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The Reactionary Backwash: 2025 in Review for Latin America and the Caribbean
Through a combination of elections, judicial maneuvers, and extra-parliamentary pressure, including direct interference by Washington, countries that were formerly left or left leaning have swung sharply to the right.
Dec 31, 2025
2025 saw progressive governments in Latin America and the Caribbean delegitimized and displaced. Right-wing forces have seized on drug-related crises to attack the so-called Pink Tide governments, driving a reactionary backwash and putting new, neoliberal administrations in power. The irony is that the rise in drug use and crime is driven by neoliberalism’s failure to meet social needs. But this has been successfully cloaked.
A further irony is that governments with the strongest records in limiting the social damage caused by illegal narcotics have been the principal targets of US destabilization campaigns.
- Contrary to President Donald Trump’s ludicrous mistruths, reports from the United Nations, the European Union, and even the US Drug Enforcement Agency certify that Venezuela is essentially free of drug production—no cocaine or marijuana production, and certainly no fentanyl.
- With its community-based policing, Nicaragua is one of the safest countries in the whole region. In contrast, neighboring Costa Rica—under aggressively neoliberal administrations—is beset by a “tsunami of cocaine” and crime “amid a backdrop of growing inequality, high unemployment, and an erosion of investment in education,” according to a special report in the Los Angeles Times.
- Cuba, despite over six decades of punishing Yankee blockades, is arguably the most gang-and drug-free country in the hemisphere.
Despite the reactionary backwash, more than half the region’s population is still governed by progressive administrations, of which the largest countries are Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
This could change in 2026, with presidential elections in Colombia and Brazil, where right-wing challenges threaten progressive gains. As the Financial Times observes, “Brazil’s global balancing act is trickier than ever.” Peru, where left-wing President Pedro Castillo was deposed and imprisoned two years ago, may also continue rightwards in elections scheduled for April. Of the current Pink Tide governments, Mexico appears best insulated from an imminent reversal.
The “Donroe” Doctrine
Presiding over these developments is an increasingly assertive US hegemon, citing a “Donroe” corollary to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine as justification for the havoc it is wreaking. Now formalized in the National Security Strategy, it's policy aims to “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence” in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). As Venezuelan Ambassador Samuel Moncada warned the UN Security Council, Venezuela is only the “first target of a larger plan” to divide and conquer the region “piece by piece.”
Through a combination of elections, judicial maneuvers, and extra-parliamentary pressure, including direct interference by Washington, countries that were formerly left or left leaning have swung sharply to the right. This trend was evident in LAC’s four major elections in 2025—in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Honduras.
Across the region, the right now arguably constitutes a significant Washington-aligned force.
There were, however, crumbs of comfort for progressives. In Ecuador, the victorious President Daniel Noboa—whose win is likely attributable to electoral fraud—has since lost key popular referendums. In Bolivia, President Rodrigo Paz faces massive popular resistance as he moves to impose austerity economics. And in Chile, the defeated communist candidate Jeannette Jara did nevertheless secure 42% in December’s runoff vote.
Progressive governments have also shown a degree of unity in opposing US aggression against Venezuela, although Mexico and Brazil have also had to contend with Washington’s direct pressures on them. In Mexico, this included overt military threats.
The rightward shift is starkly illustrated by Chile’s election, where the outgoing Gabriel Boric had been a “flash in the pan” and unfulfilled expectations have “reshaped the political horizon of the left.” In March, when José Antonio Kast takes office, Chile will have a “Nazi” in power—or at least a self-avowed defender of the Pinochet dictatorship and the son of an actual German Nazi. Kast’s first foreign visit after his win was to Argentina’s hard-right Javier Milei, restoring an alliance between the two major Southern Cone countries. Both have large, right-leaning middle classes that sustained dictatorships in the recent past.
“Trump’s policies have intensified the extreme polarization in which the far right has replaced the center right,” notes Steve Ellner, retired professor at Venezuela’s Universidad de Oriente.
