05/12/2025
The class-based politics of the War on Drugs has been known to many Afro-Americans for many years. Though it was kicked off by the murderous Nixon Administration in 1971, the 1986 Act introduced by the then Senator Joe Biden made it comprehensive in its domestic scope. Its recent usage internationally has been described in this column. It has recently been made clear in the designation of oil-rich Venezuela as a “narco-terrorist” state. Since then, it has been made even more explicit in the pardoning by President Trump of a former -oligarch conservative “Christian values” ex-President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year sentence for importing 400 tonnes of cocaine into the USA when the Us is openly supporting the “Christian values” party of Hernández.
The breakdown – temporary or otherwise of the Shamelesness + Shock&Awe armour of the US Trump Administration continues with the release of footage which shows the killing of two survivors from an illegal attack on a boat in September It clearly shows two men struggling to stay alive in the water close to the half-sunk boat full of corpses. Expect the Flood of Shit from the Administration and its social media team to confuse the issued and allow for more Shock&Awe thereafter.
3/12/2025
The long years of the Indigenous socialist movement (MAS) government of Bolivia brought better times for the people of the country and brought in the most advanced plurinational Constitution yet seen in the world. More than any other country in Latin America it is where coca itself (not the cocaine synthesized from it in Europe in the 129th century) is integral to social and cultural life with a principle of reciprocity. The fall of the government (a very poor country running into the limits of what can be achieved in a massively unequal capitalist world, not helped by the increasing megalomania of ex-President Evo Morales) and its replacement by one faction of conquistador descendant power brought immediate assertions of that power. It was announced that the USA DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency, (which still defines coca as a “narcotic”) would return to the country having been expelled in 2008. At the same time the Bolivian Army removed the Wiphala, symbolizing the country’s majority Indigenous population from its logo which does not augur well for what will happen to that Plurinational Constitution that included Rights of the natural world and all its species and plants. The US attacks and threats of attack on Venezuela in the name of The War on Drugs/Narco-Terrorism has intensified over the last six weeks and become an explicit policy-desire of “Regime change”, that is the removal of the government of another country. It should be noted that Venezuela has 17% of the world’s oil reserves and that a total of 0% of fentanyl, the drug causing most human damage in the USA itself and seized there came from the country under threat. This USA policy has involved extra-judicial killings of people on small boats on the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean building on precedents created by the Obama and GW Bush Administrations. So far that of President Trump has been distinguished by shamelessness and the Shock and Awe projection of “We can do Absolutely Anything” we chose to. But it is now squirming in face of a possible investigation into the killing of two people who survived a US attack on a boat early in the “campaign” in September. Radio shock-jock and now Secretary of War Hegseth backed away from having authorized the killing of the survivors and the order to Kill Everyone; claimed that Trump himself knew nothing and would not have permitted it; and pushed the responsibility on to Admiral Frank Bradley. Hegseth is losing the aura of Shamelessness as it becomes known that he watched the whole thing on a screen.
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16/11/2025
The banana oligarch President of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, an enthusiast for the War against “narco-terrorists”, invited US Homeland Security and ICE boss Kristi Noem to look at sites suitable for US military bases in Ecuador in pursuit of this War. For these bases to exist constitutional change was required. This and three other proposed changes which would increase Noboa’s unchecked power have been firmly rejected in a Referendum by a populace who have had a taste of what and to whom the ‘War on Drug/Gangs’ diktats are directed.
Afghanistan’s opium-making poppy crop has reportedly shrunk again this year, by 20-30 % after sharp falls since the Taliban declared and implemented a ban on poppies. This has impoverished farmers whose attempts to switch to cereals and vegetables have been defeated by severe drought. The decline may also be attributed to the use of strong, synthetic opioids, first Oxy-Contin and then Fentanyl. At the same time, Afghanistan is being fingered as a major site of methamphetamine production.
The killing of men in small boats by the USA military in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans continues, 3 one day, 11 another; as of November 14, there have been 75 casualties in total. These extra-judicial killings have been in the name of a War on Drugs variant, the War on Narco-Terrorism. This itself has morphed into threats against the governments of Venezuela and Colombia, which for the first time in thie history has a government not of the oligarchs. The threat to Venezuela is more overt with the USS Gerald Ford, the USA’s largest aircraft carrier moving into proximate waters as part of what the Minister of War, Pete Hesgeth calls ‘Operation Southern Spear’ while a Nobel Peace Prize winning Venezuelan Opposition leader sides with the idea of the USA invading the country; what is normally called treachery. The USA however does not have a happy record with land invasions, unless the army they will face is very weak. No doubt there will be careful intelligence study as to the state of the Venezuelan army but the preferred USA method is the making of realistic threats and punishments to keep the target country in a state of anxiety with resultant costs and paranoias.
