The war narrative is so disjointed and so contradictory that even the legacy media are picking it apart.
Since the Trump administration began moving US naval forces to the Caribbean and committing the wanton murder of unidentified boat crews on the high seas, we have tried to keep a close eye on the reporting in mainstream US and Western media. What we have found is that unlike most other US-led military campaigns of recent decades, the escalation of hostilities against Venezuela has enjoyed, at best, lukewarm support in the legacy press.
That doesn’t mean that certain media outlets are not doing their bit to help craft and sell a pro-war narrative, with the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal particularly standing out. But many are doing so with less enthusiasm than usual. Some outlets, including the New York Times and CBS, have even exposed some of the glaring flaws and inconsistencies in the Trump Administration’s ostensible case for war — i.e., to combat drug cartels.
The lies are so brazen and the war narrative so disjointed and contradictory that even the legacy media are picking them apart. Remember this one?
Eerie Echoes of Libya
On Saturday, Trump announced he was ratcheting up his campaign against Latin America’s drug cartels by closing “IN ITS ENTIRETY” the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela. The announcement bore eerie echoes of the no-fly zone the UN Security Council imposed on Libya just days before NATO’s bombardment of the country. And it seems to be working:
Not all flights have been cancelled, however. As Spain’s El Diario reports, flights were still coming in from Colombia, Panama and Russia on Monday. Colombian President Gustavo Petro Petro said that Washington can only restrict its own airlines and called on other countries to restore normal civil aviation links with Venezuela, emphasising the need for dialogue.
Meanwhile, as Tyler Pager reported for the Times, less than 24 hours before shutting down Venezuelan airspace, “Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who in 2021 was convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison”.
In announcing the pardon of a convicted drug trafficker while threatening Venezuela, Pager notes, Trump is displaying contradictions (which is putting it mildly):
[Trump’s] two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States…
The Trump administration has struggled to provide a clear strategic rationale for why it has amassed such a large military presence in the Caribbean. The president has most often pointed to counternarcotics operations, but the size of the U.S. forces in the region suggests bigger ambitions. In private, the president has shown an interest in Venezuela’s oil reserves, while he and his aides also have said they want to oust Mr. Maduro.
In a statement, Mr. Trump said he had issued the pardon to Mr. Hernández because “many friends” had asked him to do so, adding, “They gave him 45 years because he was the president of the country — you could do this to any president on any country.”
Those “friends” presumably include Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as the DC-based lobbying firm BGR Group. According to a 2021 VICE report, Hernández signed a deal in 2020 with BGR Group to “buttress his image as a dedicated [US] ally and an implacable foe of organized crime”. Rubio has historically been one of the biggest beneficiaries of BGR’s spending:
Although BGR presents itself as a bipartisan firm, it has inextricable ties to the Republican Party. The company was co-founded by former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. Its current team includes prominent Republicans, such as former Representative Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican, and Trump Administration State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, who is on the firm’s advisory board.
BGR has also given more than $1 million to candidates for federal office in each of the last three election cycles, with roughly 90 percent of its contributions going to Republicans. Rubio is among the top beneficiaries of BGR generosity, and he has benefited from the company’s largesse throughout his career, including BGR-hosted fundraisers during both his 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns and his short-lived presidential bid.
Here is Rubio meeting with Hernandez in 2018 to thank him for his “support of Israel and the US at the UN and his partnership targeting drug traffickers.”
Which is curious given that Hernández is the epitome of a narco político. According to court documents, Hernández’s election campaigns were funded with drug money; he had Honduran police and military protect smugglers who paid him off; and his brother, Tony, was arrested in Miami in 2018 due to his ties to a trafficking organization.
He even had an accused co-conspirator killed in a Honduran prison to protect himself, and had close ties to Sinaloan capo Chapo Guzman. Hernández once apparently boasted, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”
Selective Application
In his decision to pardon Hernández, Trump has not presented a single shred of evidence that Hernandez’s trial was biased or corrupted, points out the Gray Zone’s Wyatt Reed:
“Nor has he explained how the then-president of Honduras could have been unaware of the massive cocaine trafficking conspiracy which his own brother – Tony Hernandez – was indicted for by Trump’s Department of Justice.”