Across the region, the right now arguably constitutes a significant Washington-aligned force encompassing not only Chile and Argentina but also Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, and El Salvador. All support Washington’s military aggression against Venezuela and genocide in Palestine. As Vijay Prashad observes, this new right bloc shares the libertarian economic doctrines of the Pinochet-era “Chicago Boys” (Kast’s brother was one of them), dramatized by Milei waving a chainsaw to symbolize his attack on the state.
Crime and the Criminalization of Migration
Both left and right agree that organized crime poses a major threat to LAC’s security. Although statistics show that most of the region is safer than a decade ago, violence has surged in some previously safe countries and reactionary forces have pushed crime as an issue in many others. “Polls show that in at least eight countries, including Chile, security is the dominant voter concern, driving many Latin Americans to demand iron-fisted measures and show a greater tolerance for tough-on-crime policies,” reports the New York Times.
The right’s response is captured by the phrase la mano dura (“the iron fist”), exemplified by the torturous prisons of Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador. Such approaches have proven more attractive to electorates in Chile, Honduras, and Ecuador than the community-based strategies advanced by the left—even though they are proven to work. Rafael Correa successfully reduced crime in Ecuador a decade ago. Xiomara Castro, too, achieved a significant decrease in Honduras, where the homicide rate dropped to the lowest level in 30 years. Left-leaning Mexico most dramatically reduced homicides by 37%.
The right’s alarming yet successful rhetoric links rising crime to drug trafficking and immigration. Trump-style measures have been sold to many Latin Americans yet, as Michelle Ellner of CodePink explains, in Cuba and Venezuela he is blocking migrants from entering the US “while systematically destroying the conditions that allow them to survive at home.”
This framing resonated even in Chile, which remains Latin America’s safest country despite an increase in gang-related crime. Kast successfully blamed the increase on Chile’s half million Venezuelan migrants, whom he threatens to deport, while also proposing to construct a US-style border wall.
The principal driver of the region’s crime is the drug trade. The unseen elephant in the room is the US—the world’s largest market for illegal narcotics as well as the leading money launderer of drug profits and the cartels’ gunrunner of choice. Yet Washington portrays itself as an ally in drug-related crime prevention, claiming to be tackling “narco-terrorism” not only in Venezuela but also in Colombia and Mexico.
This is hypocrisy of the highest order. As Venezuelan writer Francisco Delgado Rodríquez points out: “The only culprits are cartels and bandits with Latin American surnames, and their US counterparts or partners never appear, defying common sense given that the volumes of drugs, weapons, and profits generated necessarily require organized structures of their own on US soil.”
Nicaragua-based analyst Stephen Sefton also notes “the central role of the US government in manipulating the regional structures of organized crime and money laundering.” In reality, “US government propaganda uses the alibi of fighting organized crime and drug trafficking to justify its extensive military presence in the region.”
Trump has elevated this hypocrisy to new heights by releasing a former Honduran president who was serving a 45-year US prison sentence for drug trafficking and links to violent crime. Trump’s administration has gone on to murder, on the high seas, over 100 supposed drug traffickers, offering no proof of their crimes, and has committed acts of piracy against commercial vessels leaving Venezuela. This is in open defiance of the Law of the Sea, which the US explicitly cites in a different context—its actions to maintain “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea.
The surge of drug-related crime, and even more of the rhetoric surrounding it, have coincided with the rise of a powerful Christian right. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, the region has seen rapid growth in conservative Protestant evangelical movements, particularly in Central America. Evangelicals constitute approximately 43% of the electorate in Honduras, 40% in Guatemala and Nicaragua, 37% in El Salvador, 29% in Panama, and 27% in Costa Rice and Brazil. Aligned with the populist right, these movements tend to promote social conservatism and pro-Zionism.
Regional fragmentation
In 2014, the 33 member states of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) declared the region a Zone of Peace, pointedly asserting its sovereignty and its opposition to US military infiltration. In opposition to any such accord, Washington instrumentalizes a “war on drugs,” which Cuba has described as “a pretext to conceal military, paramilitary, and interventionist operations.”
Biden’s expansion of US military penetration continued seamlessly with Trump—only intensified further. This includes the deployment of a full naval armada off Venezuela’s coast; major military buildups in Puerto Rico and Panama; and the recruitment of Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, and Guyana into the offensive against Venezuela.
