US assisted Venezuela in deadly drone strike, officials say
By ANNIE CORREAL, ERIC SCHMITT, ISAYEN HERRERA and JULIE TURKEWITZ
For years, a Colombian rebel army operated freely across the border in Venezuela, allowed to traffic cocaine and oversee illicit gold mines under Nicolás Maduro, the country’s former president.
But with Maduro forcibly removed by the United States and Venezuela’s government under the thumb of the Trump administration, Venezuela’s military last week launched a deadly attack on the group, the National Liberation Army, better known by its Spanish initials, ELN.
The attack, according to four U.S. officials, was carried out Friday with the help of U.S. intelligence and drones. It was not previously public who had been responsible for the attack.
The joint operation underscores how the Trump administration is increasingly enmeshed in Venezuela’s domestic affairs and how it has embraced a militarized strategy to combat drug trafficking in Latin America.
The attack was not the first joint operation in the country. In June, a strike by the United States and Venezuela killed a leader of Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang.
The New York Times reported this week that the Trump administration is aiming to establish a long-term U.S. military presence in Venezuela.
A Venezuelan human rights organization, Fundaredes, first alerted the public to Friday’s attack, which took place in the Apure region near the Colombian border, after organizers spoke with survivors and local residents.
At least 23 people were killed and many more injured, the group said, after drones bombed an ELN site that was a known hub for cocaine distribution.
The U.S. officials who confirmed details of the attack requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
For years, the ELN operated freely in Venezuela, viewing the country as a refuge from military attacks in Colombia and a prime location for flying cocaine smuggled from Colombia to other countries. The Venezuelan government was seen as its ally.
On a visit to Colombia in September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the ELN could no longer be allowed to operate “with impunity” in Venezuela and that the topic had been raised with the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez.
“We have to confront it,” he said.
While it was not clear who piloted the drones used in Friday’s attack, the type of drone involved is typically operated by U.S. forces, one of the U.S. officials said.
The State Department referred questions about the attack to the Department of Defense, which said questions should be directed to Venezuela’s government. Venezuelan officials did not respond to a request for comment.
On Monday, a senior Venezuelan military official confirmed that the country’s armed forces had carried out the attack on the ELN in Apures. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, asked not to be named. The person had not been personally briefed on the U.S. role.
Representatives of the ELN did not respond to requests for comment.
Juan Francisco García, the Fundaredes coordinator for the Apures region, said residents who lived on ranches near the site of the attack had described hearing two large explosions Friday morning. They approached and found bodies scattered around the bombed site, which García, who works in the area, said was known to be used by the ELN for shipping cocaine.
Security analysts say the ELN had consolidated control of much of the Venezuelan border and used air strips there to ship Colombian cocaine by plane to other countries in Latin America, including Mexico.
García shared photos and videos with the Times he said were taken by residents Friday. One photo shows, from a distance, a helicopter and several smaller, dark shapes hovering over pastureland. A video shows bodies amid debris.
García, who said he visited a nearby morgue and saw several victims’ bodies over the weekend, said that many of the corpses had been “mutilated” by explosives.
He said that interviews with survivors of the attack, and relatives of victims, had indicated that not all the victims were fighters.
García noted that, while less than half of the victims had been identified by Monday, government IDs found on some bodies showed that the victims were Venezuelan, not Colombian.
Since no government officially took responsibility for the attack, theories have swirled in recent days about who was responsible and whether any group leader had been killed.
The attack came on the heels of several bombings against ELN targets in Colombia ordered by the country’s conservative new president, Abelardo De La Espriella, who has vowed to crush armed groups that do not surrender.
After the ELN released a video in September in which a well-known commander defied the new president and said the group would keep fighting, De La Espriella responded by calling the ELN commander, known as Silvana Guerrero, a “terrorist” who would end up in a body bag.
On Friday, the day of the attack in Venezuela, Colombia’s armed forces reportedly dropped flyers over the border city of Cúcuta offering reward money for the ELN’s top commanders.
Colombian defense officials denied playing any role in the operation in Venezuela.
Security analysts said the military strategy against the ELN — which is said to have around 6,000 fighters — now appears to be to squeeze the group on both sides of the border at once so that it does not have a place to hide.
The attack comes as the Trump administration has designated around two dozen criminal groups in Latin America as terrorist organizations and is launching a military plan to crush Latin America’s “narco-terrorists.” It has also put pressure on leaders to target trafficking groups and to capture or kill group leaders.
Though legal experts say the terrorist label does not confer the authority to use lethal force as a first resort, the label has, nonetheless, been frequently invoked by top Trump administration officials when publicizing military strikes against accused traffickers, including boat strikes that so far have killed 244 people.
“The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said after a lethal strike last October on a boat allegedly linked to the ELN. “They will be hunted and killed, just like al-Qaida.”
