The new director of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Terry Cole has accused Venezuela and the ELN of collaborating to export cocaine to the US. Speaking to Fox News he said: “ Venezuela has become a narco-terrorist state that continues to collaborate with the FARC and the Colombian ELN to send record quantities of cocaine from Venezuela and Colombia to Mexican cartels, which continue to enter the United States in unprecedented volumes.”
The ELN has a long-standing relationship with the Venezuelan state. Starting in the 1980s and following a punishing campaign against them by the Colombian government, the ELN started using Venezuela as rearguard where they could recover their strength.
With the election of Hugo Chávez to the presidency in 1999, the Venezuelan government went from hostile to at least tolerant of the ELN’s presence in their border regions given the shared left-wing idology of the ELN and the state.
Since then, this relationship has morphed into more formal cooperation, with indications that the ELN is providing a security guarantor of the Venezuelan state. Human Rights Watch claimed in 2022 that the ELN and Venezuelan security forces had carried out joint operations in Apure (a state on the Colombian border).
This symbiotic relationship allows the ELN a secure territory in which to operate and profit, and provides both revenue and state presence in what otherwise would be difficult-to-control territories.
The claim that the Venzuelan state is “collaborating with the Colombian ELN to send record quantities of cocaine… to Mexican cartels” is misleading. To the extent that the Venezuelan state participates in or condones cocaine trafficking, the objective is primarily domestic – ensuring security and control within its own territories.
Cocaine routes that run through Venezuela (typically with product originating from Colombia) are more likely to be destined for Europe than the United States given the geography of the countries. Cocaine destined for the United States typically travels to the Pacific and Atlatnic coasts of Colombia or via Ecuador before being shipped to the US via Mexico.
Venezuela is a key partner for the ELN, but not specifically for cocaine trafficking into the US.
The new DEA director was also quick to focus on Tren de Aragua. “They continue sending these drugs to the United States, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, in addition to the members of Tren de Aragua they send to damage the streets of our country.”
The evidence that Tren de Aragua has a sigifnicant presence in the United States is tenuous, mostly individual incidents or arrests that don’t hold up to scrutiny. Beyond that, we are mostly relying on the Trump Administration telling us that Tren de Aragua is a massive problem in the US.
That claim helps to justify deportation policies in the US. Mass deportations to El Salvador were justified on the basis that those deported were in Tren de Aragua, an assertion for which no evidence was provided.
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