For Your Information
Major U.S. Role in International Drug Trafficking
On February 1, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order entitled, "Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our Northern Border," that targets Canada with various tariffs unless it complies with U.S. demands. The order states that Trump finds "the sustained influx of illicit opioids and other drugs has profound consequences on our Nation, endangering lives and putting a severe strain on our health care system, public services, and communities.
"This challenge threatens the fabric of our society. Gang members, smugglers, human traffickers, and illicit drugs of all kinds have poured across our borders and into our communities. Canada has played a central role in these challenges, including by failing to devote sufficient attention and resources or meaningfully coordinate with United States law enforcement partners to effectively stem the tide of illicit drugs." [...].[1]
Trump's assertion about Canada as a significant source of illicit drugs is not substantiated. "There is limited to no evidence or data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. or Canada to support the claim that Canadian produced fentanyl is an increasing threat to the U.S.," Marie-Eve Breton, a spokeswoman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, told the New York Times on February 6. The Times writes that in 2024, "less than one per cent of the fentanyl arriving in the United States came from Canada," noting that last year, "about 19 kilograms of fentanyl was intercepted at the Canada-U.S. border."
Despite these facts, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in a February 11 press release "the appointment of Kevin Brosseau as Canada's new Fentanyl Czar, effective immediately." The use of "czars" is typical of U.S. political terminology. News media reported that Brosseau's official title is "Commissioner of Canada's Fight Against Fentanyl," which was not mentioned in Trudeau's press release.
According to Trudeau's press release, "As Fentanyl Czar, Mr. Brosseau will work closely with U.S. counterparts and law enforcement agencies to accelerate Canada's ongoing work to detect, disrupt, and dismantle the fentanyl trade. Mr. Brosseau brings extensive law enforcement experience, having served in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for over 20 years, including as Deputy Commissioner and top cop in Manitoba. Recently, as Deputy National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister, Mr. Brosseau navigated Canada's most sensitive security challenges. His demonstrated expertise tackling drug trafficking, organized crime networks, and other national security threats will bring tremendous value to this position."
The press release continues, "Canada is taking significant action to stop the production and trafficking of illegal fentanyl. We are adding new and expanded detection capacity at border entries to find illegal drugs and guns and shorten cargo container processing time. We are building a Canadian Drug Analysis Centre to analyze illegal drug samples and identify where and how these drugs are manufactured. We are deploying new chemical detection tools at high-risk ports of entry, new canine teams to intercept illegal drugs, and a new Precursor Chemical Risk Management Unit to better track precursor chemicals and distribution channels....
"While less than one per cent of the fentanyl intercepted at the U.S. border comes from Canada, any amount of fentanyl is too much. With Canada's $1.3 billion border plan, we are reinforcing our strong border and stopping the fentanyl trade -- with new Black Hawk helicopters, drones, mobile surveillance towers, and nearly 10,000 frontline personnel working on protecting the border. As an important legal tool to enforce criminal investigations in Canada, we will also be listing organized crime cartels as terrorist entities under the Criminal Code. This listing will strengthen the RCMP's ability to prevent and disrupt cartel activities in our country.
"Last week, the Prime Minister signed a new intelligence directive, backed by $200 million in investment, that will give our security agencies more capacity to gather intelligence on transnational organized crime and share with our American partners and law enforcement across the continent. This complements joint law enforcement co-ordination efforts, including through the Canada-U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl, and money laundering."
Note
1. The order continues:
"Drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are the world's leading producers of fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and other illicit drugs, and they cultivate, process, and distribute massive quantities of narcotics that fuel addiction and violence in communities across the United States. These DTOs often collaborate with transnational cartels to smuggle illicit drugs into the United States, utilizing clandestine airstrips, maritime routes, and overland corridors.
"The challenges at our southern border are foremost in the public consciousness, but our northern border is not exempt from these issues. Criminal networks are implicated in human trafficking and smuggling operations, enabling unvetted illegal migration across our northern border. There is also a growing presence of Mexican cartels operating fentanyl and nitazene synthesis labs in Canada. The flow of illicit drugs like fentanyl to the United States through both illicit distribution networks and international mail [...] has created a public health crisis in the United States. [...] Canada's Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre recently published a study on the laundering of proceeds of illicit synthetic opioids, which recognized Canada's heightened domestic production of fentanyl, largely from British Columbia, and its growing footprint within international narcotics distribution. [... T]his failure to act on the part of Canada constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in substantial part outside the United States, to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
Targeting Mexico
The U.S. has also targeted Mexico not only on a basis similar to the February 1 executive order directed against Canada, but also through a January 20 executive order entitled, "Designating Cartels And Other Organizations As Foreign Terrorist Organizations And Specially Designated Global Terrorists." This order declares drug cartels in Mexico "foreign terrorist organizations," and along with pending legislation, would authorize the use of U.S. military force in Mexico.
