By JAMES MARSH
The War on Drugs, like the War on Terror, has proven itself to be a war on a construct abstract enough to provide rhetorical backing for a wide array of U.S. imperialist policies.
President Donald Trump, in the latest use of War on Drugs rhetoric as cover for pursuing military objectives, is mobilizing the U.S. military in the Caribbean. At the same time that his administration is rolling out the national guard at home to “fight crime” (or, in reality, to perform a test run of using military forces to carry out political policing by terrorizing working-class communities), it is rolling out the Marines and Navy in the Caribbean Sea. Trump has sent seven warships, a nuclear submarine, and thousands of troops as part of what he describes as anti-cartel operations.
This operation included a Sept. 2 armed strike on a boat allegedly operated by the Tren de Aragua cartel in order to transport illegal drugs from Venezuela to the U.S. According to Trump, 11 people on the boat were killed in the attack. International observers have condemned the attack as a human rights violation.
This attack on a civilian boat and the dispatching of the U.S. Navy darken the long shadow of military intervention cast over Venezuela. Venezuela has already seen coup attempts in 2002 by opposition forces with U.S. approval and in 2020 with direct involvement by U.S. mercenaries. In April of this year, the Venezuelan military also stated that it had uncovered plans for a “false flag” attack framing Venezuela for attacking an Exxon Mobil oil platform in the waters off the disputed territory of Essequibo/ Guyana Esequiba, which would be used as pretext for invasion. President Nicolás Maduro is mobilizing 4.5 million militiamen in response to the threat posed by U.S. warships lingering off the country’s coast.
Taken together with the heightened threat of military intervention in Venezuela, the narrative that the primary objective of the mobilizations is to fight the drug cartels is questionable. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary of Trump’s White House, stated on Aug. 19 that “the Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela. It is a narco-terror cartel. Maduro is not a legitimate president. He is a fugitive head of this drug cartel.” These accusations, for which precious little evidence has been provided, attempt to use War on Drugs rhetoric to delegitimize Maduro and justify regime change.
Rhetoric of fighting drug cartels in Latin America has, for several decades, repeatedly provided cover for the U.S. to strengthen police forces in collaborating states to better protect its investments abroad and to intervene militarily to expand its hegemony. From overthrowing the government of Panama to fighting guerrillas in Colombia, this rhetoric has attempted to justify flagrant military aggression.
Counter-insurgency and intervention
The end of the Cold War saw a transition in U.S. policy in Latin America, as it consolidated gains won through counter-insurgency tactics and military intervention and pivoted from Cold War narratives to using the framework of the War on Drugs as justification for its policies.
The Cold War saw U.S .military interventions across Latin America, from the 1973 coup carried out in Chile to the invasion of Grenada in 1983, among a host of others.
In Central America, the epoch opened by the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in 1979 saw guerrilla resistance to dictatorships carried out in Guatemala and El Salvador throughout the 1980s. The U.S. fought this threat to its power by backing state terror and right-wing paramilitaries. These counter-insurgency tactics forced guerrilla organizations to capitulate, with their leadership accepting peace deals in the late 1980s which incorporated their groups into institutional politics.
Along with the fall of the USSR, the waning power of these left-wing guerrillas weakened the justification of continued U.S. military meddling in Latin American affairs as the Cold War drew to a close. But the U.S. still had political ambitions that demanded continued military interventions. To continue to justify intervention, one of the new lines of argument turned to was that the military and military aid would fight the sale of drugs by cartels.
One such case of the changing propaganda deployed following the Cold War was the invasion of Panama in 1989. General Manuel Noriega had for years acted as a U.S. strongman in Panama and worked closely with U.S. intelligence agencies. However, by the late 1980s, the growing backlash against his dictatorial governance was proving to be a liability for Washington, with civilian neoliberal parties seeming to be more appealing collaborators.
