Image by Bret Kavanaugh.

In the last dozen or so years of the twentieth century, the United States sent US military forces to Peru, Colombia, and Panama in the name of a war on drugs. These troops performed a variety of missions; among them were training death squads and leading operations into the Colombian and Peruvian mountains that were supposedly about capturing cocaine producers and destroying their operations. Of course, these raids didn’t end cocaine trafficking, and in most cases, captured nobody but coca farmers and leftist organizers. Part of the reason for the lack of results was that Washington was more interested in propping up the governments in Peru and Colombia—governments often financed in part by the cocaine trade—in their wars against leftist guerrilla forces. In fact, for a considerable amount of time, the president of Colombia was actually associated with one of the major trafficking organizations in the hemisphere.

In Panama, the longtime friend of the United States intelligence network, Manuel Noriega, had his own connections to the Colombian narco-traffickers. His country served as an essential stop for cocaine smugglers en route to the United States. At the same time, Noriega was in favor of the treaty between Panama and the United States worked out during Jimmy Carter’s presidency that returned the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. It would be that position which was the primary trigger for the US invasion of Panama in December 1989, an invasion that killed over twenty thousand Panamanians and destroyed many more residents’ homes. Noriega was kidnapped by US forces and brought to Florida, where he sat in prison until he was convicted of drug trafficking in what can be described as a railroading. Meanwhile, George HW Bush had pardoned the US officials convicted in the Iran-Contra affair—officials who were part of the same drug trafficking Noriega turned a blind eye to........

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