Despite the counter-hegemonic presence of China, the power of the US is such that it can threaten punitive tariffs on all the constituent countries and impose unilateral coercive measures on roughly 35% of the states in the Western Hemisphere.
Trump began his new term with mass migrant deportations and sweeping tariffs imposed on the region in January, a lurch toward xenophobia and economic parochialism. In response, Honduran President Xiomara Castro, then head of CELAC, called an emergency meeting, which was then canceled for lack of regional unity. The pan-Caribbean CARICOM has seen unity undermined by Trinidad and Tobago’s servile support of Trump’s armada. In response, Black Studies professor Isaac Saney asks, “Will the Caribbean accept fragmentation as its fate, or will this rupture provoke a renewed Pan-Caribbean struggle for a future beyond empire?”
Indeed, other regional organizations such as the progressive-oriented CELAC and even the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) have waned, especially given the latter’s anemic response to US military aggression in the Caribbean. The OAS’ controversy-ridden Summit of the Americas, scheduled for December, has been postponed to 2026.
Among the region’s most progressive forces, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) has faced setbacks, including the loss of Bolivia following the election of a right-wing president. The influential leadership of Ralph Gonsalves was also lost when he was voted out in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
“The level of fragmentation that we are seeing today among Latin American countries,” Foreign Policy observes, is “the most dramatic in the last half-century.”
Great Power Competition
Washington’s push to consolidate hemispheric dominance is linked to efforts to counter China, now South America’s largest trading partner and the second largest for the overall LAC region. China’s regional strategy sharply contrasts with Trump’s. China offers a win-win model of economic cooperation for mutual benefit, while the US proffers a zero-sum model of winners and losers.
China rejects excluding third parties from the region, while the US pledges to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors.” China emphasizes multilateral cooperation and shared Global South priorities, such as reforming international financial institutions, scientific collaboration, and high-tech investment. Beijing criticizes Washington’s “unilateral bullying.”
Most LAC governments try to triangulate between Beijing and Washington, while also developing new trading partnerships with countries such as India. Under US pressure, however, Brazil and Mexico may impose new tariffs on Chinese goods, although trade with China remains crucial for both. Argentina’s President Milei accepted a US bailout, but nonetheless renewed a currency swap line with China.
Washington is pressing its client states to take an anti-China stance, which it does not even take itself, by recognizing Taiwan and cutting formal diplomatic relations with the PRC. New rightist presidents in Bolivia and Honduras have promised to do so.
Furthermore, both the US and China need access to lithium, a vital mineral in advanced technology. Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile possess around 60% of the world’s known reserves. But while China offers complementary investment and industrial partnerships in return for a share of such resources, the US offers military bases and threats.
Despite the counter-hegemonic presence of China, the power of the US is such that it can threaten punitive tariffs on all the constituent countries and impose unilateral coercive measures on roughly 35% of the states in the Western Hemisphere. These sanctions, which are collective punishment, are illegal under international law. This is done with relative impunity and little prospect for relief for the victims. And victims there are of the so-called sanctions—especially those imposed on Venezuela and Cuba, which are under country-level embargoes or sectoral restrictions that constitute blockades because the measures are enforced against third countries.
What Pax Americana Looks Like
Haiti represents the ultimate outcome of neoliberal whittling down of the state: a hollowed-out government, near-total loss of sovereignty to the US and its allies, and a vacuum in which criminal gangs operate with impunity. This is the logical outcome of enforced submission to empire.
The US seeks to impose a similar subjugation on Venezuela precisely because Venezuela represents the hope of an alternative socioeconomic order. Michelle Ellner rightly argues that Venezuela is a test case:
What is being refined now—economic siege without formal war, maritime coercion without declared blockade, starvation without bombs—is a blueprint. Any country that refuses compliance with Washington’s political and economic demands should be paying attention. This will be the map for 21st century regime change.
Even if Venezuela had not a drop of oil to be exploited, it still would be in the crosshairs of imperialism as are Marco Rubio’s other two “enemies of humanity”—resource-poor Cuba and Nicaragua. Havana, made more vulnerable by the blockade on Venezuela, is now teetering on the brink of a disaster not of its own making. Nicaragua, so far treated lightly, faces attacks on its tourism industry and the likelihood of punishing tariffs. Also in line for regime change is Colombia, whose President Gustavo Petro has emerged as a continental conscience through his criticism of Washington’s deportation policies and his outspoken support for Palestine.