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18/10/2025
Two Trinidadian fishermen, Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, were executed without trial by military forces of the USA. They are the latest victims of the internationalised class war on drugs that has been overtly politicised by the Trump regime. Both are descended from the indentured (post Abolition slave) labour brought to the Caribbean from Asia in the second half of the 19th century. As local small scale fishermen they have been subject to the violence of deep-net fishing by the ships of powerful states. Now victims of the USA’s reckless attacks on boats in the area since the wording and the War on Drugs became one on “narco-terrorism”. The present political leader of Trinidad, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, has given the US access to Trinidad’s territorial waters and even applauded its extrajudicial killings in a betrayal of Trinidad’s past and its regional opposition to US arrogance.
In the USA itself, overdoses from opioids rather than cocaine, are still the leading cause of death for
Americans aged 18-44, according to the now stripped bare public health authority, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and would be listed as one of the 10 leading causes of death overall were they not lumped together in a single category with other accidental deaths and injuries. Overdoses claimed over 80,000 US lives in 2024 – more than twice as many as motor vehicle accidents and nearly three times as many as Covid-19, though the CDC’s constant under-estimating of COVID’s effects are notorious. The 80,000 represent a slight fall in the numbers (e.g., estimates not helped by the Drug Enforcement Agency, the ‘Tsars’ of the “War on Drugs” not providing statistics to public health authorities) and this slight fall is being claimed as a major improvement by a boastful regime and masks a rise in some areas like Alaska.
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23/09/2025
Non-surprise of the year: the USA removes or ”decertifies” the government of Colombia from its list of Good Guys in the “War on Drugs”. This, when the country now has its first non-oligarchic government ever and joins Venezuela as a “rogue” state. The government of Venezuela complains that the US navy raided a tuna fishing boat in the Caribbean in the name of the war on “narco-terrorism” which is an upgrade on the “War on Drugs.”
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18/09/2025
As unhappily predicted here the banana oligarch President of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, is using his election promise of smashing “drug gangs” to make state of emergency laws across the country against the poor and its indigenous peoples. He has now ordered curfews in some regions in response to planned protests against the removal of subsidies on diesel fuel which will increase the price of more or less everything.
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07/09/2025
The Venezuelan F-15 fighter planes that “buzzed” a US warship after the killing of 11 people by US forces on what they claimed was a “narco-terrorist” boat from a “narco-terrorist” state, were manufactured in the USA an sold to Venezuela on easy terms with the encouragement of the Ronald Reagan administration. It was, Venezuela then an ally with huge reserves of oil to be in support of the oligarch torturers of the El Salvador government and the same Reagan Administration that actively involved itself in the importation of huge quantities of the cocaine that kicked off the “crack” devastation of US cities. This time it was in support of counter-revolutionary forces in Nicaragua. Reagan himself was perceived as an extremist by the US Republican Party before taking it over, a precedent for the present President.
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05/09/2025
US authorities have confirmed that two armed Venezuelan F-16 fighter jets flew over the USS Jason Dunham, a US Navy guided missile destroyer, while it was operating in international waters in the Caribbean.The Department of Defense described the action as “highly provocative” and a “show of force” intended to interfere with US counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations.
At the same time questions are being raised about the killing of eleven people, not just its legality/illegality but as to why so many people were on a drugs carrying boat; how could they be identified as to belonging to something called Tren de Aragua? Did their ID cards float to the surface, asked one non-government Venezuelan.
First in the queue to congratulate President Trump on the killings was the banana oligarch President of Ecuador, Noboa, who also likes to rule by “Emergency” laws.
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02/09/2025
The President of the USA announces that its military forces destroyed a boat carrying cocaine in the Caribbean; that eleven men were killed and that they were all members of Tren de Aragua a terrorist drugs cartel controlled by the government of Venezuela. This followed the free market authoritarians of Ecuador, Paraguay and Argentina following the USA in denouncing the Cartel de los Soles, also Venezuelan-based as an “international terrorist organisation”.
