Beyond / Comment

A History of Inconvenient Allies and Convenient Enemies

Who gets labeled a "narco-terrorist" is all a matter of foreign policy.

by Alexander Aviña via North American Congress on Latin America on April 30, 2020

...weapons into Afghanistan would often come back loaded with raw opium, destined for processing in Pakistani labs. By the time the Soviets left in late 1980s, Afghanistan directly competed with Kuhn Sa for markets in Europe and the United States, second globally only to Myanmar in opium production.

Cocaine helped fuel that other main theater of secret CIA drug wars during the aggressive rollback policies of the Ronald Reagan administration. The self-proclaimed Contra president’s clandestine war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua a small, impoverished country of an estimated 3.5 million people in 1980 used a motley international network to finance and arm the viciously violent Contras. In addition to the infamous secret arms deals with Iran, a “dark alliance," to use the late journalist Gary Webb’s description that included Contras, Colombian drug lords, Central American smugglers, and American street dealers, allegedly also raised funds.

The CIA, according to a 1989 Senate Subcommittee Report, at the very least knew about the drug trafficking and, like in Afghanistan, allowed the operations to continue.

Before he was gunned down in 1984, journalist Manuel Buendía alleged connections between CIA agents, Mexican and Colombian drug smugglers, and Mexican intelligence officials to reveal yet another dimension to the broader Contra effort.

Former DEA agent Hector Berrellez stumbled upon this Mexican connection when leading Operation Leyenda in the late 1980s. An operation that sought to capture individuals responsible for the torture and murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena in 1985, Berrellez obtained information that linked drug money to anti-Sandinista operations and that Mexican druglords like Rafael Caro Quintero had allegedly lent his ranches in Veracruz for the training of Contras. Perhaps the most explosive allegation? A CIA agent had witnessed and participated in the torture of Camarena in order to protect the Agency’s narco-connections to the Contra War.

In the midst of yet another declared War on Drugs in the 1980s, one that asked Americans to “just say no” to drugs while domestic police forces waged actual war against communities of color, U.S. imperial policy had facilitated the arrival of drugs to U.S. streets. Counterinsurgency abroad helped generate the very drugs that led to counterinsurgency at home.

The War on Drugs as Ouroboros.

Back to Venezuela, Colombia and “Drug War Capitalism”

Just as the U.S.-led post-World War II international drug control regime had the power to classify drugs as licit or illicit commodities, it also facilitated the designation of “friendly” allied nations and insubordinate “narco-states.” The designation primarily hinges not on actual drug production and trafficking, but upon accepting U.S. imperial prerogatives. Hence, the focus now on Venezuela and Maduro and not on Colombia the world’s largest producer of cocaine, or certain Central American nations that serve as key transit nodes along eastern Pacific Ocean smuggling routes, the source of an estimated 85 percent of the cocaine entering the United States. Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández might be nervous, with a brother currently facing trafficking charges in U.S. federal courts. Still, he seems safe at the moment though the story of longtime ally-turned-enemy Manuel Noriega should give him pause.