Nonetheless, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro faces the hardest test, likely with worse to come. He embodies a nation and more broadly a region bravely resisting imperial domination with remarkable resolve. Anti-imperialists hope and believe that such resistance by Latin America’s progressive governments will sustain them during 2026 and beyond.
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Unpacking the Dangerous Myth of 'Narco-Terrorism'
Framing “Operation Southern Spear” as a battle against “narco-terrorists” is a desperate attempt to commit new violence using old excuses, one which ignores the security state’s history of creating its own enemies.
Dec 04, 2025
Between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, the US government has a long history of waging bloody and unsuccessful wars against broad concepts that can not be meaningfully defeated. What makes the government’s latest “armed conflict” unique is not just its combination of these two failures, but also that its target—“narco-terrorism”—is largely a myth.
Under the title “Operation Southern Spear,” the Trump administration has launched a campaign intended to target the drug cartels that it designated as terrorist organizations earlier this year. So far, this has involved at least 21 airstrikes, killing upwards of 83 people on small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific; a military buildup involving 15,000 troops; and covert operations by the CIA in Venezuela. Though President Donald Trump lacks the legal authority for these activities, the Senate’s latest attempt to restrain military action failed in a narrow vote of 49-51.
Key to the White House’s case is the idea of “narco-terrorism,” a label they have applied to both the airstrike victims and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The US claims that Maduro is closely connected to the Tren de Aragua cartel (despite a National Intelligence Council analysis suggesting otherwise) and that he is the leader of the supposed “Cartel of the Suns” (which, despite its terrorist designation, does not exist as an organization). The specter of “narco-terrorism” has also been invoked to bash the progressive governments of Colombia and Honduras.
To say that “narco-terrorism” is a myth is not to deny the obvious violence associated with the black market drug trade, but to acknowledge that the term does more to confuse than to clarify. The idea does not accurately explain the complex dynamics of the global drug trade; instead, it radically oversimplifies the problem. By portraying military intervention as a response to drug trafficking, the “narco-terrorism” myth allows politicians to ignore all of the ways in which military intervention is a cause of drug trafficking.
Strange Origins
“Narco-terrorism” has its origins in the early 1980s, when US Ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tambs began referring to leftist rebel groups like FARC and ELN as “narco-guerillas.” Some of his specific claims were fabricated: After Colombian police completed what was then the largest drug bust in history, Tambs falsely claimed that communist rebels were involved in the operation, prompting another State Department official to admit that “Tambs got ahead of the evidence.” Regardless, the idea quickly gained acceptance as a justification for military intervention in Latin America, suggesting that the only way to reduce drug abuse at home was to wage war against foreign suppliers. By 1985, the Reagan administration was alleging an “emerging alliance between drug smugglers and arms dealers in support of terrorists and guerrillas.”
Ironically, Tambs himself later played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal, helping to traffic drugs and guns for the violent anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. The full scope of the CIA’s involvement in bringing the Contra’s drugs into the US remains unclear, but at the very least it is obvious that officials like Tambs helped support the group. Thus, the idea of “narco-terrorism” was created by someone who participated in it.
The “narco-terrorism” label has always been controversial. Drug traffickers are motivated solely by profit, while “terrorists” and “guerillas” are motivated by goals like ideology and territory. Though some armed groups in Latin America engaged directly in the drug trade, many others either had no involvement or were involved only by “taxing” traffickers for revenue. “Narco-terrorism” misrepresents this extortion racket between two opposed groups as an alliance of like-minded organizations. By “combining two threats that have traditionally been treated separately,” critics argue that the term can “complicate rather than facilitate discussions on the two concepts…”
Many of the largest foreign interventions in US history created new pathways for drugs to reach the country while also generating new demand among traumatized veterans.
