Everything the black, viscous sludge touched turned to gold: “Americans will be driving cars built by our workers in our modern factories, with bumpers made from our aluminium and gasoline made from our oil,” prophesied Venezuela’s President Carlos Andrés Pérez. Full employment, political stability, and national security could now be bought. The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had promised his people “a Great Civilisation”; in his turn, Andrés promised his people La Gran Venezuela. The curse of King Midas’ touch in that year of glory, 1973, had yet to be discovered.
There was one pessimist, who met with the scholar Terry Lynn as new high-rise buildings sprouted across Caracas in 1979: “It is the devil’s excrement,” the founder of the Organisation of Petrol Exporting Countries (OPEC), Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, told her. “We are drowning in the devil’s excrement.”
Last week, as President Donald Trump authorised the Central Intelligence Agency to take covert action to dislodge President Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian government from office—backing that up with the massing of conventional forces in position for an invasion—the paradoxical story of Venezuela revealed itself in stark relief.
Following the end of the Second World War, when it powered the militaries of the Allies, Venezuela had the fourth-largest economy in the world, measured in GDP per capita. The tidal wave of cash, though, was hollowing out the institutions of its government and civil society. Then, as the United States initiated the so-called war on drugs, using it to bring down Left-wing governments and political forces, it ended up destabilising the entire region.
Trump is about to walk down the same road many presidents took before him—a road covered in toxic slime, which leads to a place of infinite darkness.
The war on drugs
Late in the summer of 1971, President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs, declaring that drug addiction had become a “national emergency” and that drug abuse was “public enemy number one”. The real target, his aide John Ehrlichman would later admit, was anti-Vietnam war protestors and Black Americans: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
Fuelled by drug arrests, scholar Mark J Perry notes, the male incarceration rate, long stable at around 200 per 100,000 population, rose to 400 per 100,000 by 1986, before peaking at 956 per 100,000 in 2008. The mass incarcerations ruined entire communities, institutionalised a culture of disempowerment and despair.
To no one’s surprise, though, the drug war failed to deter consumption at home. Figures show that addiction and overdose deaths continued to grow, despite the massive arrests.
Faced with this impasse, later presidents turned the focus of the war on drugs outward, as Trump is now doing. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan formally acknowledged narcotics as a national security threat. For the past four years, the CIA and America’s armed forces had become increasingly involved in drug interdiction efforts. In 1989, President Bush increased financial aid for military and police in the Andean states and gave authority for wide-ranging special forces missions.
Like Nixon, Reagan, too, had a political agenda. The President’s war on drugs centred on the idea that Left-wing Cuba and Nicaragua were smuggling narcotics into the United States to destabilise its society, and finance Marxist movements in the Western Hemisphere. There was no evidence, though, that this was the case. The truth was that Cuba and Sandinista’s complicity in the drug trade was almost identical to trafficking by Right-wing regimes and insurgent groups, scholar Michelle Getchell records.
For the most part, liberals agreed. The prominent New York Democrat Stephen Solarz argued drugs were an act of war: “If intercontinental ballistic missiles were being fired at American cities from Peru and Bolivia, surely our government would have devised a plan to knock out the enemy.”
Tens of thousands of people were tortured and killed by death squads across central and southern America in the drug war—often with the not-so-discreet consent of Washington. America’s massive funding and support of militaries, moreover, skewed the political structure of nation-states across the region and fostered a culture of impunity.
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The good narcotraffickers
For America’s intelligence services, there was another problem: many of the groups and individuals involved in trafficking narcotics were their assets. Even though the CIA did not finance its clandestine operations by selling narcotics—as Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence would later do—it enabled its anti-communist collaborators to engage in the business. The gangster Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, released from jail in the United States, was sent home to fight the growing power of Left-wing groups in Sicily. In return, his heroin network was allowed to operate without interference.
Luciano’s network, historian Alfred W McCoy wrote, moved morphine base from the Middle East to Europe, transformed it into heroin, and then exported it in substantial quantities to the US—all without ever suffering a major arrest or seizure.
