
Recent narco-terrorism charges against Venezuelan president NicolĂĄs Maduro form part of a longer history of U.S. empire using drugs to advance geopolitical goals.
By Alexander Aviña – April 30, 2020
On March 26, U.S. attorney general William Barr announced new ânarco-terorrismâ charges against president NicolĂĄs Maduro and more than a dozen other high-ranking Venezuelan officials. The episode yet again demonstrated that Americaâs long-running War on Drugs is not actually about targeting illicit drugs. Instead, drugs represent important tools in cementing and perpetuating US systems of imperial controlâwhat the historian Suzanne Reiss refers to as an âalchemy of empire.â
The thinly-evidenced charges form part of a broader, hamfisted, bipartisan U.S. effort to delegitimize the current Venezuelan government and force regime changeâan effort that includes devastating economic sanctions that have caused mass suffering and death in the country. Venezuela officially joined the list of convenient enemy states deemed ânarco-statesâ for having directly challenged or impeded U.S. international designs: 1950s China, 1960s Cuba and Vietnam, and 1980s Sandinista Nicaragua.
U.S. drug interdiction campaigns, which have been global in scope since World War II, function as broader counterinsurgencies that have sought to pacify recalcitrant states and prop up pliant allies. As Reiss argues in We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire, âDrug control became a mechanism for extending US influence into the domestic and international life of its enemiesâââand, I would add, its friends.
The irony, perhaps expressed as an act of imperial psychological projection, is that the very revanchist forces that the U.S. covertly allied with to destabilize revolutionary regimes were intimately involved in the drug game. The specific experiences and words of Colonel Roger Trinquierâa French military officer on the losing side at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and later a feted counterinsurgency theoristâcan serve as a dictum for this broader history: âTo have the [Hmong], one must buy their opium.â
Nationalist Chinese forces (KMT), right-wing Cuban exiles, military officers within the south Vietnamese government, and Nicaraguan Contras form part of a longer list of inconvenientâand at times unpredictableâallies that U.S. military and intelligence agencies historically collaborated with in the attempt to assert and expand control and influence in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Cold War Narco Allies and Blowback
In our Netflix-fueled popular imaginations of fantastical drug lords and fashion-forward kingpins, most people likely donât know the name Kuhn Sa. Yet, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Saâdubbed the âPrince of Deathâ by U.S. prosecutors, while he called himself the âKing of Opiumââcontrolled an estimated half of the worldâs heroin supply from his base in northeastern Myanmar. As University of Wisconsin historian Alfred McCoy chronicles in his biography of Sa, it took decades of shifting alliances, missteps, and ruthless power plays to create the King of Opium. Aided by 20,000 soldiers and alliances forged with Myanmarâs military dictatorship, the socialist republic of Laos and high-ranking Thai military officials, Saâs refineries processed an estimated 80 percent of the Golden Triangleâs heroin. His high purity âChina Whiteâ heroin quickly captured U.S. markets during the 1980s, particularly in New York City. When U.S. attorney general Richard Thornburgh filed a sealed indictment against Sa in 1990, he proved defiant: âPresident Bush may have the button for nuclear weapons…but I have the button for opium. My opium is stronger and more potent than your nuclear bombs. I should just feed you this poison.â Echoes of Maoâs famous 1955 statement about U.S. atomic bombs but with a narco twist.
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Broader Cold War contexts also shaped Saâs rise to power. Here, we can find some useful lessons for understanding U.S. policy today. To understand the arrival of China White to New York City streets during the 1980s, we must go back to the 1950s, when Central Intelligence Agency operatives organized a series of covert operations that, in effect, protected southeast Asian drug traffickers and drug smuggling in order to organize and maintain anti-Communist countersinsurgencies. To quote McCoy, âSince ruthless drug lords made effective anti-Communist allies and opium amplified their power, CIA agents…tolerated the illicit traffic.â
The so-called âprince of deathâ was a consequence of the United States waging empire in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 70s.
McCoyâs classic work, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, traces the global history of covert U.S. agents collaborating with drug producers and smugglers from the Mediterranean to 1950s Burma, 1960s Laos, 1970s Afghanistan/Pakistan, and 1980s Colombia/Central America. In Saâs Myanmar case, local-regional conflicts that underscored that nationâs history of postcolonial state formation mixed with the end of formal European imperialism, the 1949 Chinese Revolution, and the United Statesâ anti-communist imperial actions in Southeast Asia enabled his gradual rise to the upper echelons of the global narcotics trade. The so-called âprince of deathâ was a consequence of the United States waging empire in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 70s.
1979 was a globally significant year when, to paraphrase Lenin, decades unfolded in a matter of weeks. Revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, along with coups and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, expanded the theater of operations for CIA officials willing to partner with ânarcosâ to advance broader âanti-communistâ goals. Echoing previous campaigns in Southeast Asia, CIA covert operations that aimed to secretlyâand cheaplyâwage war against the Soviets occupying Afghanistan helped transform the Afghani-Pakistai borderlands into a major heroin-producing region by the mid-1980s. Making the Soviets âbleedâ necessitated a constellation of shady alliances that would bring about imperial blowback in the 2000s: Afghani opium farmers and smugglers; fundamentalist mujahadeen leaders who turned to the drug tradeâdirectly or indirectlyâto complement funds received from CIA, Saudi and Pakastani sources; and, Pakistani military and intelligence officers who controlled heroin labs and smuggling infrastructure. The governor of Baluchistan told U.S. journalists in 1990 that Pakistani officials âdeliver drugs under their own bayonets.â Caravans that took CIA weapons into Afghanistan would often come back loaded with raw opium, destined for processing in Pakistani labs. By the time the Soviets left in late 1980s, Afghanistan directly competed with Kuhn Sa for markets in Europe and the United States, second globally only to Myanmar in opium production.
