The US president invokes the usual suspects – drugs, organised crime, illegal migration – but this is simply a grab for resources and power

In the early hours of 3 January, Caracas and other cities in Venezuela were bombed and the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, was kidnapped along with his wife by US military personnel. In addition to the 100 deaths recorded so far as a result of the attack, approximately 100 more were caused by US attacks on small boats in the previous months, under the pretext of combatting drug trafficking. Although it seems clear that the real intention of Donald Trump’s administration was to seize Venezuela’s wealth, the initial argument to justify the military deployment in the Caribbean was that it was to fight the illegal drugs trade and stop the flow of migrants that the Venezuelan government was allegedly causing by emptying prisons of criminals and sending them to the US.

As a criminology professor who has studied Venezuelan drug trafficking for 20 years, I find this far-fetched. To understand this, we have to consider Venezuela’s historical role in drug trafficking. As a typical Andean country neighbouring the world’s main coca producers, Venezuela has always played a significant role as a cocaine corridor. Since the turn of the century, its involvement in international drug trafficking has increased significantly as a result of growing European demand for cocaine, the effects of 2000’s Plan Colombia, which displaced illegal operations to border regions and neighbouring countries, and the breakdown of technical cooperation with Washington.

Andrés Antillano is a social psychologist and professor at the Central University of Venezuela