While the CIA had long been aware that its collaborator had been complicit in the drug trade, this involvement was brought up as a pretext to remove Noriega from power. The U.S. invaded and occupied Panama, leveling criminal charges against Noriega for drug trafficking and racketeering as justification. While Noriega had accepted several million dollars in bribes from the Medellin Cartel, there were other stories that were outright fabrications, such as how he was alleged to be doing cocaine with prostitutes at the time of the invasion rather than spending the time with his wife. This was also the same Noriega who just two years earlier had received a letter of praise directly from the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for cooperating in drug enforcement operations.
This invasion escalated rhetoric of criminality to justify overthrowing a regime, based on the premise that in the U.S. government’s quest to stamp out the drug trade, it had the right to intervene in other countries’ political affairs.
Counter-insurgency operations and the rhetorical use of the War on Drugs to justify military intervention fused as part of Plan Colombia. Launched in 2000, Plan Colombia began as plans for the U.S. to provide strategic economic aid that would strengthen the position of the Colombian state in negotiations with left-wing guerrilla groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). However, following the dictates of U.S. imperialism, the operation moved away from providing economic aid and toward funding the Colombian military, along with right-wing paramilitaries. FARC, which operated in sympathetic peasant communities in coca-growing regions and sold cocaine to fund its operations, was branded as the “narco guerrillas” behind the trade in cocaine, making counter-insurgency efforts part of the War on Drugs.
While Plan Colombia saw paramilitaries terrorize peasant communities, the strengthening of Colombia’s military, and the weakening of FARC as a thorn in the side of U.S. hegemony in the region, it did next to nothing to stem the sale of cocaine. The spraying of herbicides on coca fields from planes simply drove peasant farmers deeper into the Amazon. While Plan Colombia was in effect, coca growing increased and the price of cocaine exported from Colombia fell. Despite failing to thwart the cocaine trade, the operation was held up as a model for militarizing the War on Drugs.
The end of the Cold War did not see the end of U.S. counter-insurgency tactics and military interventions in Latin America. Instead, it saw counter-insurgencies and invasions fall under the rhetorical framework of the War on Drugs.
Militarization of the police state
The role of the United States in the War on Drugs in Latin America has been to work with right-wing parties to use drug enforcement operations as a pretext to militarize the police state. The War on Terror only served to further this dynamic.
War on Terror rhetoric tried to assert that ungoverned terrain and weak states anywhere in the world threatened the U.S. by serving as potential safe harbors for terrorist cells. Despite the lack of evidence of Islamist terrorist activity in Latin America, the logic of this narrative suggested that the U.S. needed to exert control or strengthen collaborating governments across Latin America and the entire world—a convenient cover for the imperialist mandate to control and police global markets.
This rhetoric turned on Mexico during the War on Terror. The U.S.-Mexico border was described in the media as a wide-open front in the War on Terror, providing an open door not just to immigrant laborers but to imagined armies of terrorists, motivating the beginnings of the border wall and intensified border policing. Barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, which included about 75 miles (~120 km) of fencing in 2005, were expanded to about 650 miles (~1000 km) of barriers by 2011. Corruption and drug cartels were pointed to by some military analysts under the Obama administration to back claims that Mexico was a failed state in need of a stronger response to cartels.
In Mexico, the militarization of the struggle between the state and drug cartels was launched by the conservative party PAN with Operation Michoacan in 2006. The operation used federal police and military forces, and directed special attention toward the Gulf Cartel specifically, which was responsible for a spike in violent crime. The escalation of the drug war also led to the rollback of civil liberties, as under the policy of arraigo, citizens suspected of involvement with organized crime could be held without trial for up to 80 days, a policy used to keep people in holding cells and to extract information through torture. The operation expanded with U.Sd support as part of the Merida Initiative launched in 2007.
The Merida Initiative, also called Plan Mexico, took inspiration from the counter-insurgency tactics of Plan Colombia. As with Plan Colombia, rhetoric of fighting the drug war provided cover for targeting left-wing guerrilla forces based in peasant communities, as it strengthened the Mexican military in fighting Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas. It also expanded U.S. neocolonial control of Mexican institutions, as funding and training strengthened ties between the US and repressive forces in Mexico.