Up until recently such a boat would have been intercepted by coastguard but in the last two weeks there has been a build-up of US militarized naval forces in the area with Seven Warships and a Nuclear-powered submarine. It is estimated that Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil in the world.
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30/08/2025
It comes as no surprise that Chainsaw Milai, President of Argentina should follow the banana oligarch President of Ecuador in decreeing the Cartel de los Soles as an “international terrorist organisation”. The drugs-terrorist rhetorical link has always been lurking behind the headlines. The USA’s President Trump has made this explicit naming of a transnational crime group he claims exists and is linked to the nominally socialist government of Venezuela.
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22/08/2025
In Spring of this year the banana oligarch Daniel Noboa, won the Presidential election of Ecuador on the grounds that he would stop “gang” violence. This allowed him to institute “states of emergency” in seven regions. On July 27, 2025, gunmen killed approximately 17 people and injured 14 others in La Clinica bar in El Empaime. This at the end of a month that saw a record number of killings. It is true that a large amount of the cocaine produced in adjacent countries passes through Ecuador where transit costs will realise a LOT of money. But the repressive measures have been mostly aimed at the working class and indigenous people defending their land
Ecuador has since been joined by Paraguay to align with the USA Trump regime in declaring Cartel de los Soles a “terrorist organization”, a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity”. Trump’s regime has linked this group to high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including President Nicolás Maduro, a nominal socialist hated and punished by the USA and European states.
“Gang”, “Terrorist”, “Illegal” – in Western language this is Latin America -at a time when the international bourgeoisie, anxious for its investments and comfort, has pushed the gold price to record levels. As a consequence “Illegal” gold mining on the continent is said to be more profitable than cocaine, as if gold mining wasn’t a transnational big and legal business.
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07/06/2025
The Mexican government’s lawsuit against gun-making companies in the USA for how their business practices help fuel “Drugs cartel violence” has been rejected by the US Supreme Court. Lawyers for Smith & Wesson saw no evil and heard no evil.
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20/05/2025
President Bukele of El Salvador now reaping the rewards of prison outsourcing, guilty or innocent, made him his name by smashing gang violence in the name of The War on Drugs. True, the number of murders has decreased since he took power but the number of Disappearances has increased. Among the disappeared journalists who revealed the relationship between his government and selected gangs.
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24/04/2025
As feared in our report on the War on Drugs, and “gangs” in Ecuador it has led to the murders of four Black Ecuadorian citizens by military officers entrusted with this war. They were young men who had gone out to play football in Ecuador’s 2nd largest city Guayaquil. It follows the pattern set by El Salvador’s “state of exception” whereby the innocent are as likely as anyone else to end up dead or in prison Prison and is no joke. In a continent where TB infections are on the rise, 44% of El Salvador’s cases are of prisoners. The Ecuadorian government of the banana business elite are promising an investigation into the four murders, their bodies found burned. Watch this Space!
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22/03/2025
WealthofNegations applauds the arrest of Rodrigo Duterte in the name of the International Court of Justice. It may have come about as a result of a fall out between the dictatorial ruling families of the
Philippines but who cares. This is the bastard who ordered the killing of thousands of the poor and
trade unionists in the name of the War on Drugs.
In Ecuador another oligarchic President Noboa , heir to a banana fortune, has recruited the USA Blackrock company of armed mercenaries to assist his version of the same and to make it a fait accompli even though he may well lose the forthcoming Presidential election run-off. Blackrock were the highly paid promoters of mayhem in post-war Iraq earlier this century.
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05/01/2025
As feared in our report on the War on Drugs (13/12/2024), and “gangs” in Ecuador it has led to the murders of four Black Ecuadorian citizens by military officers entrusted with this war. They were young men who had gone out to play football in Ecuador’s 2nd largest city Guayaquil. It follows the pattern set by El Salvador’s “state of exception” whereby the innocent are as likely as anyone else to end up dead or in prison Prison and is no joke. In a continent where TB infections are on the rise, 44% of El Salvador’s cases are of prisoners. The Ecuadorian government of the banana business elite are promising an investigation into the four murders, their bodies found burned. Watch this Space!
