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<\/p>\nMattha Busby is a freelance journalist and author who has written widely on health policy, drugs, society and culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The war on drugs<\/span> is best understood as a political metaphor. It is a thinly veiled tool of geopolitical warfare the U.S. has conveniently deployed to justify extending its hegemony across the world. And now in Venezuela, the U.S. war on drugs \u2014 that unwinnable forever war \u2014 is proving a useful fig leaf once again. What\u2019s clear is that it\u2019s the latest installment<\/a> in the United States\u2019 inglorious history of dozens<\/a> of \u201cregime change\u201d efforts in Latin America over the past two centuries.<\/p>\n Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro found this out the hard way earlier this month when he was unquestionably kidnapped<\/a>, and then indicted, by the U.S. for \u201cnarco-terrorism.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Maduro\u2019s indictment claims<\/a> he had \u201cmoved loads of cocaine under the protection of Venezuelan law enforcement\u201d and \u201callows cocaine-fueled corruption to flourish,\u201d citing alleged details<\/a> of the deposed president\u2019s direct involvement in cocaine trafficking. Ultimately, it seems the Venezuelan state has been able to at least partially manage<\/a> the irrepressible tide of cocaine smuggling through the country, unlike some of its neighbors, and capture some of the criminal profits for security forces \u2014 leading to claims<\/a> it is a \u201ccriminal hybrid state.\u201d But perhaps this was a wise move. Sealing their borders is not feasible, and aggressive campaigns to disrupt the multibillion-dollar supply of cocaine inevitably leads to violence.\u00a0<\/p>\n Regardless of how allegedly involved <\/a>the president is in the racket, it does not\u00a0justify U.S. intervention. But the well-worn war on drugs justification has provided a useful Gulf of Tonkin<\/a>-style lodestar. \u201cWe have a lot of drugs pouring into our country,\u201d Trump said <\/a>in September. \u201cVery heavily from Venezuela. A lot of things are coming out of Venezuela.\u201d But not enough oil \u2014 yet \u2014 he seemed to imply.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Beneath the overarching drug war bombast, Trump had preemptively<\/a> justified the desired oil takeover by claiming that Venezuela nationalizing \u201cour oil\u201d was a historic theft from the U.S., since the American petroleum companies<\/a> who \u201cbuilt Venezuela\u2019s oil industry\u201d were not compensated in perpetuity. Historians will recall a similar oil nationalization policy by Iran in the 1950s, which led the CIA to orchestrate a coup<\/a> which overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh<\/a> \u2014 who was jailed for three years and kept under house arrest until his death \u2014 and helped consign the country to decades of non-democratic rule, leading us right up to the present moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n Given such historical precedents, the future looks bleak for Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who is also set to stand trial. His arrest came after the U.S.had significantly increased<\/a> its presence in the Caribbean Sea throughout last fall under Trump\u2019s spurious pretext of dismantling the Venezuelan state\u2019s alleged \u201cdrug terrorism<\/a>\u201d operation. At the same time, Vice President JD Vance ramped up<\/a> the rhetoric against \u201cscum of the earth\u201d drug dealers from Venezuela, and Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch, R-Idaho, claimed<\/a> each deadly strike against a boat supposedly ferrying drugs to the U.S. from Venezuela was saving countless American lives<\/a>. Maduro warned Trump was \u201ccoming for Venezuela\u2019s riches,\u201d namely the world\u2019s largest proven oil reserves, but his remarks were largely footnotes in the Western media.<\/p>\n Lo and behold, following the extraordinarily flagrant violation<\/a> of international norms in the U.S. attack which led to the rendition of Maduro, Trump predictably pivoted away from the war on drugs premise to a might-makes-right quest to exploit Venezuela\u2019s vast oil fields. Even while Vance clings<\/a> to the entirely false idea that these war games will help ease the fentanyl crisis in the U.S., it is now clear that the killings of more than 120<\/a> people operating the alleged drug trafficking boats \u2014 likely including<\/a> both actual fisherman<\/a> and subsistence traffickers<\/a> \u2014 was just the latest Trojan horse for self-interested U.S. meddling.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs everyone knows the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,\u201d Trump said<\/a> after the pre-dawn capture of Maduro. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest in the world, go in \u2026 and start making money for the country.\u201d Left unclear was which country would benefit from all that money. It was an honest culmination of the effort to seize back effective control of Venezuela\u2019s oil fields after the nationalization of the industry back in the 1970s seriously reduced Yankee influence.\u00a0<\/p>\n But there were high-profile examples of the media running with the oft-repeated\u00a0drugs rationale, rather than oil. The New York Post almost entirely dodged using\u00a0the word \u201coil\u201d in its initial report<\/a>. The Associated Press regurgitated<\/a> the drug narrative, and Fox News hosts falsely claimed<\/a> that drugs from Venezuela play a significant role in the rates of fatal drug overdoses in the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n