The arrest of Nicolás Maduro was a way of undermining a “campaign of deadly narcoterrorism” and cocaine trafficking, Donald Trump said after the Venezuelan politician was captured and taken to the United States.
So what impact is the president of Venezuela’s seizure likely to have on the global cocaine trade?
None at all, experts say.
“Even if there was real disintegration in Venezuela in terms of political unrest or crackdowns, or much stronger law enforcement action, there would be no difference on a global scale,” said Cathy Haenlein of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), the defence and security thinktank.
“The global cocaine market is so huge, so agile, so adaptive, that none of that is going to disrupt supply in a meaningful way.”
Contrast Maduro’s arrest with the EncroChat operation in 2020, the biggest police operation against encrypted communication in history. Police forces around the world infiltrated the mobile phone messaging system used by about 60,000 criminals worldwide to conduct drug deals, launder money and organise killings.
Gangs dealing in cocaine were rolled up, and kingpins were jailed. In the UK alone, the National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested 2,864 people, landed 383 convictions and seized 20 tonnes of drugs.
For Britain’s cocaine industry, this policing success story was just a blip. Four years on, cocaine use has increased, the NCA says. Sewage sampling showed a 7% increase in cocaine use during the period of January to April 2023-4, the agency reported in its national strategic assessment for 2025. (The use of ketamine, a horse tranquilliser, jumped 85%, and 2,211 people needed medical treatment after using it in 2022-3, a fivefold increase since 2015.) Cocaine-related deaths rose by 30% in England and Wales, from 857 in 2022 to 1,118 in 2023.
Other gangs have filled the gaps in the UK supply – Albanian organised crime groups are active throughout the country, according to the agency. Even though police are making more seizures, the global supply has grown quickly enough to overtake attempts by law enforcement to stop it.
The arrest of Maduro is far less significant than EncroChat. And Venezuela is actually only a small player in the global drugs trade, analysts say.
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Haenlein, Rusi’s director of organised crime and policing studies, said: “Cocaine primarily originates in Colombia – and Peru and Bolivia, to a lesser extent.” About 80% of the world’s cocaine comes from Colombia, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that production has increased by 53% since 2022 to levels far above those when Pablo Escobar ran the country’s notorious Medellín cartel.
“That's mainly due to increased areas of cultivation in Colombia,” Haenlein said. “Venezuela is an important transit hub for cocaine trafficking. The booming market impacts the wider region, including Venezuela.”
The UNODC estimates that Colombian coca farmers could produce 2,664 tonnes of cocaine a year. About 250 tonnes of that is routed through Venezuela, according to the US State Department’s international narcotics strategy report for 2024.
Trump has hinted that he may also launch military action against Colombia, but last Wednesday his tone shifted after a phone call with Gustavo Petro, the country’s president.
The US president had suggested that the Colombian might also be abducted by US forces, but Trump seemed to have been satisfied by Petro’s plan to take on the guerrillas embedded in Colombia’s drug industry.
Since the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) disarmed in 2017, the National Liberation Army (ELN) has been the focus of Colombian action. A rump of Farc dissidents remains active, and since December has been fighting a drone war with ELN forces in the Colombia-Venezuela border region.
According to the charges against Maduro, he worked with both guerrilla groups, as well as with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, once run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and the Venezuelan syndicate Tren de Aragua, to move “thousands of tonnes” of drugs.
If he did, most of those drugs were probably heading towards Europe rather than the US, whose cocaine and fentanyl supply is controlled more by Mexican gangs. All the organised crime groups are using ever more inventive ways to conceal their cargoes.
Instead of crates full of white powder, cocaine is being liquified and transported in wine bottles and coconuts, or dissolved into fertiliser or molasses and then reconstituted after it arrives in Europe.
“There's a bigger question around enforcement as a strategy,” Haenlein said. “It’s naive and against all previous evidence that enforcement and disruption can achieve much on a large scale. There are more fundamental questions about prohibition. We have decades of evidence that it’s not working, so we need to have a proper conversation.”
Photograph By Francesco Spotorno/AFP via Getty Images
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