On February 3, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum wrote on social media, "We categorically reject the slander made by the White House against the Mexican government about alliances with criminal organizations, as well as any attempt to intervene in our territory. If there is such an alliance anywhere, it is in the U.S. gun shops that sell high-powered weapons to these criminal groups."
Nonetheless, for its part, Mexico responded to the threat of U.S. tariffs by announcing on February 3 it would deploy 10,000 of its National Guard to its border with the U.S. to stop the trafficking of drugs into the U.S. The U.S. for its part is to stop the illegal trafficking of arms into Mexico, an agreement U.S. President did not even acknowledge took place.
The Mexican President has repeatedly called on the U.S. to put its own house in order, and deal with the drug crisis within the U.S. that is leading to the demand for illicit drugs. She has also opposed the U.S. war on migrants who Trump is accusing of drug trafficking and all kinds of unfounded crimes.
In remarks made on February 14, Sheinbaum said, "Mexico is not for sale, our homeland is not for sale, sovereignty is not negotiated, we Mexicans are here to defend our homeland." She conveyed to Mexican migrants living in the U.S., who contribute 10 per cent to the U.S. GDP, that the country considers them heroes, and those requiring legal advice will receive support from Mexico's consulates, and that if they decide to return, they will be welcomed home with open arms.
Speaking on February 13, Sheinbaum pointed out how the U.S. harbours drug cartels. She said, "There is also organized crime in the United States and there are American people who come to Mexico with these illegal activities. Otherwise who would distribute fentanyl in the cities of the United States?"
Sheinbaum was responding to a reporter from the Animal Político news outlet. The news outlet published a report earlier in the week on an investigation that found that since Mexico's former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018, more than 2,600 U.S. citizens have been arrested in Mexico for offences related to organized crime, including smuggling drugs and firearms.
"The issue isn't just that drugs go from Mexico to the United
States," Sheinbaum said. She said that Mexico is willing to work with
the U.S. government on security issues in Mexico, but that the U.S.
government also has to "do its work" to "avoid the trafficking of drugs
in their country." "In
the United States, they also have to act," Sheinbaum said.
Examples of U.S. Role in Drug Trafficking Around the World
For decades the U.S. has carried out drug trafficking to fund its Cold War anti-communist "counterinsurgency" activities around the world. Its "war on drugs" is used to militarize other countries and authorize U.S. military intervention in the name of stopping drug trafficking that it is itself responsible for.
Even as the United States President accuses Canada, Mexico and whoever it is seeking to intimidate of drug trafficking and it uses the fight against drugs as a pretext to force various countries to submit to its commands, the world knows it is the U.S. which has long been involved in the trafficking of illicit drugs, through its Central Intelligence Agency in particular, as well as its Drug Enforcement Administration. This includes arming drug cartels to the hilt and utilizing the profits from drug trafficking to fund other illegal activities, while using the "war on drugs" as the pretext to carry out military interventions in other countries.
This criminal activity of the U.S. state has been an especially prominent part of the U.S. modus operandi in pursuit of its imperialist aims since it launched the Cold War after World War Two. It has always been integral to U.S. imperialist counter-insurgency to defeat national liberation struggles throughout the world, especially in Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Since the end of the bipolar division of the world when the former Soviet Union collapsed in the 1989-91 period, the U.S. has used this modus operandi to buy off drug lords and war lords not only in Afghanistan and Africa but to organize neo-Nazi mercenary forces in Europe itself such as in Yugoslavia, and subsequently linked to its counter-revolutionary operations in Asia and north Africa.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the U.S. is primarily responsible for the suffering and immiseration of all who have become addicted to drugs, the lives lost to overdoses, and the effect on families and communities. The U.S. program of mass incarceration, especially the disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans, is itself part of its "war on drugs."
