Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro reportedly rejected any negotiated exit from power, and he is betting that President Donald Trump will back down from military action against his government.
Sources familiar with internal discussions in Caracas said Maduro was counting on Trump backing down.
"Maduro has already decided — he's not going anywhere; now it's Trump's move," a source told El Pais, a major Spanish-language daily newspaper based in Madrid, Spain, chronicling the Venezuelan leader's hardline stance as U.S. warships remain stationed in the Caribbean.
The White House initially said the naval deployment targeted drug trafficking operations. But both Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have teased it is time for Venezuela-focused regime change, calling Maduro an "illegitimate leader."
Maduro's inner circle — including Delcy Rodríguez, Jorge Rodríguez, Diosdado Cabello, and Vladimir Padrino — is united in resisting U.S. pressure. Chavista officials believe Trump will not order a direct military strike, despite increasingly aggressive rhetoric from Washington.
A recent notice to Congress declared that the U.S. is in a formal "armed conflict" with drug cartels, labeling their members as "unlawful combatants."
Richard Grenell, Trump's special envoy who had been leading months of negotiations with Maduro, was directed last week to halt all talks after the president expressed frustration over Caracas' refusal to relinquish power and continued denial of involvement in narcotics trafficking, The New York Times reported Monday.
For now, the Pentagon's aim of the task force is drug trafficking, according to War Department Secretary Pete Hegseth.
"At the President's direction, the Department of War is establishing a new counter-narcotics Joint Task Force in the @SOUTHCOM area of responsibility to crush the cartels, stop the poison, and keep America safe," Hegseth wrote Friday on X.
"The message is clear: if you traffic drugs toward our shores, we will stop you cold."
The group is also reportedly relying on what it claims is a Pentagon assessment advising against intervention, though the document's authenticity is unclear.
Facing economic collapse, mass emigration, international sanctions, and isolation, Maduro's government sees survival as its only option, according to the El Pais report.
Officials compare the potential costs of a U.S. intervention to Vietnam or Afghanistan and believe that risk will deter Trump from escalation.
"Maduro practically has no other option now but to resist whatever comes and hope that Trump hesitates," the source told El Pais.
For now, all decisions run through Maduro, and insiders say his calculation is simple: outlast the pressure and exploit U.S. hesitation.
"Trump is taking the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America to the next level," according to Atlantic Council international senior fellow Geoff Ramsey in a report this week. "By involving the military, the president is going after drug cartels in a way that no previous U.S. administration has dared to so far.
"I think it is likely that we will see the Pentagon evaluate targets inside Venezuela."
"It's a bad time to be posted in a guerrilla camp on the Colombian border or operating a Tren de Aragua safe house along the Caribbean trafficking route," Ramsey reportedly added.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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