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13/12/2024
What War? Whose Drugs? The War on Drugs ─ whether its hunger or poverty it always got to be a War ─ has been and still is a deadly gravy train for otherwise unemployable state mercenaries of North America. A budget of $51 billion a year provides a lot of comfortable lifestyle salaries. There are people who will kill to maintain their comfort and comforts, thus the War on Drugs is perpetuated, is a “war without end”. Over its 50 years since President Nixon labelled drugs as “Public Enemy Number One it has used up $1 trillion. All the while it is known it has achieved nothing even on its own term ─ deaths from drug use in North America and the profits made globally have skyrocketed ─ while creating and perpetuating violences in the Southern part of the continent. A Commission reluctantly set up to investigate Colombia’s “Civil war” by its oligarchic government of 2016 finally published its report in 2024 under the country’s fist ever non-Oligarchy government concluded that the War on Drugs prolonged that disastrous “civil” war at a time when the country had the starring role in the Drugs narrative.
The War and its violences ─ which do not touch the lives and comforts of its arsonist-fireman ─ has as its nominal target cocaine which is a substance made by European chemists who synthesized coca in the 19th century. The coca leaf is an integral part of the social , cultural and spiritual life of the Andean region, is not addictive, has in fact been used as a cure for cocaine addiction. And yet from 1949, a North American dominated UN team defined coca itself as a narcotic. A Narcotic!! When its effects are known to be the reverse! But the definition and the consequent illegality of the leaf itself in the name of development and human liberation has justified the edifice of the War, the toxic spraying , the comfortable incomes and a complicit political class, an oligarchy in the Sout of the continent whose only task and claim to power is to maintain gross class and ethnic inequality.
In 2009 a “legal” coup in Honduras using the power of a feudal Congress and an-elite family Supreme Court was made against a popularly elected President Zelaya for proposing the most modest land reform. This “legal “ coup was not outright condemned by President Obama and became a mode of procedural coup for other oligarchs to use in Paraguay and Brazil. In Honduras itself it required enforcement by the military just as in the 1950s when the power of the landowning oligarchy and the North American United Fruit Company, (soon and strategically renamed Chiquita) were mildly threatened.
Early in 2024 one of the recent post-coup Presidents of the country, Juan Orlando Hernandez, an “ally of the USA in the War Against Drugs” was convicted in a New York court of complicity in cocaine trafficking. This is not new, such a “war” can be conducted against some drug “gangs” to the benefit of one particular and political favoured “gang/” ”cartel”. This also happened with the Calderon presidency of Mexico which made the “War” central to its project and when the murder rate went through the roof and into the cemeteries. Its Drugs “Czar” and Security Minister Garcia Luna was later, when the damage had been done, convicted of links to the Sinaloa cartel then and for many years top-dog gang. It is the War on Drugs itself that has provoked these violences and Northern American policies that created the conditions for them: the North American Free Trade Agreement at the end of the last century obliterated the incomes of millions of Mexican small farmers; the abolition of the commodity price agreement for coffee made coca the safe bet in “an unfortunate style of crop diversification”; and shifts in import duties for sugar impoverished Jamaica that then became a cocaine entrepot site for a while.
The grisly farce of “gangs” and upright politicians resisting outrageous demands for some justice and a little reduction in inequality of landholding and income is now being played out in Ecuador. The country has become a focus of cocaine traffic, the “War” constantly shifts locations and the business and the violences that go with it. Now In the face of the October 2023 uprising of self-organised indigenous peoples of the country and its progressive programme, a wave of “Drug gang “ violence breaks out. A favoured gang leader is permitted to escape from prison. Oligarch State repression justifies itself. It is a model perfected by former Filipino President Duarte whose own war on drugs mostly consisted of killing trade unionists. In El Salvador, the Bukele regime’s anti-“gang” emergency law gives the state the power and to imprison and torture any citizen it wishes to, trade unionists and as is likely women defending land against corporate gold mining.
The violences are real enough in central America and other spots on the cocaine trade routes. “Unless you are connected to one of the families that run this country, there is no future here. Either you work for the narcos or you go North,” a Guatemalan man says, one of the thousands of men, women and children trying to escape North and liable to be brutalized either by secure-income US border guards, or by the well-established gangs (narcos) of Mexico to whom US border control has been outsourced even while its current President Obreador is under suspicion of profiting from gang connections and the fentanyl that is killing thousands of North Americans ─ as once the legal Oxy-Contin did – is said to be produced there.