The claims by the current Trump administration that target Canada and Mexico as being responsible for drugs entering the United States are as shameless as shameless gets since without the support of U.S. police agencies at all levels and the U.S. authority itself, the drug trade would have been eliminated a long time ago. Canada's refusal to provide the well-known information about the production and trafficking of drugs is equally shameless. While Canadian police forces make statements about the small amount of fentanyl which enters the U.S. from Canada, all the while spending millions on police forces at the border, this falls far short of providing the information about the role of the U.S. in the production and trafficking of drugs to support criminal counter-insurgency operations all over the world.
1940s: CIA's Drug-Trafficking in Indochina
David Truong, in an article published in 1987 by CovertAction, entitled "Running Drugs and Secret War," wrote about the CIA's operations in Thailand aimed at undermining the People's Republic of China. The article was published in the context of inquiries into the Iran-Contra scandal, a U.S. arms-trafficking operation it used to fund anti-communist reactionary paramilitary forces in Nicaragua to overthrow the Sandinistas.
Truong explains that during the post-World War II period, when France was setting up clandestine operations to re-establish its rule in Indochina (with U.S. and British assistance), the U.S. had started up similar operations in Burma and Thailand to undermine the nascent People's Republic of China.
Truong wrote:
"U.S. intelligence activities in Thailand were part of a broad covert program, sanctioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Truman White House, against the newly established Chinese Communist government. Since 1948, the Office for Policy Coordination (OPC) under the late Frank Wisner, driven by Cold War fever, had initiated a number of covert operations in Europe and laid the ground for more anti-communist operations in Asia.
"Civil Air Transport (CAT), American intelligence's first proprietary airline in the Far East, flew clandestine missions and drops for the OPC and later for the CIA throughout Indochina, Thailand, Burma and southern and eastern China. In early February 1951, the CIA initiated Operation PAPER, the first major paramilitary operation in that part of Southeast Asia. It involved the invasion of Yunnan province, southern China, by some 4,000 Kuomintang [KMT] troops based in Mong Hsat, Burma."
KMT General Li Mi's troops met defeat and were driven back to Burma. With continued CIA assistance, the KMT again tried twice to invade Yunnan province before retrenching itself in the territory of the Shan States in Burma.
Truong continues:
"In the decades that followed, Thailand became the launching pad for the multitude of U.S. covert operations against China. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, as the U.S. increased its role in Laos and South Vietnam, the Agency developed its Thai-based covert, paramilitary programs against Indochina and the rest of Southeast Asia. This theatre of clandestine operations was also a major opium growing region, stretching from southern Yunnan to neighbouring Burma's Shan states, northern Thailand, and northern Laos. It was commonly known as the 'Golden Triangle' to opium and heroin traffickers, and was the source of 70 per cent of the world's opium production in the early 1970s. Today, the Golden Triangle still produces at least 90 tons per year of heroin destined for the American market.
"The CIA-backed KMT troops settled in Burma after World War II and controlled the opium traffic for buyers in northern Thailand and Bangkok. From 1948 on, American intelligence activities in the Golden Triangle were intertwined with the opium trade. Infiltration routes for CIA commando teams into southern China were also used as drug smuggling routes for traffickers in Burma and Thailand. Local Shan tribesmen provided the guides to both the Agency's teams and opium caravans near the Burma-Chinese border. And the Agency had maintained five secret training camps and two key listening posts in the Shan states protected by its drug smuggling KMT troops and local tribesmen.
"Thailand was of course a major opium marketplace at the tip of the Golden Triangle. The military cliques of strongmen which ruled the country, beginning with General Phao Siyanon in 1947, also controlled the Thai National Police Department (TNPD) which was the largest opium traffic syndicate in the country. These 'strongmen' grew immensely wealthy from their drug monopoly and from ties to the CIA. Much of this drug smuggling network remains very active today, and has deep roots in Thailand's military and paramilitary circles.
[...]
"The historical roots of today's secret supply network for the contras in Central America lie with the CIA's paramilitary programs with the KMT and the BPP in Southeast Asia. These covert operations provided the Agency with considerable experience in the management of secret wars and drug running."
Truong goes on to write that during the period between 1966 and 1969, "several key players in the current weapons supply network to the contras developed their skills in drug running and secret war management."
