Top Trump aide suggests boat strikes aim to topple Venezuela’s Maduro

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has suggested that the United States military’s attacks on alleged drug boats around Latin America aim to ultimately topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

In comments published by Vanity Fair magazine on Tuesday, Wiles appeared to contradict the Donald Trump administration’s stated rationale behind the bombing campaign – combating drugs.

“He [Trump] wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,” Wiles was quoted as saying.

Vanity Fair released a lengthy profile on Wiles on Tuesday, hours after the Pentagon announced three more boat strikes in the Eastern Pacific Ocean that it said killed eight people.

“So not a war on the cartels. It’s regime change,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy wrote on X in response to Wiles’s comments. “Either way, totally illegal and nonsensical.”

The US administration has been intensifying attacks on vessels as it ramps up its military presence near Venezuela, raising speculations that Washington may be plotting another regime change war against Maduro’s left-wing government.

Trump has repeatedly asserted over the past months that the Venezuelan president’s “days are numbered”.

Last week, US forces raided and seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, a move that Caracas denounced as “international piracy”.

Trump – who recently pardoned the right-wing former President of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker – has portrayed the boat strikes and the push against Maduro as an anti-narcotics campaign.

Legal experts say the targeting of vessels in international waters in the Caribbean and Pacific – which has killed more than 90 people –  likely violates US and international law and amounts to extrajudicial executions.

The Pentagon has only provided grainy footage as evidence that the boats it has targeted were carrying drugs, while describing the victims as “narco-terrorists”.

The US has been designating drug-trafficking organisations as “terrorist” groups, but UN experts have rejected that label as justification for the deadly bombardment.

“These attacks do not appear to have been conducted within the context of national self-defence, an international or non-international armed conflict, nor against individuals posing an imminent threat to life, thus violating fundamental international human rights law prohibiting arbitrary deprivation of life,” the experts said in a report last month.

“Unprovoked attacks and killings on international waters also violate international maritime laws.”

In October, Trump joked that people are no longer going fishing near the Venezuelan coast due to the US attacks.

Washington has had tense relations with Caracas since the rise of Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s late predecessor, in the early 2000s. The oil-rich South American country has been under heavy US sanctions for years.

Trump, who received the newly established FIFA Peace Prize earlier this month, has campaigned against more US wars and portrayed himself as a peace president.

But his administration has been escalating against Venezuela and issuing threats to Colombia, which is led by another left-wing government under President Gustavo Petro.

The US president has refused to rule out a ground invasion of Venezuela. He has also declared the country’s airspace closed “in its entirety”.

Last week, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy, emphasising the need to establish US “preeminence” in the Americas.

Maduro has accused the US of creating a “pretext” for war, expressing openness to diplomacy with Washington while rejecting what he called a “slave’s peace”.