That's literally what this is and they said this is what they're doing. The guy literally just got charged with distributing drugs throughout the US, pretty much running a cartel, and so on and so forth. For the US this is the best time for them to leverage their military, and their money, to be able to get someone to flip and to join team US.
They've just gotta pray that the sanctions have been working, and that they've forced Maduro to have to skimp out on paying certain members of his military. Which may sway them towards taking the big money bags from the US. It'd be stupid if Maduro does this, but greed and intelligence don't go hand in hand.
Doubt much will come out of this now though, Trump wants to ride off the approval bounce that comes with being the president during some sort of disaster (in this case, corona pandemic) not being a wartime president when people hate boots on the ground, and really any war.
No the sanctions are doing nothing of the sort. If anything, only the masses suffer. In any case this could also explain why Maduro created a mining company for the military, so he could keep them happy from the spoils underground (gold and diamonds, they said).
Maduro allows the military to conduct bribes usually (but not always) at the border, this is a decades old institution that only strengthened even more under his regime. The military knows that this "operation" could be endangered if another (not accomplice) government comes.
You see, the foot guard at the border will accept the bribe to let you pass, say, food or medicine (because you are supposed to have a permit, yadda, yadda). Part of the bribe goes to his superior, and part of that goes to his superior's superior, all the way to the top. This is kinda like an MLM with the (compulsory) bribes being the main fuel.
Of course traditionally most of the money came from smuggling out (not in) gasoline, because of the absolutely ridiculous subsidy its nearly free, so what takes you 100 USD to fill a cistern tank truck, in Colombia easily becomes 40 thousand or more USD. That's enough money for everyone, including the smugglers and all the irregular groups operating on both sides of the border. Note that while Colombia has traditionally been a "drug" cartel, Venezuela instead has been a gasoline traffic cartel (sure they could have probably also expanded into drugs, or that's what the DEA says anyway).
This has been going at least since the 90ies, which is when they got the fear of adjusting gasoline prices following
Caracazo, sowing this much worse future (this is what happens when you deny the market and attempt to peg the price of things).
Yes what I'm saying is that this corrupt military caste was produced by decades of absurd gasoline subsidy, and from those habits came the rest. Incidentally while they can bully and extort civilians or even rival irregular groups, for actual military operations they suck. Of course Venezuela has not faced a REAL military confrontation in centuries.