The Weight of Absence: Testing the Venezuela Boat Strikes Against Their Own Logic

Zero is a number that tells a story.

In August 1964, zero was the number of torpedoes that struck the USS Maddox on the second night in the Gulf of Tonkin. That zero was classified for decades. By the time it surfaced, the war it justified had ended and fifty-eight thousand names had been carved into black granite.

This is a story about a different zero. About boats burning in the Caribbean. About the space between what officials say and what the patterns show. About a formal system that treats government claims as testable predictions and finds them wanting.

The Boats

Since September, the United States has been destroying vessels in the Caribbean. More than thirty strikes. More than one hundred dead. The justification is drugs. Fentanyl. The boats are carrying poison to American shores and each one destroyed saves twenty-five thousand lives. The President says this. The Secretary of State says this. The numbers are specific. The claims are clear.

The claims are also queryable.

What if official statements were not quotes to be transcribed but objects to be computed? What if contradictions were not rhetorical observations but structural relationships in a graph? What if you could ask: given what they say is true, how likely is what we're seeing?

You can ask. The answers are not comforting.

The Tests

Legitimate operations leave signatures. Patterns that hold when the stated goal is the actual goal. When those patterns break, something else is happening. Something unstated.

Evidence. If you're interdicting drug shipments, you occasionally find drugs. The Coast Guard's rate is 73 percent. You stop the boat, you find the contraband, you document it. Thirteen strikes in our dataset. Documented drug evidence in zero. The probability of this outcome if these were real interdictions: less than one in ten thousand.

Consistency. Three officials described where the first boat was headed. Trump said the United States. Rubio said Trinidad. Admiral Bradley said Suriname. Three destinations. One boat. At least two of them are lying or guessing. Possibly all three.

Plausibility. Twenty-five thousand lives saved per boat. Thirty boats. Seven hundred fifty thousand lives. Annual American overdose deaths from all drugs, all sources, worldwide: seventy-seven thousand. The math doesn't work. The math can't work. You cannot save ten times the deaths that exist.

Stability. The story changed. It started as drug interdiction. By November, the White House Chief of Staff was saying he wants to keep blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle. By December, the President was saying Maduro's days are numbered. The justification drifted because it was never the reason.

Alignment. Fentanyl comes from Mexico. Precursors from China. Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. The supply chain is documented, studied, mapped. Venezuela is not in it. The operation targets the wrong country for its stated purpose. This is not a statistical argument. It is a geographic one.

Five tests. Five failures.

The Machine

The ontology does something a database cannot. It reasons.

Admiral Bradley said Suriname. A reader might note this contradicts Trump and Rubio. Three stories, at least two wrong. But there is something else, something you would need to know Caribbean drug geography to catch.

Suriname is a transit node on the cocaine corridor to Europe. Drugs through Suriname go to West Africa, then Amsterdam, then the continent. If Bradley is right about the destination, the boat was Europe-bound. Not America-bound. The "protecting Americans" justification does not apply.

The ontology encodes this. When Bradley's claim enters the system, the reasoner fires automatically. Suriname implies Europe corridor. Europe corridor implies European destination. European destination does not equal American population. Contradiction detected. No human required.

A journalist would need to know the geography, remember the routes, connect each claim to the justification manually. The ontology does it in milliseconds across any number of claims. That is what formal reasoning provides. Not storage. Inference.

The Control

A framework that only produces one answer is propaganda with equations.

So consider Operation Pacific Viper. Same administration. Same time period. Same stated goal. Coast Guard surge in the Eastern Pacific. Thirty-four interdictions by December. One hundred fifty thousand pounds of cocaine seized. Eighty-six suspects detained. Evidence rate: approximately one hundred percent.

Run the tests. Watch them pass.

Evidence: mountains of documented cocaine. Consistency: officials agree on facts. Plausibility: the numbers are large but verifiable. Stability: the justification never changed because interdiction was actually the goal.

Three operations. Two produce seized drugs and arrests. One produces bodies and burning boats. Two pass every test. One fails every test.

The framework distinguishes. That is the point.

The Absence

This analysis does not prove intent. It does not establish what the operation actually is. It does not adjudicate legality or assign blame. When I say the patterns are inconsistent with the stated goal, I mean exactly that. I do not mean I know what the real goal is. I am inferring from pattern mismatch, not from classified briefings.

A hostile reader might object. Perhaps evidence is classified. Perhaps the operation has features that explain the anomalies. Perhaps I am wrong.

These objections are valid. I cannot rule them out. What I can say is that the public record, as it stands, does not support the stated explanation. If the administration has evidence that would change this assessment, they have not produced it.

The framework's value is not certainty. It is structure. Claims become objects. Contradictions become edges. Tests have probabilities. Assumptions are explicit. Anyone can audit the reasoning, challenge the baselines, run it on different data.

That is a different kind of accountability than waiting for the archives to open.

The Update

As this was being written, the United States conducted large-scale strikes on Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro.

The framework had a prediction: the operation will end or change character if Maduro's government falls, even if drug flows continue.

Maduro is now in U.S. custody.

The next test writes itself. If the boat strikes were really about drugs, they should continue at the same intensity. The fentanyl supply chain has not changed. The Caribbean routes have not closed. The justification, if genuine, still applies.

If the strikes quietly stop, we will know what they were actually about.

We will not need fifty years to find out.

The full analysis, including the formal ontology, SPARQL queries, inference engine, and statistical methodology, is available in the complete version.

© 2026 Aureliano Vale. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Cite freely with attribution.

The full analysis, including the formal ontology, SPARQL queries, inference engine, and statistical methodology, is available on GitHub.