Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators this morning that, after the capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan government is cooperating with the U.S. on confronting narco-terrorism.
“For the first time in 20 years, we are having serious counter-narcotic talks with Venezuelan authorities,” Rubio said in his opening remarks.
Rubio appeared as a witness to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing about America’s policy toward Venezuela on Wednesday morning.
While most Republican senators praised the Trump administration’s strategy and the U.S. military operation that captured Maduro, Democrats criticized both.
Rubio told the committee that the regime is successfully cooperating with the U.S.
“The Venezuelan authorities are now identifying ships that they want us to grab,” Rubio said while answering questions from Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.
The U.S. has been conducting strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats since September 2025.
There have been more than 30 known strikes on these boats, mainly in the Caribbean Sea coming out of Venezuela.
Rubio shared that the Venezuelan regime—led by Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice president of Maduro—is cooperating and providing information on unauthorized ships.
“In fact, about a week and a half ago, we grabbed one of these ships,” Rubio continued.
Rubio claimed that after Maduro’s capture, “about five ships took off without authorization from the Venezuelans, because they were controlled by some [other] network in the country,” the secretary described.
“With the cooperation of the interim authorities, we seized one of those ships, we brought it back into Venezuelan waters, handed the ship off to the Venezuelans,” he continued.