1970s: Role of CIA in Supporting Mexican Drug Cartels
An essay by Jonathan Marshall, published in 1991 in the book Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, shows the role of the CIA in supporting corruption, drug cartels, and criminal activity in Mexico, all of it linked to U.S. intervention in Central America. Marshall explained that in June 1975, after the arrest of Alberto Sicilia-Falcon, a Cuban exile operating out of Tijuana, "the leader of the world's largest cocaine and marijuana trafficking organization," the heavy involvement of the U.S. and its agencies in the illicit drug trade in Mexico, directly linked to its anti-communist campaigns in Latin America and the Caribbean began to come to light. Marshall wrote:
"Sicilia himself claimed that powerful political and intelligence allies helped account for his meteoric rise within the criminal world. He told police he was a CIA protégé, trained at Fort Jackson as a partisan in the secret war against Castro's Cuba. In return for helping the CIA move weapons to certain groups in Central America, he asserted, the Agency facilitated his movement of heroin and other drugs."
Those Sicilia worked closely with, either in his criminal organization or in the Mexican government were also assets of the CIA, for example, the head of the powerful Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), Miguel Nazar Haro, who Marshall notes was a sometime asset of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and "indisputably the CIA's 'most important source in Mexico and Central America,' by the agency's own admission."
Under the tenure of Nazar Haro at DFS -- 1977 to 1982 -- the U.S. carried out a massive coverup of its so-called drug enforcement. Marshall states that U.S. government officials "knew the Mexican enforcement effort was a sham, but chose to disguise that fact from the American people until the brazen murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in February 1985. Only then did DEA Administrator Francis Mullen, Jr., startle the public with his long overdue revelation that 'Mexico hasn't arrested a major drug trafficker in eight years.'"
The Mexican government's enforcement campaign, known as Operation Condor began in 1975. "It succeeded in filling the jails with hapless peasants accused of growing marijuana on their tiny plots -- or suspected of left-wing organizing in the countryside -- but not in arresting a single major drug kingpin," Marshall writes. He goes on to explains that the two Mexican presidents who oversaw the operation were known for corruption, family links to the drug trade, and having no qualms about enriching themselves from criminal activities.
Sicilia used bribes to direct Operation Condor's activities against his drug cartel competitors in Sinaloa, but after his arrest in 1975, Condor began working to his competitors' advantage. The main Sinaloa traffickers simply moved to Guadalajara and strengthened their grip.
Mexico's DFS meanwhile provided invaluable protection to the chiefs of the Guadalajara cartel. "But the DFS did much more than simply protect the most notorious traffickers. It actually brought them together as a cartel, centralized and rationalized their operation, snuffed out competitors and through its connections with the CIA provided the international protection needed to ensure their success."
Marshall explains that Mexico's DFS provided support to Cuban exiles in Mexico to carry out drug trafficking. These same reactionaries carried out terrorist attacks against Cuba and its friends and supporters, under the auspices of the CIA. He writes:
"[T]he Zambada family of Mexican-based Cuban exiles, supplied drugs in the late 1970s to the Cuban Nationalist Movement, a constituent of CORU whose members were responsible for the 1976 assassination in Washington, DC, of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier. (José Dionisio Suarez, recently arrested for allegedly triggering the bomb that killed Letelier, reportedly spent time in Guatemala training the Nicaraguan Contras under Argentine auspices and then served the Colombian drug mafia as a smuggler and enforcer.)"
CORU was formed in 1976 with the backing of the CIA that was then under the directorship of George H.W. Bush. It was founded by a group that included CIA-backed terrorists Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles. Besides the assassinations of Letelier and others, CORU also carried out the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in Barbados on October 4, 1976 that killed 73 people.
1980s: Iran-Contra Scandal
The National Security Archive at George Washington University writes that in November 1986, "President Ronald Reagan announced to the nation -- after weeks of denials -- that members of his White House staff had engaged in a web of covert intrigue linking illicit U.S. support for a guerrilla war in Central America with an illegal and politically explosive arms-for-hostages bargain with the Islamic Republic of Iran." Specifically, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan knowingly violated the U.S.'s own arms embargo to sell weapons to Iran, the proceeds of which were then used to fund counterrevolutionary forces in Nicaragua. Also implicated was then Vice President George H.W. Bush, a former director of the CIA (1976-1977), who would have overseen other operations in which the U.S. carried out criminal activity to generate funds for foreign intervention.
