History, as it’s understood in most Western countries, often misses important chapters that leave critical gaps in the story of how modern countries came to be. In Latin America in the 20th century, episodes of guerilla warfare and juntas are acknowledged, along with portrayals of a drug war, usually depicted through popular culture.
What is left out, however, is the clandestine involvement of American intelligence agencies, including the C.I.A. and D.E.A., and how their drug operations were intimately tied to the Latin American anticommunist brigades funded by Western capital throughout the Cold War, and the brutal liquidation of the Left these narco-terrorists often carried out.
Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor at The American Prospect, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, to chronicle some of these missing chapters, including ones connected to the current U.S. Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio.
In her article “The Narco-Terrorist Elite,” Tkacik dives into Rubio’s [peripheral] personal ties to the drug trafficking racket in the 20th century as well as how this history informs his own policy, one that attempts to cynically use drug trafficking as a means to achieving the Trump administration’s extrajudicial goals.
“When Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco trafficking in favor of military operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump’s speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists,” Hedges says.
Host: Chris Hedges
Producer: Max Jones
Intro: Diego Ramos
Crew: Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Victor Castellanos
Transcript
Chris Hedges: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is being held in a Brooklyn jail charged with smuggling cocaine into the United States. But even the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that less than 10 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S. come through Venezuela. The vast majority of cocaine shipments originate in Colombia and move through the Pacific route and Mexico. Added to this, most overdose deaths in the U.S. come from fentanyl. And fentanyl does not come from Venezuela.
There are no shortages of Latin American leaders and military chiefs who are heavily involved in drug trafficking but who are considered close allies of the United States. One of them, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, was pardoned by Donald Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S., a conviction that was justified with far greater evidence than that which supports the charges levied against Maduro.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Trump’s national security advisor, comes out of the rightwing Cuban exile community in Miami, one that has for decades engaged in drug trafficking and a dirty war against those it condemns, like Maduro, of being communists.
The investigative journalist Maureen Tkacik at The Prospect in her article, “The Narco-Terrorist Elite,” looks at the close ties these anti-communist Cubans, including Rubio’s inner circle, have with the drug trade and their full throated support for Latin American leaders who are engaged in drug trafficking, including Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, whose family fruit business is accused of trafficking 700 kilos of cocaine,
Joining me to discuss this long nexus between the drug trade in Latin America and the Cuban anti-communist movement is Maureen Tkacik. It’s a great article and let’s just go through it. I want to begin with how you open it. So you’re talking about Marco Rubio as a teenager working for his brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. Explain.
Rubio, right, with Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro in 2020.
(Alan Santos, Palácio do Planalto / Flickr /CC BY 2.0)
Maureen Tkacik: Well, Marco Rubio has a sister who is substantially older than him, maybe 10, 8 or 10 years older than him, and got married fairly young. She met a man named Orlando in high school. He had come over to Miami in the early 70s, I want to say 1972. They fell in love. His family moved to Las Vegas in 1979.
And I’m not sure why he, I think he has suggested that there was a strike. He thought that he would get better opportunities. He was working as a bartender and a banquet waiter. So he thought that there was a better opportunity in the restaurant business in Las Vegas.
So they go to Las Vegas and his sister doesn’t want to go and she stays in Miami with Orlando and many of his happiest childhood memories are times when they returned for Christmas to Miami, times they went home and Orlando made them a big home-style Cuban meal.
He butchered a whole pig. He put together Marco Rubio’s bicycle at Christmas when he was eight years old. Just this sort of wonderful figure in Marco Rubio’s life when they finally decide to move back to…
Chris Hedges: Let me just interrupt — this is according to Marco Rubio’s memoir, right? This is his version.
Maureen Tkacik: Yes, this is according to Marco Rubio’s memoir and there’s also been biographies. There’s a biography of him written by the Washington Post reporter, Manuel Roig-Franzia. So this is sort of, yes, this is the version of his life.
Orlando Cecilia begins working for a pet store in 1983 and he has Marco, little Marco, literal little Marco doing some odd jobs, building cages and looking after his dogs, pet related jobs. And Marco Rubio makes enough money to go see every single Miami Dolphins home game in, you know, the 1985 season, I think, maybe 1984-1985 season, I gotta get that right.
Anyhow, turns out, 1987 rolls along and Cecilia gets locked up. He’s one of, I think, 11 individuals indicted in this in Operation Giraffe or something like that, some reference to the pet store. Actually, it was a front for a cocaine and marijuana trafficking organization that, what do you know, had been in operation since 1976, was accused of trafficking at least $79 million worth of drugs, speaking in code words about the drugs on wires.
