As far back as the El Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Contra War of the 1980s, the United States’ efforts to prosecute “drug wars” with Latin American cartels and traffickers have produced mixed results at best.
These efforts have been complicated by the tension between sound crime-fighting strategies and geopolitical concerns, such as regime change.
This is not because U.S. law enforcement agencies or the military are ignorant of necessary methods or incapable of lawfully taking down drug kingpins or cartels.
But the U.S. has certainly proved itself capable of acting illegally, or in morally questionable fashion at best.
This was certainly the case in the 1980s when, as the San Jose Mercury News reported, “the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to [a] South Central L.A. drug dealer.”
Further back, in the 1960s, the CIA was entangled in Asia’s drug trade and, as the author Patrick Winn showed, got American soldiers in Vietnam hooked on heroin.
Now, a former Honduran president convicted for drug trafficking has received a pardon from President Donald Trump, even as the president of Venezuela faces a potential U.S. invasion over accusations of drug trafficking made by Trump himself.
Elsewhere, the leader of the Chapitos faction of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Guzmán López, who had been accused of flooding the US with illicit fentanyl, this month reached a plea agreement.
According to court documents, it occurred when one of the sons of former cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias El Chapo, changed his plea from not guilty to guilty, for “two drug trafficking charges and engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.”
As Parker Asmann writes, it all means “another judicial case … will not go to trial or expose the inner workings of organized crime in Mexico.”
Nonetheless, several things are new or different under Trump, at home and in institutions meant to fight crime abroad:
- No president since Nixon has so weaponized the democratic institutions of government and especially the Department of Justice to routinely come after their legal and/or political opponents.
- No president since Nixon has used the rhetoric of “law and order” to defund agencies of crime control while providing around $100 billion to ICE for deporting criminal immigrants, only to find immigrants with no criminal records becoming the largest group in ICE detention.
- No president since Nixon has systematically sabotaged multinational security relations, to the effect of at least 10 Caribbean nations turning against the U.S. over Trump’s neglect of natural disaster relief and his military’s terrorist-like actions causing the unlawful killings of people on boats allegedly smuggling drugs.
Nobody reading this commentary needs a recitation of Trump’s campaign of retribution on home soil. But Trump has also systemically defunded and downsized crime prevention and gun control, while decriminalizing behaviors of both criminals and social control agents.
Which takes us back to the “war on drugs,” and Trump’s unlawful killings in the name of his supposed attempt to stop dangerous substances coming into the U.S.
Of the 95 killings so far in the Caribbean, none seem to have been of actors who posed an imminent threat to anyone’s life, and would therefore have been subject to drug enforcement policies, the laws of war, and U.S. military protocol.
For a racketeering president, this is simply his way of “taking care of business.” Trump could care less whether the magnitude of crime is getting worse or better, except in terms of his own criminality or ability to exploit the crimes of others for the acquisition of power and wealth.
Selling pardons from the Oval Office was one of Trump’s earliest scams. Now, in addition to the ex-president of Honduras, three other big-time, drugs-related criminals have benefited.
On day one of Trump 2.0, he pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht — convicted of “creating the largest online black market for illegal drugs and other illicit goods,” as the Washington Post put it. Trump did so because he made deals with the Libertarian Party and the crypto community.
Subsequently, the habitually lawless, supposedly “drug-warring” president granted clemency to a longtime Chicago gang leader, Larry Hoover, and a Baltimore drug kingpin, Garnett Gilbert Smith.
And yet Trump insists Venezuela represents a drug-fueled threat to Americans and merits severe action.
Last week, he told Politico President Nicolás Maduro’s “days are numbered.” Two days later, U.S. forces seized a large oil tanker near the Venezuelan coast, a significant escalation.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the move was warranted because the tanker was being used to transport oil from Iran, in defiance of sanctions. The AG released video showing U.S. forces descending from helicopters and searching the vessel.
Meanwhile, footage of the murder of two helpless survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean was only one of more than a dozen such videos that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has not boastfully shown to the world.
Instead, Hegseth declared the Pentagon won’t release the video because it is “top secret” and would be in violation of “longstanding Department of War policy.”
Had these interdictions of allegedly cocaine-carrying boats been part of a real drug war, and not a pretext for a possible invasion of Venezuela, cargoes would have been seized and traffickers arrested — as a means of leveraging them to go after kingpins and cartels.
On Tuesday evening, Trump announced a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, alleging the country was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes.
But as Trump said, this is really about ramping up pressure on Maduro and his nation’s economy, “until such time as they return to the United States all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Or in the alternative, regime change occurs, with the departure of Maduro and his alleged “foreign terrorist organization” as Trump labeled the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
CBS's 60 Minutes, on the ground in Caracas to interview President Maduro but seeing the session cancelled for “security reasons,” decided to interview people in the streets instead.
The general consensus was that Venezuelans are concerned about an invasion and see three likely outcomes: Maduro packs his bags, is arrested, or is killed.
One poignant statement came from a man “wearing a hat with the insignia of a civilian-military organization,” who said Trump’s accusations about drugs made no sense, because the nation’s economy was based on oil exports.
He told CBS, “The country of Venezuela doesn’t need to rely on drugs because we are a petroleum country. We have never cultivated a drug trade here.”
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy. The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.