The National Security Archive goes on to state:
"Eventually, a joint congressional select committee was convened and an independent counsel appointed by the courts, both of which uncovered volumes of invaluable documentary evidence of what had transpired, including:
"- After being explicitly prohibited from aiding the Contras with military or intelligence support, the president and his top advisers had agreed to solicit financial and other material backing from a slew of foreign governments, from Saudi Arabia, to China, to the Sultanate of Brunei, to apartheid South Africa. No effort was ever intended to notify Congress, which had constitutional authority over funding for those activities.
"- When the approaches to foreign governments seemed not to be enough, National Security Council staffer Oliver North, the main foot soldier of the affair, with authorization from at least one of his superiors, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, diverted revenues from the illicit Iran missile sales to the Contras -- the activity that garnered the most attention in the scandal.
"- Reagan had authorized direct talks with Iran to bargain for American hostages being held by Hezbollah in Lebanon, in direct contradiction of his own black-letter policy, and disregarding statutory requirements to justify his decision in writing and notify Congress.
"- When Reagan's senior aides told him the Iran deals were illegal, he told them flatly that he was willing to face 'charges of illegality.'
"- After the covert Contra support operation was exposed with the shooting down of a U.S.-backed supply plane (in October 1986), State Department and CIA officials testified falsely to Congress about U.S. ignorance of the program. Their testimony eventually produced guilty pleas to criminal charges of misleading Congress.
"- After the Iran deals were leaked to a Lebanese news magazine, the White House recognized it would be much harder to hide their role in this instance. The president, vice president and other top aides rallied around to protect the president and the covert policy by explicitly promoting a cover story that departed in significant ways from the truth.
"- Vice President George H. W. Bush was substantially aware of, and even participated in aspects of, the illicit operations even though he denied it vociferously at the time. Confirmation eventually came in the form of dictated notes which he had refused for years to turn over to the independent counsel, as well as in the form of other documents about proscribed quid pro quo deals with the Honduran government."
1980s: CIA and Drug Enforcement Asministration's Promotion of
Drug-Trafficking
in Afghanistan
The CIA played a key role in Afghanistan to defeat the erstwhile Soviet Union's occupation of that country. The CIA used its counterrevolutionary Contras to establish mujaheddin for this purpose, along with war lords, disrupting the traditional council (jirga) that played a key role in keeping peace and resolving disagreements. The CIA eventually turned the mujaheddin into Al-Qaeda.
William Vornberger, in an article entitled "Afghan Rebels and Drugs," published in CovertAction in 1987, pointed out:
"The DEA [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration] event admits the CIA-backed contras are responsible for the heroin traffic out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. After David Melocik, the DEA's Congressional Liason, returned from a fact-finding trip to Southeast Asia he announced at a press conference that 'You can say the rebels make their money off the sale of opium. There's no doubt about it ... the rebels keep their cause going through the sale of opium.'
[...]
"Two top officials on the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse wrote, with surprising candor, in the New York Times: 'We worry about the growing of opium poppies in Afghanistan and Pakistan by rebel tribesmen who apparently are the chief adversaries of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Are we erring in befriending these tribes as we did in Laos when Air America helped transport crude opium from certain tribal areas?'"
Alfred McCoy is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, Colombia, published in 2003, which revised an earlier work published in 1972. His research revealed that the CIA had fostered heroin production in Afghanistan for decades to finance operations aimed at containing the spread of communism, and later to finance operations aimed at containing the spread of the Islamic state. McCoy alleges that the CIA protects local warlords and incentivizes them to become drug lords.
In his book, McCoy argues that the CIA follows a similar pattern in all their drug involvement. He quotes General Tuan Shi-wen, commander of the Kuomintang Fifth Army (based in the Golden Triangle), as follows: "We have to continue to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium."
McCoy has also written that during the 1980s "to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA, working through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, backed Afghan warlords who used the Agency's arms, logistics, and protection to become major drug lords."