Marco Rubio yearbook photo at Miami Senior High School. (South Miami Senior High School / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
Basically, the idea was that the pet store was a front for a cocaine trafficking organization. Now, the leader’s son of this operation has since starred on a very popular show called “Tiger King.” And he claims now that he only sold coke to support his animal habit because he loves exotic animals so much. But it’s an awful lot of drugs that he trafficked.
And this is a known story. It’s not like I broke the story of Marco Rubio’s brother-in-law being a drug trafficker. This has been well known since 2011. The story was broken by Univision. It somehow did not reach conventional wisdom. I sort of thought it had, but a lot of people have been shocked by this.
But I thought, if I look a little bit into this guy’s drug trafficking organization, I bet it might tell us something about the milieu of Cuban drug trafficking in Miami in the 80s and kind of how that fits into the larger geopolitical scene here, right?
And what do you know? What I didn’t realize until I started peeling away the layers is that cocaine trafficking, drug trafficking generally, in the United States between the late 60s, at least, and the late 80s was totally dominated by Bay of Pigs veterans, veterans of this supposed massive fuck up in American history, this sort of joke that [inaudible] years ago, it was a very, it lives on. It was a very successful sort of network.
All of those guys who were veterans, and I think that there were 1,500 veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, they had a level of prominence and a certain amount of respect in the community.
And a massive percentage of them got into drug trafficking in the late 60s. And this is from the very beginning, I found a story that had been totally forgotten from the early 60s, I think 1964, where a Cuban woman comes to the C.I.A. and says, listen, I think that my husband, I got this anonymous letter, my husband has been at a training camp for Manuel Artime, who was a doctor who led the Bay of Pigs Brigade 5206 or the MRR [Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria], there were various words for the group that launched the attack.
Manuel Artime was the sort of charismatic leader of this group. He was also very controversial. And this woman says, listen, my husband’s disappeared, I haven’t heard from him. He was recruited by Artime to go to Nicaragua to train for an invasion and overthrow of Castro.
But I’m told that he was killed. And indeed, what they discovered is that he had been, it was an inside job and he had been killed because he was complaining about the fact that Artime wasn’t actually training anyone to do any invasions, overthrow Castro; he was training them to smuggle contraband.
And at the time, it was whiskey and clothing, it was not narcotics that they were accused of smuggling. But very quickly, by 1971, there’s this massive drug bust, 150 drug traffickers, the 150 of the biggest drug traffickers in America all get arrested on a single day. [Operation Eagle, June 21-22, 1970 with 135 arrests.] And what do you know, maybe 70 percent of them are Bay of Pigs veterans. [Many of those arrested were part of the C.I.A.’s anti-Castro Operation 40.]
So, one of the Bay of Pigs veterans in the cocaine trafficking, in the drug trafficking scene, not arrested that day is a guy named Guillermo Tabraue. I’m probably mispronouncing that, but Tabraue had probably been a criminal before the revolution. I found an old clipping of him getting arrested for a car theft, as part of a car theft enterprise in Havana in 1959.
He ran a jewelry store that was extremely popular and they sold stolen jewelry. And the jewelry store was renowned for giving police officers and judges very, very good prices on gold cufflinks and Rolex watches. So this was a very popular jewelry store. And at some point he signs up to be a D.E.A./C.I.A. informant.
And because the D.E.A. has just been established [it was established in 1973 and was principally the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) before that], they realize that, shit, all of these C.I.A. affiliated Bay of Pigs veterans are in the cocaine trafficking and heroin trafficking business now, we’d better figure out what they’re up to.
And a gentleman from the C.I.A. comes in and says, I can handle that. I’ll set up a little agency inside this new D.E.A. and I will make sure that we know everything about what the Bay of Pigs veterans are doing in the drug trafficking community. [The C.I.A. had been involved with drug enforcement since the 1950s. ]
Prisoners of Brigade 2506 guarded by Cuban Fidelistas in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, 1961. (Miguel Vinas / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
So Tabraue signs up as an informant for this guy. And at the same time, he gets into trafficking marijuana and soon after, cocaine through the jewelry store and he also has an unlicensed abortion clinic. He’s got a few different… and then later his son comes in and starts the pet store. And this is the enterprise and it’s connected to just an unbelievable array of Bay of Pigs-veterans-run trafficking organizations.
Later, people associated with this, Artime has this accounting whiz kid protege who he trains in these… he sets up this like money laundering sort-of university where he trains this kid in hotel rooms and the kid doesn’t know the names of his instructors or anything, but this guy goes on to become the Medellin Cartel’s lead accountant. So it’s this unbelievable cast of characters.
