‘War on Drugs’: More About War Than Drugs
On July 14, at a summit held in Orlando, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Terrance Cole, declared that the Mexican cartels and the Government of Mexico are “the same thing.” He presented no evidence. President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded that evidence be provided; none was. Mexico’s Security Cabinet responded with figures—tens of thousands of arrests, hundreds of tons of narcotics seized—while Cole’s office remained silent. The accusation was never meant to be proven. It was only meant to be hurled.
Anyone who has studied the half-century arc of Washington’s “war on drugs” recognizes this maneuver instantly. The research notebooks Addicted to Imperialism, produced by the Tricontinental Institute in collaboration with partner research centers across Latin America, document the pattern with precision: the label of “narco-state” is not a finding but a weapon, aimed with remarkable consistency at governments that assert their sovereignty, and omitted, with equal consistency, in the case of governments that submit.
Declaring that a state is indistinguishable from a cartel is the precondition for treating it as a target. When the White House asserted in early 2025 that Mexican traffickers maintained an “intolerable alliance” with Mexico’s government, and when Cole now elevates that to the level of identity—the government and the cartel as a single structure—the groundwork is being laid, publicly, for an intervention against a sovereign neighbor country ruled by a political party that Washington cannot control.
Let us first consider what fifty years of this “war” have actually produced. The DEA’s own leadership reported in May 2024 that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels alone count associates and facilitators in all fifty US states. After Plan Colombia—the largest counter-narcotics program in history, which consumed more than ten billion US dollars—Colombia’s potential cocaine production rose from 1,053 tons in 2016 to 1,738 tons in 2022, along with a record amount of land planted with coca. Between 2001 and 2024, Washington channeled more than 20 billion dollars in “counter-narcotics assistance” into Latin America and the Caribbean—three-quarters of that sum through the Pentagon.
That last figure says it all: this was never a public health program that failed. Rather, it is a military assistance program that succeeded—it managed to militarize the hemisphere, embed US agencies and troops in the internal security of nominally sovereign states, and criminalize the peasantry, while the profits were laundered northward.
Venezuela is the definitive case. In March 2020, Attorney General William Barr displayed “Wanted” posters for President Nicolás Maduro, offering 15 million US dollars for the head of a sitting president and accusing him of leading the “Cartel of the Suns“—a cartel that serious analysts have never been able to locate outside of US accusations.
The evidence was compiled by the DEA itself through Operation Money Badger, a clandestine infiltration into Venezuela carried out—according to the agency’s own internal memos—unilaterally and without notifying Venezuelan authorities; that is, illegally. Those fabricated accusations became the justification for the assault on Caracas in January 2026 and the abduction of a sitting president.
And what followed the abduction? Not a gram less of cocaine reached the streets of the United States: the UN’s own data shows that Venezuela was never a significant route of production or transit compared to the Pacific corridor that runs through Washington’s closest allies. What followed, instead, was oil. Within days, the White House announced that Venezuela would deliver between thirty and fifty million barrels of crude, marketed by US officials, with the revenues deposited into accounts controlled by the United States.
New licenses issued by the US Treasury Department opened Venezuela’s oil fields to Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell. Trump himself dispensed with the pretext, promising that the major US oil companies would come in, invest billions, and begin extracting from the largest proven reserves on the planet. Oil executives were received at the White House as the real spoils of the “anti-drug” operation were being handed out. Rarely has an empire confessed its motive so quickly.
Brazil shows the same mechanism in its legal form. In May, Washington designated the Comando Vermelho and the PCC as “foreign terrorist organizations,” placing Brazilian criminal gangs in the same legal category as [Palestinian resistance organization] Hamas; in July, Treasury sanctions were imposed. Brazil did not request this “help.” The designations unilaterally extend US anti-terrorism law over the Brazilian economy—any bank, company, or citizen with an indirect link now risks being prosecuted in the US.
The terrorist designations coincide with the punitive tariffs and sanctions imposed on a justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court, all aimed at a progressive government that had the audacity to put a former president plotting a coup on trial and to strengthen ties with the BRICS. The “fight against organized crime” functions here as a jurisdictional appropriation of South America’s largest economy.
Now compare this severity with Washington’s attitude towards its allies. Juan Orlando Hernández, president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was found guilty by a US federal jury of conspiring to import hundreds of tons of cocaine—a man whom prosecutors claimed had received bribes from none other than El Chapo—and sentenced to forty-five years. On December 1, 2025, Trump granted him a full pardon, releasing him while simultaneously endorsing Hernández’s party in the Honduran elections and labeling the Honduran left as “narcocommunists.”
The cornerstone of the most ambitious drug trafficking prosecution in the history of the US Justice Department was demolished overnight for electoral convenience. Meanwhile, in Ecuador, Daniel Noboa—whose “Plan Ecuador” has translated into states of exception, immunity for US military personnel, a mercenary alliance with Erik Prince, founder of [private military contractor] Blackwater, and record cocaine exports through the country’s ports.
All of this occurs amidst persistent allegations of official complicity with drug trafficking and electoral manipulation—yet he [Noboa] is hailed as Washington’s model partner, despite troubling events such as the assassination on June 14 of the prosecutor investigating the extrajudicial killings of Ecuadorian fishermen at the hands of US forces. The lesson could not be clearer: drug trafficking is forgivable, even excusable, in an ally. Sovereignty is the only unforgivable crime.
This is the pattern, and it has persisted for over a century with cases documented in Addicts to Imperialism: Bolivia and Venezuela expelled the DEA due to its role in coup attempts and quickly became “narco-states”; Honduras, ruled by a drug trafficker, and Ecuador, governed by a complacent heir, continued to be “security partners.” The intensity of the [drug trafficking] accusation corresponds to a government’s independence, never to its relationship with drugs.
According to all the indicators—production, consumption, cartel power, deaths—the United States’ War on Drugs is a failure of historical proportions, and its architects know it: consumption has increased, production has risen, and cartels operate in every state inside the United States, funded by US financial institutions and armed by US weapon manufacturers.
However, judged by its actual purpose, the War on Drugs has been a fifty-year success: a permanent and flexible pretext for surveillance, sanctions, legal warfare, the establishment of military bases, and now, invasion. Today, that pretext is being used as a weapon more brazenly than ever: to kidnap a president and seize his country’s oil, to subject Brazil’s economy to anti-terrorism legislation, to declare that Mexico’s elected government is a cartel.
A serious war against the drug economy would begin in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the gun shops of the southern United States. Instead, what Latin America faces is a war against its right to self-governance—and the independent governments of the region, from Mexico City to Brasília and Caracas, are not the accused. They are the intended victims.
Carlos Ron is a former Venezuelan diplomat and deputy coordinator of the Our America office at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.
Source: Nodal
Translation to English by The Assembly Media team.