The CIA, according to a 1989 Senate Subcommittee Report, at the very least knew about the drug traffickingâand, like in Afghanistan, allowed the operations to continue.
Cocaine helped fuel that other main theater of secret CIA drug wars during the aggressive rollback policies of the Ronald Reagan administration. The self-proclaimed Contra presidentâs clandestine war against the Sandinistas in Nicaraguaâa small, impoverished country of an estimated 3.5 million people in 1980âused a motley international network to finance and arm the viciously violent Contras. In addition to the infamous secret arms deals with Iran, a âdark allianceââto use the late journalist Gary Webbâs descriptionâthat included Contras, Colombian drug lords, Central American smugglers, and American street dealers allegedly also raised funds. The CIA, according to a 1989 Senate Subcommittee Report, at the very least knew about the drug traffickingâand, like in Afghanistan, allowed the operations to continue.
Before he was gunned down in 1984, journalist Manuel BuendĂa alleged connections between CIA agents, Mexican and Colombian drug smugglers, and Mexican intelligence officials to reveal yet another dimension to the broader Contra effort. Former DEA agent Hector Berrellez stumbled upon this Mexican connection when leading Operation Leyenda in the late 1980s. An operation that sought to capture individuals responsible for the torture and murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena in 1985, Berrellez obtained information that linked drug money to anti-Sandinista opearations and that Mexican druglords like Rafael Caro Quintero had allegedly lent his ranches in Veracruz for the training of Contras. Perhaps the most explosive allegation? A CIA agent had witnessed and participated in the torture of Camarena in order to protect the Agencyâs narco-connections to the Contra War.
In the midst of yet another declared War on Drugs in the 1980sâone that asked Americans to âjust say noâ to drugs while domestic police forces waged actual war against communities of colorâU.S. imperial policy had facilitated the arrival of drugs to U.S. streets. Counterinsurgency abroad helped generate the very drugs that led to counterinsurgency at home.
The War on Drugs as Ouroboros.
Back to Venezuela, Colombia and âDrug War Capitalismâ
Just as the U.S.-led post-World War II international drug control regime had the power to classify drugs as licit or illicit commodities, it also facilitated the designation of âfriendlyâ allied nations and insubordinate ânarco-states.â The designation primarily hinges not on actual drug production and trafficking, but upon accepting U.S. imperial prerogatives. Hence, the focus now on Venezuela and Maduro and not on Colombiaâthe worldâs largest producer of cocaineâor certain Central American nations that serve as key transit nodes along eastern Pacific Ocean smuggling routesâthe source of an estimated 85 percent of the cocaine entering the United States. Honduran president Juan Orlando HernĂĄndez might be nervous, with a brother currently facing trafficking charges in U.S. federal courts. Still, he seems safe at the momentâthough the story of longtime ally-turned-enemy Manuel Noriega should give him pause.
Former Colombian president Ălvaro Uribe also forms part of this history. In office from 2002-2010, Uribe was long dogged by alleged links to MedellĂn cocaine traffickers and viciously brutal paramilitaries as he rose to political prominence during the 1980s and 1990s. By the time he took office in 2002, the country had received billions of dollars from the United States as part of âPlan Colombiaâ: A joint US-Colombian-funded counterinsurgency against Marxist ânarco-terroristsâ that, according to the work of journalists Dawn Paley and Steven Cohen, used an assortment of violences to open the country to foreign capital for extractive industries, megadevelopment projects, and land grabs. As president, Uribe cemented Plan Colombia as a form of governance that justified itself by using the âmetricsâ of security, stability, and prosperity. He did not hesitate to use alliances with narcos and right-wing paramilitaries to bring about his âDemocratic Securityââa security forged on the murdered and disappeared bodies of union leaders, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian activists, the urban poor, and the campesinos murdered by the Colombian military and then dressed up as guerrillas. The consequences of drug war capitalism and forever war for the massesâsystematic human rights violations and impunity, plunder, deepened socio-economic inequalityâwere presented as âprogress,â âdevelopment,â and âinvestmentâ for Colombia.
And all the while, cocaine production began to steadily rise. Today, the acreage devoted to coca production in Colombia is higher than in pre-Plan Colombia years. But the United States, in the words of General John Kelly, has a âspecialâ relationship with the Colombia that Uribismo created. Joe Biden continues to laud his work as âone of the architectsâ of Plan Colombia. And it continues to serve as a prototype for Mexico and Central America.
Decades ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt allegedly expressed this type of special relationship in a more crass, direct way about Anastasio Samoza: âHe may be a son of a bitch, but heâs our son of a bitch.â
Alexander Aviña is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University and the author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside (Oxford University Press, 2014)
Featured image: The U.S. Coast Guard offloads seized cocaine in Miami Beach, 2014 (Photo by Sabrina Laberdesque/Wikimedia)
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