Very quickly after, the C.I.A. is always talking, they’re always writing memos about how they need to cut these guys loose. But what they really became was this sort of secret police deep state of Latin America. One of these characters is a guy named Félix Rodríguez. He remained a C.I.A. asset, I think. I mean, he’s still alive too, which is saying something, because a lot of these guys have been murdered.
And Félix Rodríguez is a real kind of rich and prolific character in the history of Latin America.
Chris Hedges: Well, let me just interrupt since I met him during the war in El Salvador. He was disguised as a Bolivian captain when they captured Che Guevara, was there for the execution of Che, and he used to show us his wristwatch and tell us that he’d taken it off the body of Che Guevara.
And this was during the whole Iran-Contra [affair], which we’ll get into, but I want to just stop and go back to Rubio.
You write that Rubio’s approval ratings, you’re writing about how they’re the highest in the Republican Party, but you write, “even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump’s single most cynical policy, the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country in the name of fighting drug cartels.”
And then you go on,
“In September, Rubio hailed Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an “incredibly willing partner” who “has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration.”
Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa’s family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022.
Rubio has tirelessly promoted the cause of convicted (alas, just-pardoned) drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. In 2018, Rubio personally and publicly commended Hernández, then president of Honduras, for combating drug traffickers (and supporting Israel), just seven months before his brother was indicted for trafficking 158 tons of cocaine in containers stamped ‘TH,” for Tony Hernández.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo poses for a photo with Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on June 18, 2018. (Wikimedia Commons / State Department photo/ Public Domain)
Rubio has raved about the crime-fighting efforts of Salvadoran and Argentine junior strongmen Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, in spite of the former’s documented alliance with MS-13 and the various Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that enveloped his libertarian political party last fall, as well as both leaders’ slavish devotion to the drug cartels’ single favorite mode of money laundering.
Rubio has been one of the Beltway’s biggest backers of newly elected Chilean president José Antonio Kast, the son of a literal Nazi war criminal who has spent his entire political career lionizing, whitewashing and promising a restoration of the brutal reign of Augusto Pinochet, who personally ordered the Chilean army to build a cocaine laboratory, consolidated the narcotics trade inside his terrifying secret police and then allegedly “disappeared” key conspirators like his secret police chemist Eugenio Berríos.
And for at least a decade, Rubio has lauded, strategized with, and viciously condemned the multitude of criminal investigations into former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whom some describe as a kind of Kissingerian figure to the former Florida senator.
I just want to read that because Rubio has, for years and years and years calling for the overthrow of [Hugo] Chávez and [Nicolás] Maduro, made these alliances with a variety of figures who the D.E.A. and other agencies have investigated and found to be huge drug traffickers.
Maureen Tkacik: Indeed. And again, this is not my area of expertise, I come into writing about Latin America in a very circuitous fashion. But when you examine the evidence, it’s shocking. It’s not shocking to you, you covered Iran-Contra. But I grew up thinking, initially, that C.I.A. involvement in cocaine was some sort of conspiracy theory.
And then I did a little bit of research and realized, oh no, the C.I.A. did traffic cocaine. That happened, there are various excuses and reasons for that but not really that like the C.I.A. and its assets veritably invented cocaine trafficking, really that you must be intelligence affiliated to kind of play in this game.
And the right wing in Latin America, it’s so unbelievably cynical. It makes your head spin. But that the major drug traffickers are fascist right-wing jerks and just who you would think would be involved in such a predatory and destructive industry as narcotics. There you go. And all of what’s really, really surprising to me and I understand that I think to do business in Latin America, in order to be a politician in Latin America, you have to deal with this being one of your industries.
These are the power brokers in your region and you have to contend with them. You can’t sort of pretend that they don’t exist and you can’t put them all away. They are more powerful than you will ever be. But it is the cynicism, and it’s also something that, because of the recently published Fort Bragg Cartel, in which…
Chris Hedges: This is Seth Harp’s book, which I interviewed him [on], but the book is amazing. Yeah, you can explain just a little bit.
Maureen Tkacik: In that book, which is not about Latin America, it’s about Afghanistan, he really digs into, he expresses the similar sense of awe that he felt upon discovering that everything that we had ever said, that we had ever heard about the Taliban trafficking heroin was the opposite of reality.
The Taliban, that was the source of almost all of their popular support, was that they had clamped down on that industry because it was not popular for the reasons that there are destructive industries and addictive narcotics are probably the most destructive and they’re not popular with anyone.
