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The US Is Looking to Merge Two Failed Wars in Latin America, the War on Drugs and the War on Terror

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“All-out war in Venezuela cannot be ruled out”, warns Jeffrey Sachs. “Anything is possible because this is a long-standing operation.” 

In 2014, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) declared Latin America and the Caribbean a “land of peace” based on respect for the principles and rules of international law. That peace is now in the process of being shattered by a US government determined to reimpose its strategic dominion over its direct neighbourhood, using a hybrid of the failed war on drugs and the failed war on terror as a pretext.

Ironically, it was during the early years of the Global War on Terror that Washington began to lose strategic influence in its “backyard,” as we noted in our 2021 post, “The US Is Losing Power and Influence Even In Its Own ‘Back Yard‘”:

China’s rise in Latin America coincided almost perfectly with the Global War on Terror. As Washington shifted its attention and resources away from its immediate neighbourhood to the Middle East, where it frittered away trillions of dollars spreading mayhem and death and breeding new terrorists, China began snapping up Latin American resources. Governments across the region, from Brazil to Venezuela, to Ecuador and Argentina, took a leftward turn and began working together across various fora. The commodity supercycle was born.

China’s trade with the region grew 26-fold between 2000 and 2020, from $12 billion to $315 billion, and is expected to more than double by 2035, to more than $700 billion… According to the World Economic Forum, “China will approach—and could even surpass—the US as LAC’s top trading partner. In 2000, Chinese participation accounted for less than 2% of LAC’s total trade. In 2035, it could reach 25%.”

The US is determined to reverse this trend. It is also intent on (in the words of former SOUTHCOM Commander Laura Richardson) “boxing out” China and Russia from Latin America’s resources, which it covets for itself. That is the real driving force behind Washington’s escalating hostile actions against Venezuela, which, lest we forget, is home to the largest oil reserves on the planet as well as many other mineral resources (gold, diamonds, iron ore, bauxite…).

Those actions include putting a $50 million bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s head, designating two Venezuelan cartels, Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles, as terrorist organisations, Trump’s ordering of the US military to fight drug cartels abroad, and the deployment of eight military vessels, a submarine and air assets to waters near Venezuela.

On Tuesday, the US military upped the stakes by carrying out an alleged lethal drone strike against a small vessel that was allegedly transporting drugs from Venezuela.

From Venezuela Analysis:

During a press conference at the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump claimed the vessel “came out of Venezuela” and it was carrying “a lot of drugs.”

Trump later shared a video on his Truth Social platform that appeared to show a speedboat exploding at sea after being fired upon by a missile. Eleven people on board were reportedly killed instantly in the strike, which the US alleges took place in international waters within the US Southern Command’s “area of responsibility.”

“Let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs to the United States,” Trump warned in his post.

According to the US government, the destroyed vessel belonged to the so-called “Tren de Aragua” gang, which was designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the US in February. Washington alleges, without evidence, that the gang is led by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The “Tren de Aragua” was a prison-born gang and its operations inside Venezuela were dismantled in a raid in 2023.

In early August, Washington offered a US $50 million reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest, claiming he is also linked to the so-called “Cartel de los Soles.” There has never been any disclosed court-backed evidence that proves the cartel’s existence, nor Caracas’ connection to any drug trafficking or transnational criminal activities.

According to an Insight Crime report, there is also no reliable evidence that “Tren de Aragua” ever grew to become a regional threat or a transnational drug trafficking outfit.*

The US has provided no evidence whatsoever that the people onboard the boat were trafficking drugs — we just have to take US President Donald Trump’s word for it. And that will presumably be the case going forward. It goes without saying that the US strike on the boat represents a clear violation of international law, but the same goes for just about all military operations undertaken by the US these days, including its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Of course, the US could have just intercepted the vessel and made its case against the alleged traffickers, but the problem with that is there probably wasn’t any case to be made.

Indeed, the Maduro government has responded to the alleged strike by claiming that the video is AI-generated, and that the attack never took place. As the US journalist Dan Cohen reports for pro-government Venezuela News, the claim has fuelled speculation that Washington is running an AI video experiment designed to test how easily public perception can be manipulated as well as how far AI video technology has come.

One thing that is clear is that this is just the beginning of the US’ remilitarisation of the Americas. US Defence Secretary Pete Hogseth said the strike was the start of “a long-term operation in the Caribbean that will take place by land, sea and air” — this despite the fact that the Caribbean is not nearly as important an area for drug trafficking as the Pacific.

“Is This a Joke?”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that military strikes on alleged drug traffickers will “happen again”, batting away concerns over the legality of such strikes and the sovereignty of Latin American nations. Speaking at a press conference in Mexico City Wednesday, Rubio pledged to continue to coordinate on security matters with countries like Mexico, but suggested the US would not hesitate to take unilateral measures.