McCoy wrote of the DEA and CIA's role in Afghanistan: "Although the drug pandemic of the 1980s had complex causes, the growth in global heroin supply could be traced, in large part, to two key aspects of U.S. policy -- the failure of DEA prohibition in the war on drugs and CIA protection for drug lord allies in its covert wars. By attacking heroin trafficking in separate sectors of Asia's extended opium zone in isolation, the DEA had simply diverted heroin exports from America to Europe and shifted opium production from the Middle East to Southeast Asia and back again -- raising both global consumption and production with each turn. Moreover, the rising opium harvests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, America's major suppliers, were unintended 'fallout' from the CIA's covert Afghan war. Just as earlier covert wars had increased Burma's opium crop in the 1950s, so the agency's aid to mujaheddin guerrillas now expanded opium production in Afghanistan and linked Pakistan's nearby heroin laboratories to the world market. After a decade as the sites of major CIA covert operations, Burma and Afghanistan were, in 1989, the world's first and second largest heroin suppliers. [...]
"During the 1980s, the CIA's covert war in Afghanistan transformed Central Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market. [...] In its decade of covert warfare against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA's operations provided the political protection and logistics linkages that joined Afghanistan's poppy fields to heroin markets in Europe and America."
McCoy points out that the CIA sought to conduct its covert war with the Soviet Union with local warlords and commanders, "making its success contingent on their power." These local warlords then used the CIA's clandestine operation to become drug lords. McCoy writes:
"Only two years after the start of the Afghan war, the CIA's covert supply apparatus that shipped arms to the mujaheddin had been inverted to serve a massive drug operation that moved opium from Afghanistan, through Pakistan's heroin laboratories, and into international markets. As heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan border to service Western markets in 1979-1980, Pakistan's opium production grew nearly tenfold to 800 tons. Within a year, Pakistani heroin supplied 60 per cent of America's illicit demand and an even greater share of Europe's."
[...]
1990s: U.S. War on Drugs in Colombia
One of the major aims of the U.S. in Colombia was to defeat the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who were waging a guerilla war on the basis of empowering the Colombian people and throwing out those impoverishing the country and exploiting the people in the service of private and foreign interests. It did so under the guise of drug enforcement while actually increasing illegal drug production and drug trafficking in Colombia and the region, while falsely accusing the FARC of carrying out the crimes it was itself committing.
Alfred McCoy in his 2003 book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, Colombia, explains:
"In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon declared a 'war on drugs' against the Asian heroin traffic, launching a major expansion in U.S. international enforcement. A decade later, President Ronald Reagan redirected the U.S. drug war toward domestic enforcement and coca eradication in the Andes, a policy shift followed by all his successors. [...] In 1996, President William Clinton further expanded the drug war with his $1.3 billion 'Plan Colombia' -- an emphasis on enforcement exaggerated by his successor George W. Bush, who promised, in February 2002, to cut drug abuse by 25 per cent through aggressive law enforcement."
The fact is that curbing drugs was never the genuine aim of the War on Drugs which was to divert attention from the reasons for the insurgency of the guerilla forces, blame them for all the crimes committed by the CIA and the counter-insurgency paramilitary forces and suppress them in the name of stopping the production and trafficking of illegal drugs.
McCoy writes:
"Despite four U.S. drug wars fought at a cost of nearly $150 billion, world illicit opium supply grew fivefold from 1,200 tons in 1971 to 6,100 tons in 1999. Similarly, during 15 years of U.S. bilateral eradication in the Andes, coca leaf production doubled to 600,000 tons in 1999. After holding steady at 100 prisoners per 100,000 population for over half a century, the U.S. incarceration rate, driven by mandatory drug sentencing, soared from 138 in 1980 to 702 in 2002 -- creating, in effect, a doomsday machine that continues to fill prisons without limit or logic. At the start of the 21st century, the United States was fighting a global drug war by creating the world's largest prison population and defoliating mountain farms in Asia and the Andes."
McCoy explains further on:
"Ignoring the lessons from Nixon's drug war in Asia, the Reagan White House pursued a parallel policy in Latin America with predictably dismal results. [...] In 1982, Reagan declared a war on drugs in Latin America and, two years later, reinforced this unilateral action when the Andean nations released the Quito Declaration against narcotics in August 1984. Building upon this diplomatic momentum, Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive No. 221 in April 1986, declaring drug trafficking a threat to 'U.S. national security,' thus legitimizing the use of military forces to fight the drug war beyond U.S. borders. During the next decade, this directive subordinated all U.S. foreign policy goals in Latin America to the 'all-encompassing focus' of stopping the drug flow.