As with Plan Colombia, the Merida Initiative did not stop the drug trade; instead it reorganized it. The winner of the Mexican drug war was the Sinaloa Cartel, which avoided the decapitations directed at its competitors like the Gulf Cartel by collaborating with drug enforcement agencies. The DEA struck deals with Sinaloa leadership in which it allowed the cartel to continue smuggling drugs in exchange for information, as well as helping to arm the Sinaloa Cartel through the gun-running operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.
The tactics used by the Merida Initiative were not only part of a largely failed project of prohibition, but they served to militarize the police state and carry out counter-insurgency operations, strengthening the repressive forces in Mexico on behalf of U.S. interests. In the context of the rhetoric of the War on Terror, this plays into the ruling class notion that the U.S. needed to do more to expand control over ungoverned regions across the entire world.
The role of the U.S. in militarizing the police forces of collaborating states uses the War on Drugs as cover for neocolonial control over working class communities in Latin America.
Trump and missile strikes in the Caribbean
Trump, using the narrative of fighting the cartels to justify the deployment of the military in Latin America, has designated a list of drug cartels as terrorist groups. This accusation is the legal basis for the airstrike carried out days ago in international waters off the coast of Venezuela. This designation of cartels as unlawful combatants lacking the legal protections of either accused criminals or enemy soldiers attempts to justify military actions that ignore civil liberties and human rights protections. As has been the case with many other military operations working under the name of drug enforcement, it also threatens military intervention, particularly against Venezuela.
In Mexico, the designation of cartels as terrorists and the presence of the Navy in the Gulf of Mexico poses the threat of expanding drone warfare. The Trump administration has deployed troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and is carrying out drone surveillance flights over Mexico. As with the recent missile strike in the Caribbean, sources within the U.S. military have suggested Trump may be preparing unilaterally declared military action against cartels in Mexico, in violation of Mexican sovereignty. Threats to act militarily against cartels highlight the fact that the U.S. government feels it has a prerogative to intervene in the internal affairs of its neocolonies.
In Venezuela, the narrative that military mobilizations are fighting drug trafficking is even more questionable. For starters, the forces sent to Venezuela in August are too large to be used for drug policing. Furthermore, the main flow of the drug trade passes through the waters of the Pacific, not the Caribbean, and so sending the Navy to the southern Caribbean would not be especially useful for drug enforcement. And perhaps most importantly, the mobilizations against the cartels come at the same time that the Trump administration is baselessly accusing President Maduro of being a cartel leader.
While some observers have suggested the current mobilization is too small to be an outright invasion, the rollout of the military is still a threat to attempt regime change. Venezuela’s populist leadership under President Maduro has consolidated a military dictatorship, with nationalist policies (in this case, nationalizing oil revenues) that present a barrier to oil extraction in the country by U.S. multinational corporations. In light of the series of U.S.-backed coup attempts in the country, the threat of imperialist intervention remains high. By slapping the brand of “narco terrorists” on the Venezuelan government, airstrikes on cartels threaten larger military action aimed at regime change.
Sending the Navy could also be part of an attempt by the U.S. to scare concessions out of Venezuela as a tactic of gunboat diplomacy. Despite the nationalization of oil, Venezuela allows U.S. companies like Chevron to operate within the country as partners in oil extraction, highlighting a willingness to negotiate with U.S. capitalists. Another front for negotiations is the disputed territory of Essequibo/ Guyana Esequiba, the region surrounding the Essequibo River between Venezuela and neighboring Guyana, where the U.S. has a vested interest in influencing negotiations of which oil firms have extraction rights in the oil fields off the coast.
Using the narrative of the War on Drugs as cover for military action in Latin America is not new for the U.S. government, as shown in counter-insurgency efforts against FARC and the Zapatistas, and importantly in the invasion of Panama. Militarizing drug enforcement efforts also has a troubling history of rolling back civil liberties and strengthening the police state.
The working-class movement must oppose imperialist interventions. We must demand an end to the disastrous War on Drugs. And we must demand the U.S. keep its hands off Venezuela.
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