{"id":319227,"date":"2026-08-10T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=319227"},"modified":"2026-08-08T19:34:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T18:34:22","slug":"the-war-on-drugs-has-always-been-more-about-war-than-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/08\/the-war-on-drugs-has-always-been-more-about-war-than-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"The War on Drugs Has Always Been More about War Than Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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foto: Southcom<\/p><\/div>\n

Sovereignty Is the Only Unforgivable Crime<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

4 Aug 2026\u00a0<\/em>– The pardon of Washington\u2019s ally Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez amid an uptick in the US war on drugs signals that trafficking is forgivable, even pardonable, in an ally.<\/span><\/p>\n

On July 14, at a summit in Orlando, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole,\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0that Mexico\u2019s cartels and Mexico\u2019s government are \u201cone and the same.\u201d He offered no evidence. President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded some; none came. Mexico\u2019s Security Cabinet answered with figures \u2013 tens of thousands of arrests, hundreds of tons of narcotics seized \u2013 while Cole\u2019s office remained silent. The accusation was never meant to be proven. It was only meant to be deployed.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has studied the half-century arc of Washington\u2019s \u201cWar on Drugs\u201d recognizes the move instantly. The research notebooks\u00a0\u201cAdictos al Imperialismo<\/a>\u201d, produced by the Tricontinental Institute together with partner research centers across Latin America, document the pattern with precision: the \u201cnarco-state\u201d 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 \u201cintolerable alliance<\/a>\u201d with Mexico\u2019s government, and when Cole now escalates that to identity \u2013 government and cartel as a single structure \u2013 the groundwork is being laid, in public, for intervention against a sovereign neighbor governed by a party Washington cannot control.<\/p>\n

Consider first what fifty years of this \u201cwar\u201d have in fact produced. The DEA\u2019s own leadership \u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0in May 2024 that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels alone maintain associates and facilitators in all fifty US states. After Plan Colombia \u2013 the largest counternarcotics program in history, consuming well over ten billion US dollars \u2013 Colombia\u2019s potential cocaine production \u00a0rose<\/a>\u00a0from 1,053 tons in 2016 to 1,738 tons in 2022, alongside record acreage under coca. Between 2001 and 2024, Washington\u00a0channeled<\/a>\u00a0more than twenty billion dollars in \u201canti-narcotics assistance\u201d to Latin America and the Caribbean \u2013 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Venezuela is the definitive case. In March 2020, Attorney General William Barr held up wanted posters of President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro,\u00a0offering<\/a>\u00a0fifteen million dollars for a head of state and charging him as leader of a \u201cCartel de los Soles<\/a>\u201d that serious analysts have never been able to locate outside of US indictments. The evidence was assembled by the DEA itself through\u00a0 Operation Money Badger<\/a>, a clandestine infiltration of Venezuela conducted, by the agency\u2019s own internal memoranda, unilaterally and without notifying Venezuelan authorities \u2013 that is, illegally. Those manufactured accusations became the license for the January 2026 assault on Caracas and the abduction of a sitting president.<\/p>\n

And what followed the abduction? Not one gram less of cocaine reached the streets of the United States \u2013 the\u00a0UN\u2019s own data<\/a>\u00a0show Venezuela was never a significant production or transit route compared to the Pacific corridor running through Washington\u2019s closest allies. What followed, instead, was oil. Within days, the White House\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that Venezuela would surrender thirty to fifty million barrels of crude, marketed by US officials, with revenues deposited in US-controlled accounts. New Treasury licenses\u00a0opened<\/a>\u00a0Venezuelan fields to Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell. Trump himself dispensed with the pretext, promising that America\u2019s biggest oil companies would go in, spend billions, and start extracting from the largest proven reserves on Earth. Executives were\u00a0received<\/a>\u00a0at the White House while the \u201canti-drug\u201d operation\u2019s real dividend was divided. Rarely has an empire confessed its motive so promptly.<\/p>\n

Source:<\/em> Breakthrough News<\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original – resumen-english.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4 Aug 2026 – The pardon of Washington\u2019s ally Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez amid an uptick in the US war on drugs signals that trafficking is forgivable, even pardonable, in an ally. Venezuela is the definitive case of this double standard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":319228,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[2267,550,135,3281,1126,1050,541,559,334,3324,2137,779,249,95,70,557,1892],"class_list":["post-319227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","tag-cartels","tag-corruption","tag-drugs","tag-evil-empire","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-maduro","tag-mexico","tag-north-america","tag-south-america","tag-sovereignty","tag-trump","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-venezuela","tag-war-on-drugs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319229,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319227\/revisions\/319229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}