How US ‘war on drugs’ is aimed at governments that assert sovereignty

By Carlos Ron 
On 14 July, at a summit in Orlando, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole, declared that Mexico's cartels and Mexico's government are ‘one and the same.’ He offered no evidence. President Claudia Sheinbaum demanded some; none came. Mexico's Security Cabinet answered with figures—tens of thousands of arrests, hundreds of tons of narcotics seized—while Cole's office remained silent. The accusation was never meant to be proven. It was only meant to be deployed.
Anyone who has studied the half-century arc of Washington's ‘War on Drugs’ recognizes the move instantly. The research notebooks Adictos al Imperialismo, produced by the Tricontinental Institute together with partner research centers across Latin America, document the pattern with precision: the ‘narco-state’ label is not a finding but a weapon, aimed with remarkable consistency at governments that assert sovereignty and withheld, with equal consistency, from governments that submit. Declaring a state indistinguishable from a cartel is the precondition for treating it as a target. When the White House asserted in early 2025 that Mexican traffickers held an ‘intolerable alliance’ with Mexico's government, and when Cole now escalates that to identity—government and cartel as a single structure—the groundwork is being laid, in public, for intervention against a sovereign neighbor governed by a party Washington cannot control.
Consider first what fifty years of this ‘war’ have in fact produced. The DEA's own leadership reported in May 2024 that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels alone maintain associates and facilitators in all fifty US states. After Plan Colombia —the largest counternarcotics program in history, consuming well over ten billion US dollars— Colombia's potential cocaine production rose from 1,053 tons in 2016 to 1,738 tons in 2022, alongside record acreage under coca. Between 2001 and 2024, Washington channeled more than twenty billion dollars in ‘anti-narcotics assistance’ to Latin America and the Caribbean—three quarters of it through the Pentagon. That last figure is the tell: this was never a public-health program that failed. Rather, it is a military-assistance program that succeeded—at militarizing the hemisphere, embedding US agencies and troops in the domestic security of nominally sovereign states, and criminalizing the peasantry while the profits were laundered northward.
Venezuela is the definitive case. In March 2020, Attorney General William Barr held up wanted posters of President Nicolás Maduro, offering fifteen million dollars for a head of state and charging him as leader of a ‘Cartel de los Soles’ that serious analysts have never been able to locate outside of US indictments. The evidence was assembled by the DEA itself through Operation Money Badger, a clandestine infiltration of Venezuela conducted, by the agency's own internal memoranda, unilaterally and without notifying Venezuelan authorities — that is, illegally. Those manufactured accusations became the license for the January 2026 assault on Caracas and the abduction of a sitting president.
And what followed the abduction? Not one gram less of cocaine reached the streets of the United States—the UN's own data show Venezuela was never a significant production or transit route compared to the Pacific corridor running through Washington's closest allies. What followed, instead, was oil. Within days, the White House announced that Venezuela would surrender thirty to fifty million barrels of crude, marketed by US officials, with revenues deposited in US-controlled accounts. New Treasury licenses opened Venezuelan fields to Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell. Trump himself dispensed with the pretext, promising that America's biggest oil companies would go in, spend billions, and start extracting from the largest proven reserves on Earth. Executives were received at the White House while the ‘anti-drug’ operation's real dividend was divided. Rarely has an empire confessed its motive so promptly.
Brazil shows the same instrument in its juridical form. In May, Washington designated the Comando Vermelho and the PCC as ‘foreign terrorist organizations,’ placing Brazilian criminal gangs in the same legal category as Hamas; in July, Treasury sanctions followed. Brazil did not request this ‘help.’ The designations unilaterally extend US terrorism law over the Brazilian economy—any bank, company or citizen with an indirect link now risks US prosecution—and they arrive in the same season as punitive tariffs and sanctions against a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, all aimed at a progressive government that dared to try a coup-plotting ex-president and to deepen ties with BRICS. The ‘fight against organized crime’ here functions as a jurisdictional land grab against South America's largest economy.
Now set this severity beside Washington's attitude toward its friends. Juan Orlando Hernández, president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022, was convicted by a US federal jury of conspiring to import hundreds of tons of cocaine—a man prosecutors said took bribes from El Chapo himself—and sentenced to forty-five years. On 1 December 2025, Trump granted him a full pardon, releasing him in the same breath as he endorsed Hernández's party in the Honduran election and branded the Honduran left ‘narcocommunists.’ The capstone of the most ambitious narcotics prosecution in the history of the US Department of Justice was demolished overnight, for electoral convenience. In Ecuador, meanwhile, Daniel Noboa—whose ‘Plan Ecuador’ has delivered states of exception, immunity for US military personnel, a mercenary alliance with Blackwater's Erik Prince, and record cocaine exports through the country's ports, amid persistent allegations of official complicity with trafficking and of electoral tampering—is embraced as Washington's model partner, despite worrisome events, such as the killing on 14 June of the prosecutor investigating the extrajudicial killings of Ecuadorian fishermen by US forces. The lesson could not be plainer: trafficking is forgivable, even pardonable, in an ally. Sovereignty is the only unforgivable crime.
That is the pattern, and it holds across a century of cases the Adictos al Imperialismo notebooks trace: Bolivia and Venezuela expelled the DEA for its role in coup attempts and promptly became ‘narco-states’; Honduras under a trafficker and Ecuador under a compliant heir remained ‘partners in security.’ The intensity of the accusation tracks a government's independence, never its relationship to drugs.
By every metric it set for itself—production, consumption, cartel power, deaths—the US War on Drugs is a failure of historic proportions, and its architects know it: consumption has grown, production has grown, and the cartels operate in every US state, banked by US financial institutions and armed by US gun manufacturers. But judged by its actual function, it has been a fifty-year success: a permanent, elastic pretext for surveillance, sanctions, lawfare, military basing and now invasion. Today the pretext is being weaponized more nakedly than ever—to abduct a president and seize his country's oil, to place Brazil's economy under terrorism law, to declare Mexico's elected government a cartel. A serious war on the drug economy would begin in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the gun shops of the US South. What Latin America faces instead is a war on its right to govern itself—and the region's independent governments, from Mexico City to Brasília to Caracas, are not the accused. They are the intended victims.
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This article was produced by Globetrotter. Carlos Ron is Co-Coordinator of the Nuestra America office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a former Venezuelan diplomat