they have to make a decision very soon because President Trump isn’t playing.”
Machado made the remarks in an interview with Fox News on Sunday. A former lawmaker in the National Assembly, Machado was violently ousted from her position in the top legislature in 2014 and has since organized peaceful protests against the socialist regime and attempted to run for president. Machado was the frontrunner in the sham 2024 presidential “election” before Maduro banned her from running for office for supporting international human rights sanctions on his regime.
President Donald Trump has approved an aggressive foreign policy against socialism in Latin America for his administration, as well as a series of military actions intended to curb international cocaine trafficking in the region, which experts agree is deeply linked to the Maduro regime itself. The Trump administration increased its reward this month to $50 million for any information that could lead to the capture of Nicolás Maduro and similarly imposed bounties on some of his most powerful henchmen, prominently including Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.
The U.S. military also initiated operations in the southern Caribbean Sea in mid-August reportedly intended to intercept cocaine shipments to the United States and limit the scope of influence of trafficking organizations, including cartels and terrorist organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Machado was addressing this pressure on Maduro and his allies in the interview.
A t-shirt depicting US President Donald Trump that reads ‘Hands off Venezuela’ is seen while supporters of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro take part in a protest against the reward imposed by the US President, in Caracas on August 11, 2025. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)
“Maduro is worried,” she surmised, “and he should be, because over 90 percent of the Venezuelan people are united and have decided to move forward [without him].”
Machado lamented that, under Maduro, “Venezuela has become a safe place for criminal organizations from around the world” – not just from neighboring states, but jihadist organizations in the Middle East. Maduro’s regime, she added, was not a government but a “criminal structure that is using Venezuela to channel tons of drugs that arrive in the United States.”
Elsewhere in her remarks, Machado noted that Maduro had turned Venezuela into a “satellite of the Iranian regime” and a “safe place for criminal organizations from around the world.” The Maduro regime is closely allied to Islamist Iran and has longstanding ties to the jihadist terror organization Hezbollah, which recent reports warn is operating freely in Latin America and participating in the regional drug trade.
The Maduro regime has denounced Washington for approving military activity in international waters near Venezuela. A report by the news agency Reuters indicated on August 18 that the military was deploying three Aegis guided-missile destroyers to the Caribbean to fight drug trafficking. Subsequent reports indicated that as many as 4,000 sailors and Marines would deploy to the region following the publication of a massive United Nations report finding record-high cocaine production in Latin America, most of it originating in Colombia.
Radical leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro was among the regional heads of state defending drug trafficking against the American operations. Petro announced this month that he would order the Colombian armed forces to defend Maduro against any American “military intervention,” which no reports indicate is imminent.
“I publicly convey my order, as commander of the Colombian Armed Forces. Colombia and Venezuela are the same people, the same flag, the same history,” Petro declared in an extended statement on social media. Petro also claimed that Maduro had offered his help “to defeat the drug trafficking groups on the border.”
On Monday, Petro bizarrely declared that the Cartel of the Suns, an international cocaine trafficking organization run through the Venezuelan regime, “does not exist.”
Maduro responded to the military deployment by claiming that it is a precursor to an American invasion of the country and announcing a nationwide “mobilization” to recruit soldiers for armed civilian militias. Recruitment campaign events throughout Venezuela over the weekend attracted little interest, while propaganda videos spread by the regime online of alleged soldiers performing “martial arts” displays were met with mockery.
In an interview with Fox News this week, DEA Administrator Terry Cole reiterated the Trump administration’s position that Maduro is the head of a criminal syndicate, not the head of a state of a legitimate regime.
“Venezuela has become a narco-terrorist state that continues collaborating with Colombia’s FARC and ELN [National Liberation Army] to send record amounts of cocaine from Venezuela to the Mexican cartels, which continue entering the United States,” he explained. “Venezuelan corruption, the Venezuelan dictatorship, is narco-terrorist. They continue sending this poison to the United States, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, not to mention the members of the Tren de Aragua gang that they send to our country to destroy its beautiful streets.”
The Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan organized criminal gang that the Venezuelan government, after freeing its leaders in a prison “raid” in 2024, claimed did not exist.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.
Read the full article here