Image by Jon Tyson.

Every accusation is a confession. This is clearly true of the Trump administration’s insistence that Venezuela operates as a “narco-state,” exporting terrorism to the U.S. via fentanyl, now labeled as a “weapon of mass destruction.” The charge is not only false, given that virtually no fentanyl enters the country from Venezuela, but transparently political and pretextual.

This hypocrisy was made unmistakable with Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in 2024 in a U.S. federal court on drug trafficking charges. Hernández presided over a regime long treated as a strategic ally within Washington’s regional security architecture, a reminder that the label of “narco-state” is applied not according to fact but according to the shifting imperatives of U.S. imperial power.

This accusation collapses further when placed in broader historical context. For decades, the most powerful state actors facilitating and protecting narcotics trafficking have not been Washington’s adversaries but Washington itself. Throughout the Cold War and the so-called War on Drugs, the United States, above all through the CIA, repeatedly subordinated drug enforcement to geopolitical priorities, enabling narco-networks so long as they advanced perceived U.S. interests.

These dynamics became especially pronounced in the 1980s, with disastrous consequences both at home and abroad. The decade marked an intensification of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. His administration insisted that communist “advances” could not only be contained but rolled back. Upon taking office, Reagan launched his promised global offensive, intervening wherever alleged Soviet influence appeared. Turning a blind eye to drug trafficking became a central feature of this crusade, as anti-communism consistently took precedence over anti-narcotics efforts.

Carter and the Crisis of Confidence

Reagan’s rise followed a brief but meaningful thaw. In the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War, Americans’ faith in political institutions had been profoundly shaken. Years of economic stagnation, inflation, and the reverberations of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo convinced many that the postwar promise of endless upward mobility, the ideological core of the American dream, was collapsing.

It also became impossible to ignore that the U.S. was not only failing to deliver on its economic promise but had also long abandoned the democratic values it claimed to champion. In 1975, the Church Committee laid bare what much of the Global South had known for decades: the United States had been operating as a global anti-democratic force, orchestrating coups and assassinations, sabotaging leftist movements (at home and abroad), and imposing political outcomes that served the interests of American capital rather than the aspirations of people around the world.

Then, in 1977, came........

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