Trump’s Plan to Invade Venezuela and Abduct “Narcoterrorist” Maduro

The Trump administration, through its attorney general Pam Bondi, announced on August 7 it has doubled a reward—from $25 million to $50 million—for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. According to the administration, Maduro is in cahoots with drug cartels, specifically Cártel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns).

Bondi accused Maduro of heading up one of the world’s most notorious drug trafficking operations. She said his alleged involvement in the drug trade is a threat to the national security of the United States. Trump’s AG said Maduro utilizes “foreign terrorist and criminal organizations,” including the Tren de Aragua gang, the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, in addition to Cartel of the Suns, to traffic cocaine in the United States.

“He is one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world and a threat to our national security. Therefore, we’ve doubled his reward to $50 million,” Bondi said in a video posted on X.

While there is little compelling evidence of Maduro’s involvement in the drug trade, it is known that the Venezuelan National Guard and military began to buy, store, transfer and distribute cocaine in the mid-2000s. Prior to direct involvement, the Venezuelan military extorted narcos in the transfer of drug shipments.

“According to InSight Crime, a theory as to what may have motivated this move is that Colombian narcos began to pay the military in drugs rather than cash. This forced the Venezuelans to seek markets of their own,” writes intelligence analyst Javier Sutil Toledano.

Venezuela might not have become involved in the drug trade if not for the multi-billion-dollar Plan Colombia security program signed with the United States. Billed as an anti-narcotics effort, the real purpose of the plan was to eradicate guerrilla movements aligned against corporate petroleum and mining activities. Colombia Plan maintained a close relationship with death squads and organized paramilitary forces, notes Noam Chomsky.

Plan Colombia’s war on guerrilla movements forced FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) to move operations to the border with Venezuela and corrupt officials became involved in the drug trade. The narrative claims FARC is a major distributor of cocaine. This is, however, an exaggeration.

“In standard US terminology, the FARC forces are ‘narcoguerrillas,’ a useful concept as a cover for counterinsurgency,” writes Chomsky. “It is agreed—and FARC leaders say—that they rely for funding on coca production, which they tax, as they tax other businesses.”

Klaus Nyholm, at the time head of the UN Drug Control Program, believes “the guerrillas are something different from the traffickers,” while Andean drug specialist Ricardo Vargas argues the guerrillas were “primarily focused on taxation of illicit crops,” not trafficking. Moreover, FARC called for “a development plan for the peasants” that would “allow eradication of coca on the basis of alternative crops.” Vargas added that Colombian peasants grow cocoa plants “because of the crisis in the agricultural sector of Latin American countries, escalated by the general economic crisis in the region,” a crisis exacerbated by neoliberal trade policies.

In 2013, it was reported that FARC, while in the process of demobilization, was taken over piecemeal by the Gaitanistas (Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, aka Clan del Golfo), described as a rightwing Colombian neo-paramilitary group and the largest drug cartel in Colombia. It is believed the group is comprised of either reservists or retired professional soldiers. Colombian General Leonardo Alfonso Barrero Gordillo worked with Clan del Golfo and its paramilitary groups, according to human rights organizations.

“Although Maduro was not among the early Venezuelan officials tied to narco-trafficking during the previous Hugo Chávez presidency, a federal indictment filed in New York shows his rise through the ranks of the Cartel of the Suns,” claims the Miami Herald.

The news outlet mentions an indictment that claims Maduro and the cartel aimed “to flood the United States with cocaine and inflict the drug’s harmful and addictive effects on users in this country.”

CIA Runs Cocaine to Fund Black Ops

The Trump administration is less interested in the “harmful and addictive effects” of cocaine on Americans than the ongoing US effort to overthrow the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and destroy  the Bolivarian Revolution initially led by the late  former President Hugo Chávez. If Trump and crew were sincerely interested in stopping the importation of cocaine, they would turn their attention to the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

Joël van der Reijden, an independent Dutch researcher, believes CIA involvement in the drug trade is one of the most important covered up conspiracies of all time. The CIA inherited the drug business from Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), a now defunct French intelligence agency. The operation was “upscaled” with heroin in Vietnam and later a similar template was used in South America with cocaine. It is said US intelligence was involved in drug trafficking with Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian Mafia) before the establishment of the CIA in 1947. The Southeast Asian “Golden Triangle” of heroin production and distribution included early CIA notables, including Frank Wisner, Paul Helliwell, Claire Chennault, William Pawley, and Tommy Corcoran.