On Thursday, Rubio was in Ecuador meeting with the country’s President Daniel Noboa. Ecuador is cooperating very closely with the US on security and intelligence matters. In 2023, the FBI even participated in the investigation of the assassination of the presidential candidate of Fernando Villavicencio in 2023. Today, the US is considering reopening a military base in Ecuador, a country that voted in a 2011 referendum to close all foreign military bases.

Yet despite all the military and intelligence support from Washington, the violence has only worsened in Ecuador while cocaine trafficking has increased — just as happened in Colombia and Mexico following the signing of the Plan Colombia and Merida Initiative security arrangements. Meanwhile, Noboa and his family’s banana business are accused of involvement in the export of more than half a ton of cocaine since 2020 to several countries in Europe.

As was painfully clear from day one, Trump’s appointment of Rubio as secretary of state and his acting national security advisor, making Rubio arguably the most powerful sec state since Henry Kissinger, could only bode ill for Latin America. In an article cross-posted here, Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies pointed out that “Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America”:

He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.

In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.

In March 2023, Rubio urged President Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting  leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people.

In her book, “Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire,” the Gray Zone’s Anya Parampil details some of the incongruences in Marco Rubio’s rise to power, including his confected family history:

In 2011, the Washington Post revealed that Rubio had based his entire political coming-of-age story on a lie. Though he repeatedly spouted a clichéd south Florida tale of his parents’ escape from Fidel Castro’s socialist hellscape, immigration records demonstrated that the Rubios had in fact gained permanent US residency nearly three years before Cuba’s 1959 revolution — meaning they had actually fled thee regime of the country’s US-backed military dictator, Fulgencio Batista.

Aside from pathetic dishonesty, Rubio’s character was tarnished by revelations that throughout the 1980s, his brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, directed a $75 million cocaine smuggling ring out of his home in West Kendall, Florida.

Merging the War Against Drugs with the War on Terror

One of Trump’s first acts back in office was to officially designate eight Latin American drug trafficking groups as terrorist organisations. Six of them were Mexican (cártel de Sinaloa, cártel de Jalisco “nueva generación”, cártel del Noreste, la Nueva Familia Michoacana, cártel de Golfo and “Cárteles Unidos”), one of them Venezuelan (Tren de Aragua) and the other Salvadorian (Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13).  

As feared, this move has opened the way to more aggressive, unilateral US military action in the countries affected: Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela. Also, all property and interests in property of those designated as terrorist organisations that are in the United States or that are in possession or control of a US person can be more easily seized.

Since then, three more cartels have been designed terrorist organisations: the supposed Cartel de los Soles, of which Maduro is allegedly the leader (according to the US president), and two Ecuadorian cartels, Los Lobos and Los Choneros. This is a move that has been in the works for some time, as we reported in our Sept 26, 2023 post, “Back to Business As Usual: The US Is Once Again Vigorously Stirring the Pot in Latin America“:

Droves of high-profile figures, including arch neocon and regime change-specialist Lindsay Graham, presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ron de Santis, and media pundit Tucker Carlson, have been calling for direct, overt US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels in order to stem the flow of fentanyl.

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in March, former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump) William Barr likened Mexico’s “narco-terrorists” to Isis and called for “a far more aggressive American effort inside Mexico than ever before.” Barr also called AMLO the cartel’s “chief enabler” for refusing to wage war against the cartels with quite the same zeal as his predecessors.

Barr is hardly one to talk given his central role in burying evidence of then-President George HW Bush’s involvement in the “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra” scandals, the latter of which involved the trafficking of huge volumes of cocaine to the US by the Contras, as the hand-written notebooks of Oliver North, the National Security Council aide who helped run the contra war, amply show. Years later, courageous journalists like Gary Webb and Robert Parry would show that the CIA was also heavily involved in bringing crack cocaine into the US.

Back to today, it goes without saying that the real driving motivation behind the latest calls to expand the war on drugs is not to stem the flow of drugs into the US, or to tackle the escalating violence of drug cartels across Latin America — if Washington was serious about that, all it would have to do is pass legislation to stem the southward flow of US-produced guns and other weapons. But that would hurt the profits of arms manufacturers.

And if it was serious about tackling drug addiction, it would never have let Big Pharma unleash the opium epidemic in the first place. And once it had, it would never have let the perps walk free with the daintiest of financial slaps on the wrists.

No, this is primarily about what the US war on drugs has always been about: pursuing geopolitical and geostrategic dominance in key regions of the world while controlling and imprisoning for serious sums of money the restive populace at home. This is a point that is explained elegantly by Jorge Retana Yarto, a former director of the Intelligence School for National Security of Mexico’s Centre for National Intelligence (CNI), in an article for the news website Contralinea:

The ideology of the “war” on drugs and organized crime in the United States is an immense fabrication. That does not mean that the problems linked to the multinational trafficking of prohibited drugs and the criminal organizations that have specialized in it, and everything that this entails, do not exist. They exist and are very acute, but both phenomena were ideologized for the purposes of geopolitical and geostrategic dominance, and were imposed through exportable reactive and punitive public policies in matters of intelligence and security, causing social, political-institutional, cultural and economic devastation. By assuming a military dimension, (the War on Drugs) the foundations for armed intervention in the Latin American region were laid, converting the territories, as well as national sovereignties, into areas of geostrategic action.