But the Taliban had successfully sort of eradicated that industry in Afghanistan, then we come in, we overthrow the Taliban, and what do you know, the poppies are back like never before.
A U.S. Marine greeting local children working in an opium poppy field in Helmand Province, 2011. (ISAF / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)
Chris Hedges: Well, Hamid Karzai, who was our puppet, and his brother controlled 90 percent of the heroin trade. And what Seth documents in his book is how Delta Force and these other elite units came back, essentially, and started dealing, they could ship the drugs over easily, started dealing drugs all up and down the eastern seaboard.
Maureen Tkacik: And he also documents this really systematic effort by the D.E.A. to suppress the evidence that this is happening. So, they’re saying, hey, look, we’ve tested the heroin and absolutely no heroin from Afghanistan is coming into America. It’s all from Mexico or it’s all from here. And those kinds of efforts that are made to conceal and distort what is plainly happening that everybody knows is also really quite astonishing.
And in the earlier days of the D.E.A., the agency had, I think, I’m not sure, but it seems like the agency had a lot more folks working for it who understood that their relationship with the C.I.A. was going to be adversarial and that in order to like actually eradicate drugs, they were gonna come up against some very powerful people within their own government.
Like that was sort of understood. I think by now the D.E.A. is just fully in on it. But I felt a similar… When he’s been given a lot of interviews describing how rigorously he fact-checked his thesis because the propaganda was so… the certainty was among all of the chattering classes that… it’s sort of like, “Maduro is a terrible, ruthless killer.” So many people will tell you this with all the conviction you could muster, but you don’t really ever know where it comes from.
And in this case, it was the same. We accused the Taliban of being drug traffickers. We were the drug traffickers. And as soon as the Taliban takes charge, they get rid of the drug traffickers, and that’s why we hate them. And that’s why they hate us.
Chris Hedges: Well, we also occupied their country for 20 years. I want to talk about Iran-Contra, which I did cover, because it was during the [Ronald] Reagan administration, and Reagan was having trouble getting funds approved. The Congress was more adversarial. Now it’s completely supine, of course.
And so they set up this system of trafficking drugs to fund the Contras. Edén Pastora, who was a renegade Contra leader operating out of Northern Costa Rica, I knew him as well, was very involved in this, as was Félix Rodríguez, who went by the pseudonym Max Gómez. But talk about that, because it’s an important moment where you’re, in essence, really setting up this infrastructure which continues.
Maureen Tkacik: Sure, I would just like to say the infrastructure did predate Iran-Contra. One of the reasons that these gentlemen have been so resilient in our deep state is because they funded their own, they self-funded their operations. So the Church Committee happens, the C.I.A. endures all of these scandals in the 1970s. You wanna do some covert ops, who are you gonna call?
This was happening very early. Artime was getting in all of these scandals. There was the woman whose husband had been murdered. There was also, he had this wife who was maybe a bit of a prostitute. She’d been the mistress of [Fulgencio] Batista and some other big dictators and she’d also posed for smut, lesbian smut.
And so they send him off to Nicaragua and he sets up a base there. This is sort of the start of this Black Ops regional dirty army that does a lot of coke trafficking, but they also sort of form militias. And there’s something called Operation Condor, which actually turns out to be two things, but maybe they are the same. And it supposedly started with Pinochet and the Argentinian…
Chris Hedges: It was three countries that united to fight communism, led perhaps by Argentina and Chile, right? Operation Condor?
Maureen Tkacik: Yes, so that is the one that most people know and supposedly launched in 1975. But I was speaking to a scholar of this stuff who was saying, really, it started with the murder of Che Guevara posing as a Bolivian colonel. But Félix Rodríguez, this Bay of Pigs veteran and this sort of long-time C.I.A. asset, and he also, he not only took Guevara’s Rolex, but apparently he would brag that he had cut off his finger and sent it to Fidel Castro.
C.I.A. agent Felix Rodriguez, left, with Che Guevara, center, before Guevara was executed in Bolivia, in 1967. (AP Photo / Courtesy of Felix Rodriguez / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
So I’ve been told that, this is in 1967, this is sort of the soft launch of Operation Condor and the beginning of this kind of like cooperation between all of these right-wing forces throughout Latin America.
There’s another Operation Condor in Mexico that started in the early 70s that was a crackdown. It was a specifically sort of D.E.A.-Mexican military project that cracked down on marijuana farmers.
And this was… I don’t know if they were the same thing but it had some of the same effects. It was this real crackdown on left wing sort of guerrilla movements, labor organizers. It was very easy for them to get sort of rounded up in this blitz to eradicate marijuana throughout Mexico.