Of course, Hernández is not the only US-aligned, Rubio-connected head of state, current or former, to be accused of ties to the narcotics trade. As we’ve already noted on previous occasions, the family business of Ecuador’s Miami-born president, Daniel Noboa, has repeatedly been caught transporting cocaine in its banana consignments to Europe.
When senior figures within Argentina’s Milei government were shown to have received campaign funding from known drug traffickers just a few months ago, Washington barely batted an eye.
It’s a similar story with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Just over a month ago, The Washington Post revealed that Rubio had agreed to return to El Salvador nine leaders of the MS-13 criminal group who were in US custody in exchange for Bukele’s agreement to allow the US to deport and detain hundreds of immigrants at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
Bukele’s request came amid compromising reports of secret deals between his government and MS-13. The people Rubio promised to return to El Salvador included US government informants who were under the protection of the US Department of Justice. Who knows what has happened to them since their return?
Now, Trump’s proposed presidential pardon for a convicted narco presidente reveals the selective way the US tends to apply its war on drugs. As Judge Andrew Napolitano noted, “the evidence in this case was overwhelming.” What the Trump administration is doing is “kill[ing] the people as to whom there is no known public evidence of guilt (i.e. the boat strike victims) while pardon[ing] the person convicted in a court of law with overwhelming evidence of guilt.”
The proposed pardon is also definitive confirmation, if ever needed, that the US’ rapidly escalating war against the drug cartels is, at bottom, a flimsy pretext for another campaign of regional plunder and geostrategic domination, as we warned over three years ago:
[I]t goes without saying that the real driving motivation behind the latest calls to expand the war on drugs is not to stem the flow of drugs into the US, or to tackle the escalating violence of drug cartels across Latin America — if Washington was serious about that, all it would have to do is pass legislation to stem the southward flow of US-produced guns and other weapons. But that would hurt the profits of arms manufacturers. And if it was serious about tackling drug addiction, it would never have let Big Pharma unleash the opium epidemic in the first place. And once it had, it would never have let the perps walk free with the daintiest of financial slaps on the wrists.
No, this is primarily about what the US war on drugs has always been about: pursuing geopolitical and geostrategic dominance in key regions of the world while controlling and imprisoning for serious sums of money the restive populace at home. This is a point that is explained elegantly by Jorge Retana Yarto, a former director of the Intelligence School for National Security of Mexico’s Centre for National Intelligence (CNI), in an article for the news website Contralinea:
The ideology of the “war” on drugs and organized crime in the United States is an immense fabrication. That does not mean that the problems linked to the multinational trafficking of prohibited drugs and the criminal organizations that have specialized in it, and everything that this entails, do not exist. They exist and are very acute, but both phenomena were ideologized for the purposes of geopolitical and geostrategic dominance, and were imposed through exportable reactive and punitive public policies in matters of intelligence and security, causing social, political-institutional, cultural and economic devastation. By assuming a military dimension, (the War on Drugs) laid the foundations for armed intervention in the Latin American region and converted the territories, as well as national sovereignties, into areas of geostrategic action.
A “Clean Break” for the Western Hemisphere
Under Trump 2.0, that geostrategic action is being aimed at governments that are somewhat left of centre and are unwilling to turn their countries into US vassal states. As international relations professor at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer notes, the US “does not tolerate left-leaning governments… and as soon as they see a government that is considered to be left-of-centre they move to replace that government.”
As we noted in early September, the US is essentially looking to merge two “failed” wars in Latin America, the war on drugs and the war on Terror. Or as Max Blumenthal put it in his latest podcast with Aaron Mate, it is about taking the Project for a New American Century’s “Clean Break” program for the Middle East and applying it to the Western Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, as the war in Ukraine runs out of funding and cannon fodder, Trump’s rapidly escalating fake war on narco-terrorism is opening up new profit-making opportunities for the MIC…
Nick Corbishley 