Far from being allies, rebels and drug traffickers often fought one another. Most rebels were communist outsiders, while many traffickers hoped to build ties with Colombia’s elite. The rebels sometimes imposed wage and price controls in coca-growing communities in hopes of building popular support, rules which ate into the traffickers’ profits. These tensions eventually escalated into violent conflict, and it was later revealed that dozens of officers from the US-backed Colombian military had collaborated with the traffickers in a campaign to crush the rebels. The rebels and traffickers were “staunchly opposed social forces” in the words of journalist Collet Merrill, meaning that “narco-guerilla” was “less an analytical model than a political slogan.”
The Trump administration’s definition of “narco-terrorism” seems even less useful than its original meaning. Speaking to the United Nations, a US delegate commented on the recent terrorist designations of cartels to say: “When you flood American streets with drugs, you are terrorizing America...” Similarly, the White House claims that drug imports “constitute an armed attack” all by themselves. In other words, traffickers no longer need to have any “terrorist” connections to be considered “narco-terrorists,” because all drug trafficking is now considered “terrorism.”
The language used in our debates about drug trafficking is poisoned by this type of imprecision. Even the concept of a “cartel” is suspect, as it often portrays loose networks of organized criminals cooperating with state authorities as well-coordinated paramilitaries that lack government connections. This sort of terminology survives because of its usefulness to government officials in search of ready-made explanations, officials who did not want to draw attention to their own role in the global drug trade.
Stop Hitting Yourself
Many of the largest foreign interventions in US history created new pathways for drugs to reach the country while also generating new demand among traumatized veterans, leading some scholars to conclude that “every major foreign war of the past century produced a domestic drug crisis.” At times, the US government has even purposefully supported drug traffickers to advance its short-term objectives.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA allegedly facilitated drug trafficking in Southeast Asia to help fund anti-communist organizations, helping to turn the region into the source of the majority of the world’s heroin by the early 1970s. Much of this heroin made its way to US soldiers stationed overseas and, through the trafficking efforts of troops like Army Master Sergeant Ike Atkinson, to the United States itself. The subsequent rise in drug addiction helped inspire the original “War on Drugs,” a war which the US fought on both sides of.
The pressures of the Drug War helped bring Mexican “cartels” into existence. One of the first such organizations—the “Guadalajara Cartel”—emerged as an organized effort to survive the joint US-Mexican attempts at destroying the then-disorganized drug trade. Later efforts to support foreign security forces backfired when some of the Mexican soldiers who received special forces training in the US defected to form their own cartel: “Los Zetas,” which carried out a wave of extreme violence in Mexico in the 2000s-2010s.
With our focus exclusively on military efforts to disrupt the supply of drugs, little time is spent on the real solution: reducing demand.
Similarly to Vietnam, the War in Afghanistan created new channels for heroin trafficking. After the Taliban lost control of the country, a US government report noted that Afghanistan saw “increased poppy cultivation and drug production as farmers and traffickers took advantage of the power vacuum…” The growing opium trade corrupted the highest levels of US-backed leadership in Afghanistan. As a result, US-occupied Afghanistan was “producing nine times more heroin than the rest of the world combined,” according to journalist Seth Harp.
Sensing a profitable opportunity to connect this supply of heroin with the demand at home, a group of current and former US troops began smuggling the opium into the world’s largest military base, Fort Bragg. These smugglers then moved the drugs around the country by plugging into the distribution network of the Los Zetas cartel (whose founders had coincidentally received training at Fort Bragg decades earlier). US military interventions thus produced all of the necessary ingredients to inflame the opioid crisis: a flood of new heroin production abroad, flights to smuggle it into the US, and a cartel with the skills to distribute it.
These are just a few of the moments throughout history when the US government facilitated drug trafficking all over the world. More recently, the US provided extensive support to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández despite widespread allegations that he was connected to cocaine trafficking. Only after he left office did the US government bother to indict him for “protect[ing] some of the largest drug traffickers in the world,” helping to bring more than 400 tons of cocaine into the country. In an absurd act of hypocrisy, President Trump recently pardoned Hernández on the grounds that the convicted drug trafficker was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”
Believe it or not, this was not even the first time that something like this had happened. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration tolerated the obvious drug trafficking of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega because of his cooperation with their geopolitical priorities. As with Hernández, the government even provided cover for Noriega by claiming that he helped fight against drug trafficking. But when US officials finally lost patience with him near the end of the decade, a Panamanian official predicted that “suppressing drug trafficking might be the Reagan administration’s excuse for an invasion.”