“Vulgar, Thuggish and Illegal”

As Jeffrey Sachs explains in an interview with Hindustan Times, the US has been trying to topple Venezuela’s Chavista government for over 20 years, so far to no avail, though it has caused huge disruption and destruction in the process, including an economic collapse caused by US sanctions “that may literally be unparalleled in peacetime”.  As such, everything that is happening right now is “also part and parcel of ongoing US policy… It’s all flagrantly vulgar, thuggish and illegal…, and another of America’s delusions of hegemony”.

 

Like the Global War on Terror, the whole edifice of the US’ war on the drugs cartels, is built on a foundation of lies. Just as Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, Venezuela is a relatively minor corridor for drug trafficking organisations. Just as the US supported Islamist terrorist groups whenever it served its interests (Syria, Libya, Chechnya…), the US has a long history of supporting drug trafficking organisations (Fast and Furious, IranContra, Corsican mafia…)

A recent article by former UN anti-drugs agency director Pino Arlacchi offers a brutal take down of the Trump administration’s Venezuela “narco-state” narrative. Among many other documents, it cites the 2025 World Drug Report, which, “piece by piece,… dismantles the geopolitical lie built around the ‘Cartel de los Soles’, an entity as mythical as the Loch Ness Monster, but which is useful for justifying sanctions, blockades and threats of military intervention against a country which, incidentally, sits on one of the planet’s largest oil reserves.”

But while the US’ wars of the past half century have always been built on farcical lies, their impact in terms of lives lost and economies and infrastructure destroyed has been devastating. How many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been ruined by the US and Israel’s Global War on Terror? How many lives destroyed? How many more “terrorists” created?

The Empire of Chaos ripped asunder an entire region, using its as a laboratory for its robot planes of death. It now intends to do much the same to its own “backyard” by melding together the failed War on Drugs with the failed Global War on Terror. By designating drug selling businesses as “terrorist” organisations, the US president can draw up arbitrary kill lists and visit death and destruction from the skies.

Admittedly, I use the world “failed” in as much as the war on drugs has failed spectacularly to reduce the volumes of drugs consumed by the American public while the GWOT has failed to put an end to Islamist terrorism — indeed, Syria is now governed by a “former” Islamist terrorist who was essentially installed by the US, Turkey and Israel. But those were never the real goals of the two wars. As Yarto reminds us, this is all about geopolitical and geostrategic dominance.

There was a moment during the early stages of the GWOT when Egypt’s then-strongman President Hosni Mubarak voiced his fears that a war in Iraq would create “a state of chaos and fear” in the wider region. As Brian Whitaker wrote for The Guardian, that is precisely what the US hawks want, and it is precisely what they got:

For the hawks, disorder and chaos sweeping through the region would not be an unfortunate side-effect of war with Iraq, but a sign that everything is going according to plan.

In their eyes, Iraq is just the starting point – or, as a recent presentation at the Pentagon put it, “the tactical pivot” – for re-moulding the Middle East on Israeli-American lines.

Now, the US wants to remould its direct neighbourhood. The war drums are beating loud and clear. On Thursday, Washington denounced that two Venezuelan military planes had flown over a US navy ship in what it described as a “highly provocative action.” The Maduro government is expanding its mobilisation of the Bolivarian militia of Venezuela, reports Anadolu:

For the first time, 15,751 popular defense bases and 5,336 communal militia units will be mobilized nationwide.

Maduro said citizens continue to enlist through a digital platform, adding that, beyond the roughly 4.5 million people already trained over the years, the total is expected to surpass 8 million with the addition of new volunteers.

He stressed that Venezuela has the capacity to preserve peace under all circumstances and to defend itself against external threats—a capacity he pledged to strengthen further.

All-out war in Venezuela cannot be ruled out, warns Sachs: “Anything is possible because this is a long-standing operation. This isn’t something new, this is something that goes back more than 20 years.”

On Thursday, the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, released a resolution supported by 20 of the 33 countries that comprise the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) expressing their “deep concern” about the “extra-regional” military deployment, alluding to the US armed forces’ latest manoeuvres in the area. The foreign ministers gathered for the emergency summit called for the region to remain “as a land of peace.”

They know what is coming, and they are rightly terrified. Ominously, 13 countries refused to sign the resolution, including Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru. As always, the region is riven by division. The mad irony is that even the countries that support the US’ militarisation of Latin America, such as Argentina and Ecuador, are still facing crippling US tariffs and visa restrictions.

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2 comments

  1. Trees&Trunks

    The only good thing of this merger is that there is nano-hope of budget cutting. There used to be humungous terror budget and a humungous drug budget. Will they now merge into one smaller budget or will 1+1=4 so the will get more, more,’more!!!!!?

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