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Venezuela Gains US Legitimacy as Washington Deepens Military Presence Across Latin America

Trump met Venezuela's interim leader at the UN while the U.S. military shifted strike aircraft to the region and Colombia conducted a major hostage rescue. Meanwhile, 24 navies launched the hemisphere's biggest multinational exercise in Peru.

The week opened in New York, not in jungles or at sea. On September 22, President Donald Trump met Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, at the UN General Assembly—the first encounter between a U.S. president and a Venezuelan leader in more than eleven years. Rodríguez promised elections without specifying a date and addressed the Assembly the next day, a symbolic reversal from the Hugo Chávez era when a Venezuelan leader called an American president "the devil." Trump reinforced the diplomatic warming by removing Venezuela from the U.S. list of countries failing to meet drug-control commitments, citing positive progress under Rodríguez's leadership. The military track advanced in parallel. On September 15, Colombian forces supported by U.S. Southern Command conducted a raid in Catatumbo, rescuing eight people held for nearly two years by the ELN guerrilla group. Meanwhile, CNN reported that the U.S. military is redirecting MQ-9 Reaper drones from Africa Command to Southern Command, moving strike aircraft previously assigned to Somalia operations toward expanded anti-cartel missions in South America. The shift reflects a wider resource competition among three theaters—Africa, the Middle East, and now Latin America—as Washington deepens its military footprint in the hemisphere. The scale of that commitment became visible in Peru, where the 67th edition of UNITAS wrapped its first full week. The multinational exercise, the longest continuously running in the Americas, brought together naval forces from 24 countries, with over 5,300 personnel, 26 surface vessels, two submarines, and 21 aircraft operating across the Pacific, Amazon, and—for the first time—Lake Titicaca. The exercise, running September 10–24 in and around Callao, trains interoperability and combined command structures under U.S. Southern Command coordination. Rodríguez's diplomatic gains come with political risk. Former U.S. Ambassador James Story noted that she derived legitimacy primarily from Trump's engagement, leaving open the question of what the relationship would become if Trump were no longer in power. Her visit drew criticism for her recent past on U.S. sanctions lists and prompted headlines about the gap between her 2019 UN speech condemning U.S. "economic terrorism" and her 2026 praise for energy cooperation with Washington.