Though George H.W. Bush claimed that the 1989 invasion of Panama was intended in part “to combat drug trafficking,” others were skeptical. The Academy Award-winning documentary The Panama Deception argued that the true purpose of the invasion was to reinforce US dominance over the Panama Canal (a topic which is now an obsession of President Trump’s). Though this regime change operation against a former ally serves as a classic example of how military interventionism creates its own villains, it is now often remembered as a success, even earning praise from Republicans arguing in favor of Trump’s airstrikes. Panamanian diplomat Carlos Ruiz-Hernández recently criticized this comparison as a “fundamentally flawed” analogy which “persists because it’s emotionally satisfying for US hawks.”
Get Real
By misunderstanding and overemphasizing a select few of the groups involved in the drug trade, the “narco-terrorism” myth redirects our attention away from more significant causes of drug trafficking. First, the focus on supply distracts us from the far more important question of demand—so long as drug addiction remains a major problem in this country, the drugs will always find a way in. Additionally, the exclusive focus on non-state actors distracts us from the role that our own government plays in facilitating the global drug trade.
Framing “Operation Southern Spear” as a battle against “narco-terrorists” is a desperate attempt to commit new violence using old excuses, one which ignores the security state’s history of creating its own enemies. In truth, this is a domestic problem as much as a foreign one. Of those convicted of drug trafficking in the US, 80% are citizens. MS-13, now designated as a foreign terrorist organization, was founded in Los Angeles and spread abroad by the US government’s deportation practices. More than two-thirds of the Mexican cartels’ guns come from the US, and US military weaponry regularly shows up in the hands of cartel members.
With our focus exclusively on military efforts to disrupt the supply of drugs, little time is spent on the real solution: reducing demand. In fact, the Trump administration has undermined real public health solutions by repeatedly firing employees at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, discouraging lifesaving harm reduction efforts, and proposing massive cuts to drug abuse services. No amount of immoral and illegal airstrikes will ever save even a fraction of the lives lost by these decisions.
Perhaps the greatest flaw of “narco-terrorism” is that it encourages us to believe that complex human problems have simple military solutions. Sociologist C. Wright Mills once astutely criticized US elites for accepting a “military definition of reality,” a distorted perspective which prevents them from imagining policy solutions that do not involve military intervention. So long as the government insists upon seeing non-military problems through a military lens, they will never be solved.
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Trump's Threat to Invade Venezuela Is Indeed About Drugs–Oil, That Is
This is not about stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, it is about actually increasing the flow of the dangerous drug some pushers want to keep us all hooked on.
Nov 28, 2025
President Donald Trump’s saber-rattling about potential military action in Venezuela is indeed about drugs, but not cocaine. It is about a far more dangerous drug that former President George W. Bush admitted (in his 2006 State of the Union address) the US is addicted to—oil.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world—300 billion barrels—even larger than reserves in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Trump and his oil industry friends may imagine that by deposing President Nicolas Maduro and installing a friendly government there, the US would have unlimited access to this huge oil reserve, which is five times larger than the proven reserves in the US. Never mind the fact that for any hope of future climate stability, most of this oil needs to stay right where it is, in the ground.
We've seen this tragic play before. The Bush administration justified its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq with the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which, as it turned out, it didn't. And as US Central Command commander General John Abizaid admitted about the Iraq war at the time: “Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.” The invasion killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, and destabilized the broader Middle East region for years.
And now here we go again. A similar pretext—this time “drug interdiction”—is being used to justify a potential US invasion and regime change in Venezuela. But this is not about stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, it is about actually increasing the flow of the dangerous drug some pushers want to keep us all hooked on—oil. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro recently stated on the US-Venezuela threat: “Oil is at the heart of the matter.”
Instead of admitting their addiction, the damage it causes, and committing to recovery, hard core junkies are always desperate for more supply. It seems Mr. Trump and his oil industry friends are the most dangerous narco-traffickers we need to worry about.
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