https://mronline.org/2026/01/08/western-imperialists-are-the-real-drug-traffickers-not-venezuela/
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Bankers from London to New York have made a killing off the drug trade for hundreds of years.
On Sept. 2, the newly renamed Department of War reportedly launched an airstrike against a skiff off the coast of Venezuela. This attack, which killed 11 Venezuelans alleged by the Trump administration to be “drug traffickers,” both marks a dangerous escalation toward war in the Americas and is yet another entry in this long history of weaponizing the so-called “War on Drugs.” In this sense, the accusation is no surprise, despite the fact that the 2025 UN World Drug Report reports that Venezuela’s contribution to the global drug trade is marginal.
However, it is an open secret that the United States government, and more importantly the big banks that it serves, are at the center of the largest drug trafficking networks in the world. Yet, the government of the United States does not hesitate to use accusations of drug trafficking, smuggling, use, and abuse to wage war against working and oppressed people domestically and around the world.
Just a few years ago, in July 2019, two stories dominated headlines at the exact same time: the sentencing of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to life for his role in the Sinaloa Cartel, while in Philadelphia a ship owned by JP Morgan Chase was seized in a $1.3 cocaine bust. At the time, Liberation News reported on the sentencing of “El Chapo,” describing how Wachovia Bank “laundered money to buy large planes for the transport of hundreds of millions of dollars of cocaine” for Mexican cartels–and when internal dissent was raised by former employee Martin Woods he “quit the bank after Wachovia executives repeatedly ignored his documentation of drug dealers laundering funds through the bank.”
Despite this evidence, no Wachovia executives were even charged, much less faced any repercussions for their documented role in financing the global drug trade. Similarly, in the investigation into the Philadelphia cocaine bust, neither JP Morgan Chase nor the operating shipping company, Mediterranean Shipping Co., were targeted in part of the investigation, but eight crew members were charged and sentenced to years in prison. This blatant corruption is nothing new for the capitalist class.
19th century
Bankers from London to New York have made a killing off the drug trade for hundreds of years. From the Opium Wars of the British Empire to the U.S. wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan and interventions across Latin America–the drug trade has been a core element to Western imperialism.
There is on one level the raw, capitalist logic of the drug trade. From opium to heroin to cocaine (not to mention coffee, sugar, and tobacco), trafficking in highly addictive substances is a surefire way to make a return on investment. Demand only grows the more markets are flooded with drugs–but the interconnections between the drug trade and imperialism go deeper than profit. To understand the geopolitical dimensions of the drug trade, there is no better example than the Opium Wars of the 19th Century.
The Opium Wars were not simply about opening China up to British trade in opium. The British Empire only had a surplus of opium because their colonial policies in India destroyed the longstanding Indian cotton and textile industry which was outcompeting British textile mills spinning cotton grown on southern U.S. slave plantations. Opium became a cash crop the British colonials cultivated in India only to flood the Chinese market at gunpoint, leading to a generational crisis of addiction in China itself.
It wasn’t just British imperial aristocrats who profited off the demolition of the Indian textile industry and the addiction and immiseration of the Chinese people. Key families within the U.S. ruling class made fortunes in the opium trade in the 19th century as well. Families like the Astors, the Forbes, and the Delanos cashed in big on the so-called “China trade.” Much of this money was recirculated into elite universities, including the Low family, for which the iconic Low Library at Columbia University is named.
Cold War
In the 20th century, U.S. imperialists took the Opium War model and ran with it. Historian Alfred W. McCoy’s 1991 book “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” traces the threads of the drug trade throughout the Cold War, demonstrating the role of the U.S. intelligence community and big banks in undergirding the global drug trade. McCoy traces the role of heroin in particular in the U.S. collaboration and backing of groups as disparate as the Sicilian mafia, the South Vietnamese Army, anti-communist Afghan warlords like Gulduddin Hekmetyar, and the Nicaraguan Contras.
Some of the profit from this trade certainly found its way laundered through the biggest banks on Wall Street and into the pockets of the capitalist ruling class, but deeper than that, much of the profit was recycled back into intelligence operations, becoming a slush fund for the CIA. Journalist Gary Webb famously exposed the contours of one of these examples with his 1998 book “Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion.”
This investigation demonstrated how, “for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” This slush fund in many ways allowed the CIA to continue running covert, or “black,” operations after the investigations in the mid-1970s into CIAs operations by the Church Committee, among others, that exposed operations such as the MKULTRA and COINTELPRO.
21st century
A 2008 letter published by National Institutes of Health by Simon J. Spedding, a medical advisor to the Australian Office of Veterans Affairs who worked in a children’s hospital in Kabul in the 1970s, stated that “the simple facts are that opium production was high under the U.S. influenced government of Afghanistan of the 1970s, decreased 10-fold by 2001 under the Taliban, and then increased 30-fold and more under the U.S. to the same level as in the 1970s.”
Contrary to the U.S. claim that the Taliban was promoting opium production to finance terrorism, after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after 20 years in 2021, the Taliban prohibited the cultivation of poppies, a key ingredient in opiate production, and production plummeted. A 2023 UN report reported the decline in opium poppy production between 2022 and 2023 at a 95% reduction.
From the British Empire’s Opium Wars to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, it has always been Western imperialists and finance capitalists using the drug trade to finance terrorism. Spedding continues in his letter,
these are facts, whereas the idea that the CIA runs opium from Afghanistan would be a conspiracy theory–unless, you thought about the United Nations statistics or happened to have been to Afghanistan.
Just last month, an explosive new piece of journalism, “The Fort Bragg Cartel” by Seth Harp (interviewed here by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner of the Empire Files) exposed the deep ties between domestic and international drug running, murders, and impunity at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fort Bragg is the home of the U.S. Army’s most secretive special operations, Delta Force. Delta Force is known for its “elite” status as a “black ops” unit akin to the better known Seal Team 6.
Between 2020 and 2021 a “staggering 109 soldiers assigned to Fort Bragg died” from murder and drug overdoses and it turns out, the high mortality is just the tip of the iceberg. The direct connections between Fort Bragg and Mexican cartels goes back at least to the 1990s when, as Harp reports, the Mexican Airborne Special Forces Group, which was trained in irregular warfare by American and Israeli forces at Fort Bragg NC and Fort Benning GA, defected to the Matamoros based Gulf Cartel before splitting off and working a new cartel, Los Zetas.
This marked the advent of the most brutal and violent epoche in the history of the drug trade in Mexico. Los Zetas had training “marksmanship, rapid deployment, ambushes, surveillance, and psychological operations,” and used “overt military force to consolidate control over most of the Texas border and the Gulf Coast port of Veracruz.” Groups like this are responsible for the thousands dead and countless more disappeared.
Same playbook against Venezuela
Whether it is the categorization of Mexican cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” or the long, long history of drugs being used as a geopolitical tool by imperialists abroad and a weapon against the working class at home, we can be sure that the last thing the U.S. capitalist class is interested in is combatting the drug trade.
The Trump administration’s accusations levied against Venezuela as a “narco-state” must be seen within this history. The allegations are being deployed as a political weapon for military escalation to seek the overthrow of the Maduro government. All working people of the world should stand united against these imperialist maneuvers.
Trump (Photo: wallpaperflare.com)
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