In the 1980s, the CIA oversaw Nicaraguan Contra arms and cocaine trafficking. The operation was revealed when American commercial airline pilot Barry Seal was investigated for working with the Medellin Cartel in Colombia. Seal had a relationship with the CIA.

“Barry Seal was a veteran of both the drug trade and the intelligence business,” write Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn. “Seal’s first contact with the CIA came in the 1960s while he served as a pilot for the US Army’s Special Forces division. He left the army in 1965 to become, at the age of twenty-six, a pilot for TransWorld Airlines, and it’s apparent that Seal continued his relationship with the Agency during his employment with the airline.”

According to van der Reijden,

“It is virtually certain that both [George H.W.] Bush and [Bill] Clinton, the latter as governor of Arkansas, were shielding Seal’s operations from law enforcement… the  [CIA director] Casey-Bush-North alliance destroyed the DEA’s operation aimed at bringing down the entire Medellin Cartel when they decided to leak the Contra sting operation of their asset Barry Seal to the media,” thus allowing Reagan to accuse the Sandinista government of drug trafficking and force Congress to end the ban on US military aid to the Contras.”

CIA cocaine distribution in the United States was exposed in the 1990s by journalist Gary Webb in a three-part series published by the Mercury News. The newspaper series documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s was siphoned to the Contras, the CIA mercenary army attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government.

Additionally, in 1993 the Justice Department investigated “allegations that officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials,” The New York Times reported.

“CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War. In 1949, two of Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated generals, Li Wen Huan and Tuan Shi Wen, marched their Third and Fifth Route armies, with families and livestock, across the mountains to northern Burma. Once installed, the peasant soldiers began cultivating the crop they knew best, the opium poppy.”

Panama Invasion Redux?

In December, 1989, President George H.W. Bush ordered the US military to invade Panama City. The invasion was codenamed Operation Just Cause, and the supposed just cause was the arrest of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, a long time CIA asset, on drug trafficking charges. Noriega received protection from DEA investigations due to his “special relationship with the CIA” (see Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs, and the Press, 1998). He was instrumental the effort to launder drug money while also receiving financial support from drug dealers. According to Gary Webb (Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, 1999), Noriega was involved in the CIA effort to smuggle cocaine into the United States.

After Noriega was exposed in The New York Times as a participant in the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan tried to have the Panamanian leader step down, but he refused to do so. The notorious Elliot Abrams and the Pentagon agitated for an invasion of Panama. Reagan declined, afraid it would hurt the upcoming Bush presidential campaign. However, after his successor assumed office, the plan to get rid of the exposed CIA asset Manuel Noriega became more urgent, especially after the press called George H.W. Bush a “wimp” for not going after Noriega. The new president was berated after he called for hunting down major drug dealers and then not acting on Noriega.

27,684 US troops and over 300 aircraft invaded on December 20. Explosions and fire ripped through the heavily populated El Chorrillo neighborhood in downtown Panama City.

“El Chorrillo was invaded, destroyed, burned, and desecrated on that fateful day,” writes Argelis Wesley. “Thousands fled barefoot and terrified, many watched as their homes collapsed under the flames and disappeared in the chaos. Others witnessed point-blank executions and the violation of fundamental rights. Some chose to leave the place they had called home since birth.”

She writes that years later,

“We still do not know how many people died or how many bodies were buried in mass graves. Nor do we fully understand how this brutal incident affected the mental health and well-being of El Chorrillo’s generations, from children to adults.”

On January 3, 1990, Noriega surrendered to US forces. He was convicted of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He was subsequently extradited to France, and then back to Panama, where he died during surgery to remove a brain tumor.

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Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/trump-plan-invade-venezuela-abduct-narcoterrorist-maduro/5898569