The CIA is also allied with the Corsican mafia to break the hold of communist trade unions on Marseille’s docks, providing funds and weapons that allowed brothers Barthelemy Guerini and Antoine Guerini to build up a smuggling empire. For two decades, McCoy records, the Guerini brothers trafficked heroin to the US, all the while enforcing a ban on its sale inside France itself.
Later, the CIA allowed the Kuomintang, evicted by the People’s Liberation Army from China, to traffic heroin from their bases in northern Thailand and Myanmar, McCoy writes. Figures ranging from the river pirate Bay Vien to South Vietnam Premier Nguyen Cao Ky also used revenues from heroin trafficking to build up their power base, winning immunity for their operations by supporting US’ strategic objectives.
Among the most egregious examples were the support of Frank Castro and other CIA-linked anti-communist Cubans linked to acts of terrorism, notably the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in 1976. Although the US was well aware of Frank Castro’s role in narcotics trafficking and terrorism, he was recruited in a notorious 1986 plot to funnel arms to anti-Nicaragua insurgents.
From 1985, historians Peter Scott and Jonathan Marshall write, evidence began to emerge that the CIA’s anti-communist allies in Nicaragua had been part-funding their operations through the trafficking of cocaine. A United States Congressional investigation later discovered that a network of mercenary pilots and arms suppliers in Central America, linked to CIA covert operations, had built the backbone of the trafficking networks.
The first-hand testimony of former Drug Enforcement Administration officer Michael Levine revealed the CIA often undermined narcotics investigations when it appeared it might damage their larger ideological or political aims.
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The brewing crisis
Even though Venezuela became rich in the 1950s, evidence of an emerging crisis was not hard to find. The high exchange rate of its currency, economist Terry Lynn Karl notes, made other industrial and agricultural exports uncompetitive. The income from oil, thus, had few avenues for productive investment. To make things worse, the enormous revenues incentivised corruption and thus undermined the political system. Even though Venezuela was often held out as a beacon of hope in a violent region, its foundations were far from firm.
Facing hardship as a consequence of an International Monetary Fund bailout in 1989, Venezuelans turned to the populist socialism of President Hugo Chavez. Chavez expanded social services, but ran the oil industry into the ground.
To make things worse, Venezuela’s southern neighbour, Colombia, was seeing a boom in its own version of petroleum—cocaine. Fighting a Left-wing insurgency in the 1980s, Colombia developed a narco-state to secure itself, its political class tightly allying with drug cartels, Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle explain. “The cartels’ monopoly presented opportunities for the enrichment of all Colombian capital, regardless of whether enterprises were directly or indirectly involved in the cocaine trade,” they note.
As it faced growing economic problems during this time, Venezuelan capital offered itself as a transit point for cocaine headed onward to the Caribbean or to Mexico, where other cartels would then transship it to the US. Venezuelan businesses and their political patrons also began to make investments in cocaine shipments, sharing the risks of interdiction with their Colombian and Mexican partners.
Trump’s war could overthrow President Maduro with relative ease—but even if it succeeds in choking one line of narcotics trafficking, it’s unlikely to have a significant impact. For one, Venezuela and its largest cartel, Tren de Aragua, occupy a relatively small role in transshipping narcotics to the US. Secondly, a change of regime is profoundly unlikely to change the economic and political circumstances which drive cocaine-related activity in the Venezuelan Andes. Third, the US is unlikely to be willing to commit the military resources needed to engage in an open-ended military operation across Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico.
An answer to America’s drug problem, as experts have long argued, lies within its borders, in measures to reduce demand and combat addiction. The growing market for synthetic narcotics, moreover, is reducing the significance of Colombian cocaine.
Fighting drugs isn’t Trump’s aim in coercing Venezuela, though: The objective is to assert American hegemony in its neighbourhood, over hostile and unruly regimes. Like drug wars in the past, Trump’s efforts are likely to deepen the chaos in Central America—exposing the US to greater danger.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)