Okay – stop me if youve heard this one before.
When you dig a little deeper into our history with Venezuela and drug smuggling – you learn that the US had a hand in helping them get started. I don’t know how many times I’ve researched US conflicts with other countries and learned that they started because of things WE did – not because they just hate freedom!
Unsurprisingly, if you dig just a little beneath the surface of our current standoff with Nicols Maduro – complete with warships, nuclear submarines, and $50 million bounties – youll find the same pattern that’s defined American foreign policy for decades: we create the mess, then act shocked when it blows up in our faces.
I came across a link to the 1993 60 Minutes report The CIAs Cocaine – which earned a Peabody Award for exposing one of the agencys more embarrassing operations – and it provides the perfect blueprint for understanding how we got here. I’m sure youve probably heard about the CIA being responsible for flooding the US with drugs, particularly crack cocaine – well, heres how it happened.
Back in the Reagan era, during the height of the war on drugs, the CIA hatched what they probably thought was a brilliant plan. They would recruit Venezuelan General Ramn Guilln Davila to help ship 22 tons of cocaine into American cities. The idea was to gain the confidence of Colombian drug traffickers by actually moving their product, creating a long-term intelligence operation.
The DEA wanted nothing to do with this scheme. They could see the obvious problem: you can’t fight drugs by literally importing drugs. But the CIA, in its infinite wisdom, decided to go ahead anyway. The result was predictable – some of that cocaine ended up in the hands of American dealers, flooding the very communities the war on drugs was supposedly protecting.
Now, thirty-two years later, Trump has deployed over 4,500 military personnel, seven warships, and a nuclear submarine to the Caribbean because Venezuela is allegedly trafficking drugs. The irony would be funny if it werent so dangerous. Were threatening military action against a country for doing exactly what we helped them learn to do.
The current crisis follows the same tired playbook. Trump has designated Venezuelan President Maduro as a narco-terrorist and doubled the bounty for his arrest to $50 million. He claims Maduro leads something called the Cartel of the Suns – though notably, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reports that Venezuela doesn’t actually produce cocaine. That honor belongs to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. But facts have never been particularly relevant when we need a foreign boogeyman.
Whats really happening here is a textbook example of blowback. We spent decades destabilizing Latin American countries, supporting coups, funding paramilitary groups, and yes – trafficking drugs when it suited our intelligence objectives. Then we act surprised when the’se regions become unstable and turn to illicit activities to survive.
The Venezuela situation is particularly mindboggling because it demonstrates how our foreign policy contradictions create their own momentum. Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell visited Caracas earlier this year and secured the release of six detained Americans. For a moment, it looked like diplomacy might prevail. But the hardliners in the administration – led by Marco Rubio – couldnt stomach the idea of actually talking to Maduro instead of trying to overthrow him. You may or may not know that Marco Rubios brother-in-law, married to his sister Barbara, was a cocaine trafficker who served 12 years in federal prison for his role in a $75 million drug smuggling operation in Miami during the 1980 and was personally responsible for distributing $15 million worth of cocaine. So, Rubio might have a personal vendetta in all of this. Anyway.
So here we are, with Trump releasing videos of U.
S. forces blowing up boats in international waters, killing eleven people in what he proudly calls a strike against narcoterrorists. Legal experts are questioning whether this extrajudicial killing violated international law, but that’s never stopped us before.
The pattern is always the same. We intervene somewhere, usually for reasons that have more to do with our geopolitical interests than any genuine concern for human rights or democracy. We destabilize institutions, fund armed groups, and generally make a mess of things. Then, when the inevitable chaos emerges, we point to it as evidence that we need to intervene more.
Its worth noting that Venezuelas current problems didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Weve been trying to overthrow their government for over two decades, imposing sanctions that have devastated their economy and pushed millions of people to flee the country. Now were using the migration crisis and drug trafficking that resulted from this destabilization as justification for more military action.
The most frustrating part is that we never seem to learn from the’se cycles. The same people who architected the disasters in Iraq and Libya are now drawing up plans for Venezuela. Theyre using the same rhetoric about threats to American security, the same promises that military action will solve complex political problems.
But if you really want to understand why Venezuela has drug trafficking problems, start with the 1993 60 Minutes report. Look at how the CIA decided it was acceptable to flood American cities with cocaine in service of some larger strategic goal. Then ask yourself: if we were willing to do that to our own communities, what exactly did we do to theirs?
The truth is that most of Americas foreign conflicts trace back to our own actions. We armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan, then acted shocked when some of them turned into the Taliban. We destabilized Iraq and created the conditions that led to ISIS. We funded death squads in Central America, then wondered why people were fleeing north.
And we helped establish drug trafficking networks throughout Latin America when it served our Cold War objectives, then declared a war on drugs when those same networks became inconvenient.
The current standoff with Venezuela is just the latest chapter in this story. Well probably end up with another military intervention that creates more problems than it solves, more refugees, more instability, and eventually, more justification for the next intervention.
Maybe its time to admit that if you keep finding yourself in conflicts where you’re the common denominator, the problem might not be everyone else.