Jake Braun: Don’t mistake Trump’s Venezuela raid for progress on fentanyl

After the United States successfully captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump has demonstrated why the operation really happened: oil.

Not fentanyl.

Despite political rhetoric, Venezuela is not a major player in the fentanyl crisis. Venezuelan cartels traffic oil, migrants and cocaine.

The center of fentanyl production is not Caracas. It is in northern Mexico, particularly the “golden triangle” region, which is the Sinaloa Cartel’s stronghold.

While the Maduro operation may have a positive effect on global energy markets, Americans should not mistake it for progress in the fight against fentanyl.

That fight remains unfinished – and urgent.

Fentanyl crisis is not a typical drug epidemic

I spent years inside the U.S. national security system, including helping design the nation’s counter-fentanyl strategy and writing a book on the topic, “Fentanyl: Fighting the Mass Poisoning of America and the Cartel Behind It.”

One lesson is unavoidable: If we want to stop fentanyl, we have to be honest about where the threat originates and how to defeat it.

At its peak in 2022, fentanyl killed nearly 75,000 Americans in a single year, more than double the combined total annual deaths from cocaine and heroin.

Almost no one, not even drug users, seeks fentanyl. They test drugs to avoid it. They fear it. But fentanyl is often hidden inside substances, turning routine drug use – for example, fake prescription pills – into a deadly gamble.

This is not a typical drug epidemic. It more closely resembles a mass poisoning.

To fight fentanyl, focus on Mexico, not Venezuela

A shift in focus toward Mexico and the mass poisoning of America would be welcome. Here, too, the Venezuelan operation is instructive.

A traditional “kingpin” strategy arrest the boss, declare victory and move on won’t work here. To truly end the fentanyl crisis in America, we must employ a counter-network strategy, as the military did against terrorists after 9/11.

Think al-Qaida, not Al Capone.

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán – the most notorious kingpin in history – is serving life in a U.S. supermax prison. Over the past several decades, authorities have captured or killed nearly every major kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel and its predecessor organizations.

Yet fentanyl still flows. Americans still die.

That’s because Sinaloa is not a street gang. It’s the size of a Fortune 500 company, with global supply chains, chemists, financiers and assassins. In some regions, it can even outfight the government.

The good news is we know how to disrupt this network – because we already did.

From 2023 through 2024, U.S. and Mexican authorities shifted tactics. Instead of kingpins, they targeted the cartel as a system: its chemical suppliers, money, equipment and communications.

The result was a stunning 37% reduction in fentanyl deaths in just over a year.

New analysis published in Science showed this decline was driven largely by enforcement – particularly efforts to stop Chinese fentanyl precursor chemicals before they reached cartel laboratories in Mexico.

That effort, initially dubbed Operation Blue Lotus, disrupted the cartel’s chemicals, money and manufacturing at scale. It worked, but it was never fully institutionalized.

Attacking the Sinaloa Cartel requires a multipronged approach

Now the Trump administration has a real opportunity to build on that success.

First, as we did with al-Qaida, intelligence officials must map the Sinaloa Cartel – every node, financier and supplier. After decades of sparring with trafficking networks rooted in this region, the U.S. remains woefully in the dark about how the Sinaloa Cartel actually operates. In fact, Ford knows Toyota better than the U.S. knows Sinaloa.

Second, we must target the cartel’s vulnerable assets: its digital infrastructure, finances and communications. We should direct our cyberwarriors to hack the cartel back to the Stone Age. Sinaloa cannot operate a modern criminal enterprise without access to information technology systems, the internet and cryptocurrency. Disrupt those systems, and the cartel slows to a crawl.

Mexican leadership has been consistent about another truth: Sinaloa would be far less formidable if it were not armed to the teeth with a military-grade arsenal made in the United States. This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. Americans have a right to bear arms. Mexican cartel members do not have a right to U.S.-made weapons of war. To win, we must defang this beast.

Finally, we must confront the Chinese chemical companies supplying fentanyl precursors. Targeting their investors, customers and access to Western markets would force a choice – and cut off the cartel’s chemical lifeline.

This crisis isn’t abstract. It shows up in emergency rooms, schools and homes across the country. Every fentanyl death represents a life that never had to be lost.

Americans appreciate honesty about how and where to aim our fire to end the mass poisoning of America. If fentanyl is the target, the bull’s-eye is about 3,100 miles away from Caracas, Venezuela, in Sinaloa, Mexico.

Jake Braun, a former White House acting principal deputy national cyber director, is the author of “Fentanyl: Fighting the Mass Poisoning of America and the Cartel Behind It.”