Venezuela As Today’s Key Front
The most extensive current CIA operations in Latin America are unfolding around Venezuela. In 2025, the Trump administration secretly authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations against Nicolás Maduro’s regime, including the use of lethal force. In December 2025, the CIA struck Venezuelan targets with drones, and in January 2026 a clandestine CIA team carried out sabotage missions to pave the way for US military forces, which seized Maduro and flew him out of the country.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe told a closed congressional briefing that the agency’s foreign intelligence collection on Latin America had grown by roughly 51% during his tenure, while the number of human intelligence (HUMINT) sources had risen by 61%.
The Venezuela Years
Dan Beeton, director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), believes that with Hugo Chavez’s rise to the presidency, countering Venezuela became the top US priority in Latin America and the Caribbean, as a State Department memo published by WikiLeaks made clear.
“Despite its failure, the Venezuelan coup fit the pattern of US-backed regime change efforts,” he said, referring to the 2002 push to oust Chávez that involved the CIA and its affiliated structures.
More than two decades on, the CIA’s activity in the South American country appears not to have let up. In 2021, Venezuela’s head of state accused the agency of advancing plans against his country, and in 2019 he called former MP Juan Guaidó an agent of the agency.
Among the agency’s more recent actions, observers have also cited the planned coup against Evo Morales; the one against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras; interventionist moves in Ecuador during Rafael Correa’s presidency, and others.
How does it operate?
In one of his pieces, writer Carlos E. Lippo points out that certain embassies indirectly made use of CIA “front agencies” that report to the State Department, such as the now-shuttered USAID, whose first “accomplishments” included the 1964 overthrow of then-Brazilian President João Goulart.
He also mentions the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose funding Trump partly blocked during this term, which in turn has subordinate organizations such as the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS).
The CIA in Latin America
Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello also spoke out after the White House occupant confirmed he had authorized the CIA to operate in Venezuela.
“There is no people in this America that has not lived through a coup staged by the CIA. There is no people in this America, or killings of these peoples’ leaders, that the CIA did not organize. Just ask in the United States itself,” Cabello said.
These recent reactions from Caracas point to an old wound – CIA operations in the region, known from declassified archives and repeatedly condemned by presidents, experts, the media, academics, former agents and others.
Decades ago, Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who ran espionage in Ecuador out of the US embassy, said in an interview: “Millions of people around the world have been killed or at least had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports,” as Ópera Mundi quotes him.
On data protection, Edward Snowden, a former analyst at the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA, warned more than a decade ago that he had discovered “that his agency was violating international law and the sovereignty of Latin America.”
The US federal agency’s presence in the region is such that Manuel de la Iglesia Caruncho, who holds a doctorate in economics from the Complutense University, wrote in an article that “no Latin American country has been left untouched by the CIA’s actions… whether Democrats or Republicans were in power in the United States.”