"Under Reagan's renewed drug war, funding was doubled and focused on sealing America's southeastern borders from trans-Caribbean drug flights. Even though cocaine seizures rose from two tons in 1981 to 100 tons in 1989, this enforcement shield around Florida simply deflected smuggling west to northern Mexico, forging an alliance between Colombian and Mexican cartels.
[...]
"The impact of Reagan's policy was felt most directly in Colombia. Although marijuana exports had surged in the 1970s, criminality was still contained and few could have foreseen the catalytic effect of cocaine in the drug violence of the 1980s. After the industry collapsed around Medellin in Antioquia province [Colombia] during the 1960s, mass migration sent some 2 million people to the United States, laying the foundation for a future criminal diaspora. As the province's Medellin cartel started shipping cocaine north in the late 1970s, the drug lord Pablo Escobar expanded profits by controlling street-level distribution across America through contacts in this Antioquia diaspora. Washington pressed Colombia for action against the Medellin cartel, and Escobar responded with a spectacularly violent attack on the state.
[...]
"President Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, expanded the drug war by focusing on aggressive domestic enforcement and militarized eradication in Andean source nations. [...] His appointee to the newly created post of drug policy director, William J. Bennett, released the first National Drug Control Strategy statement, calling for an 'unprecedented' expansion of police, courts, and prisons to win the war on drugs. Insisting on enforcement over education, Bennett called for an 85 per cent increase in federal prison capacity and pressured states to expand theirs as well. [...] After only a year on the job, Bennett declared victory in the drug war and resigned. [...]
"Most importantly, the Bush administration militarized the drug war. [... T]he Bush administration enlisted the U.S. Defense Department in the drug war, expanding its scale far beyond the limited resources of the State and Justice departments. Desperate for a new mission at Cold War's end, the Defense Department announced, in September 1989, it would 'lead the attack on the supply of illegal drugs from abroad' and soon began deploying its vast arsenal for the fight -- Blackhawk helicopters, Navy E-2C aircraft, costly communications equipment, and Special Operations units. By the end of the Reagan-Bush era, Washington's drug-war metaphor had become a military reality."
U.S. efforts to end drug production in Peru and Bolivia were entirely offset by increased production in Colombia. McCoy writes:
"This shift of coca production north to Colombia was by no means benign. In effect, U.S. eradication efforts drove coca out of relatively peaceful areas like Bolivia into Colombia's ongoing civil war. After the Medellin cartel's terror ended with Pablo Escobar's death in December 1993, the rival Cali cartel's quiet infiltration of the state culminated in its secret contributions to the 1994 campaign that helped elect President Ernesto Samper and half the Colombian Congress."
McCoy's investigation, like others, falls prey to U.S. disinformation that tries to put the blame on drug-trafficking in that country on the FARC. In 1997, the U.S. put FARC on its list of foreign terrorist organizations, denying its status as a combatant force in a civil war, and its aim of ending the Colombian state's crimes and exploitation of its people, especially the impoverished peasantry.
McCoy points to the role of state-backed United Self-Defense Forces, a reactionary paramilitary group that were linked to armed militias established by drug lords to protect their interests. McCoy writes:
"As FARC's influence grew, the military countered by backing the violent paramilitaries -- particularly, the United Self-Defense Forces (US-DFC), commanded by Carlos Castano, a former lieutenant to drug lord Pablo Escobar. In August 1997, the US-DFC's reliance on cocaine was confirmed with the seizure of a complex of four sophisticated labs and 700 kilograms of finished cocaine in Cundinamarca. By 2001, the 8,000-strong US-DFC paramilitary had assets of some $200 million, largely from coca protection, and was using this illicit income for aggressive counterinsurgency.
[...]
"During its last year in office, the Clinton administration won approval for 'Plan Colombia" -- a $1.3 billion military program to train an anti-drug battalion, supply helicopters, and defoliate coca fields. From this vast war chest, USAID allocated only $47 million for alternative crops, a clear indication of the program's priorities.
[...]
"By early 2002, the administration of President George W. Bush began pressing Congress to lift restrictions on Plan Colombia to allow a shift, as U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy put it, from 'counter narcotics to counter insurgency.'"
In fact, U.S. state agencies have been involved in the production and trafficking of drugs all over the world. Without U.S. protection, the problem would have been controlled long ago.
This article was published in
Volume 55 Number 2 - February 2025
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2025/Articles/M5500212.HTM
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