The War on Drugs Has Always Been More about War Than Drugs

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 10 Aug 2026

Carlos Ron | Breakthrough News/Resumen - TRANSCEND Media Service

foto: Southcom

Sovereignty Is the Only Unforgivable Crime

4 Aug 2026 – The pardon of Washington’s ally Juan Orlando Hernández amid an uptick in the US war on drugs signals that trafficking is forgivable, even pardonable, in an ally.

On July 14, at a summit in Orlando, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole, declared that Mexico’s cartels and Mexico’s government are “one and the same.” He offered no evidence. President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded some; none came. Mexico’s Security Cabinet answered 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 deployed.

Anyone who has studied the half-century arc of Washington’s “War on Drugs” recognizes the move instantly. The research notebooks “Adictos al Imperialismo”, produced by the Tricontinental Institute together with partner research centers across Latin America, document the pattern with precision: the “narco-state” label is not a finding but a weapon, aimed with remarkable consistency at governments that assert sovereignty and withheld, with equal consistency, from governments that submit. Declaring a state indistinguishable from a cartel is the precondition for treating it as a target. When the White House asserted in early 2025 that Mexican traffickers held an “intolerable alliance” with Mexico’s government, and when Cole now escalates that to identity – government and cartel as a single structure – the groundwork is being laid, in public, for intervention against a sovereign neighbor governed by a party Washington cannot control.

Consider first what fifty years of this “war” have in fact produced. The DEA’s own leadership  reported in May 2024 that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels alone maintain associates and facilitators in all fifty US states. After Plan Colombia – the largest counternarcotics program in history, consuming well over ten billion US dollars – Colombia’s potential cocaine production  rose from 1,053 tons in 2016 to 1,738 tons in 2022, alongside record acreage under coca. Between 2001 and 2024, Washington channeled more than twenty billion dollars in “anti-narcotics assistance” to Latin America and the Caribbean – three quarters of it through the Pentagon. That last figure is the tell: this was never a public-health program that failed. Rather, it is a military-assistance program that succeeded – at militarizing the hemisphere, embedding US agencies and troops in the domestic security of nominally sovereign states, and criminalizing the peasantry while the profits were laundered northward.

Venezuela is the definitive case. In March 2020, Attorney General William Barr held up wanted posters of President Nicolás Maduro, offering fifteen million dollars for a head of state and charging him as leader of a “Cartel de los Soles” that serious analysts have never been able to locate outside of US indictments. The evidence was assembled by the DEA itself through  Operation Money Badger, a clandestine infiltration of Venezuela conducted, by the agency’s own internal memoranda, unilaterally and without notifying Venezuelan authorities – that is, illegally. Those manufactured accusations became the license for the January 2026 assault on Caracas and the abduction of a sitting president.

And what followed the abduction? Not one gram less of cocaine reached the streets of the United States – the UN’s own data show Venezuela was never a significant production or transit route compared to the Pacific corridor running through Washington’s closest allies. What followed, instead, was oil. Within days, the White House announced that Venezuela would surrender thirty to fifty million barrels of crude, marketed by US officials, with revenues deposited in US-controlled accounts. New Treasury licenses opened Venezuelan fields to Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell. Trump himself dispensed with the pretext, promising that America’s biggest oil companies would go in, spend billions, and start extracting from the largest proven reserves on Earth. Executives were received at the White House while the “anti-drug” operation’s real dividend was divided. Rarely has an empire confessed its motive so promptly.

Source: Breakthrough News

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