So, all together we see an enormous amount of cooperation. A lot of it is orchestrated by the C.I.A. Pinochet at some point comes in and does some things that the C.I.A. supposedly doesn’t know about.
I read one interesting passage about how the C.I.A. wasn’t really on board with Operation Condor. They weren’t entirely behind it and they were very, very intent on making sure that it wasn’t headquartered in Miami because that would have been the obvious place to headquarter such a mission. But all of these guys funded their operations by trafficking massive quantities of drugs.
And this is something that like there is on the left, I think there’s this sort of conventional wisdom. This public intellectual, Michael Massing, he’s got a Genius Grant, he’s written a few books on drug policy. And his line on Gary Webb was always like, it didn’t really matter that the C.I.A. was…
Chris Hedges: Let me just interrupt for people that don’t know, Gary Webb was the reporter who really broke the story, he did break the story of the shipment of cocaine by Contras and C.I.A.-affiliated operatives into American cities like Oakland. The press, the establishment press, worked overtime, including, I was at the New York Times, to discredit him.
They discredited him not by going down and checking on his reporting or trying to re-report what he did, but by getting background briefings at the C.I.A., and then he ultimately committed suicide.
Maureen Tkacik: Yes, and with the benefit of hindsight, it is absolutely mind-blowing to read any of the reports from Iran-Contra or a lot of the sources that I used in this story just came from some of the collections of declassified JFK files, right? Because these guys also were deeply involved in that assassination and others. You can look up, anybody who was a Cuban exile in Miami in the 60s, you can probably see if they’ve had any prominence.
You can probably find some information about them in these files. But anyway, you look at the evidence that was just known by the end of the 80s about the C.I.A. involvement and the Contra involvement in drug trafficking and this wasn’t new news. [Robert Parry, the founder of Consortium News, first broke the story for the Associated Press of Contra involvement in the drug trade.]
One thing that Gary Webb really, a connection that he really nailed down was the connection between the drug dealers that really first popularized crack in the… I think Rick Ross was the name of one of them in 1985, because when crack hit, I mean, it hit, it changed everything. When I started writing for newspapers in the mid-late nineties, crack was still people under the influence, it [was] the source of a lot of violence in cities.
It was a drug that really had just a devastating effect on already devastated American cities. And he nailed down the connection between this C.I.A., this just massive supply of cheap drugs and this desperation to find new customers for this stuff. And to do that, they had to go to people who had way less money than your average cocaine consumer. And that’s what they did with it. This supply matters.
You know, there’s this idea that the only way you can really fight drug addiction and the scourge of illegal drugs is by working on the demand. And there’s an element of truth to that. It makes a lot of sense. But the fact is, our government’s run by drug traffickers, our institutions of power. And that’s one of the reasons, look at what the Sacklers did. That was a supply side addiction epidemic.
And we allow these things for whatever reason, but the evidence was absolutely overwhelming that the C.I.A., that the highest levels of the American intelligence apparatus were deeply involved. And even that, there’s a documentary that came out recently that has a lot of quite a few D.E.A. and other intelligence officers from the 1980s saying that Félix Rodríguez himself, remember this character who assassinated Che Guevara, Bay of Pigs veteran…
Chris Hedges: He didn’t actually assassinate Guevara. It was a Bolivian soldier shot, but he was there. Just as a small point, he was there.
Maureen Tkacik: He cut his finger off after he was dead.
Chris Hedges: Well, no, he sent the… He is assassinated in the sense that they ordered, they determined that there was no way Che was going to — he was captured alive, of course — was going to live, but he didn’t actually pull the trigger. They got some poor Bolivian soldier to do it. That’s just a small footnote. You can read Jon Lee Anderson’s great book on Che.
Maureen Tkacik: Sorry. But Félix Rodríguez is supposedly now, according to these folks, the guy who actually ordered the murder, the torture and subsequent murder of a D.E.A. agent who had sort of run afoul of it had become sort of a whistleblower named Kiki Camarena.
Chris Hedges: This is Kiki Camarena.
Maureen Tkacik: Yeah, and that is something that the cartels had long sort of been blamed for. Now somebody tried to, I think, sue the Netflix documentarian for defamation, but Félix Rodríguez, who’s still alive and still kicking, indeed, recently hosted none other than Álvaro Uribe, former Colombian Prime Minister and good, good friend of Marco Rubio at a Bay of Pigs reunion event.
So Félix Rodríguez is still a figure of some prominence in Miami. He’s got a lot of blood on his hands, allegedly and not allegedly and by his own testimony. But this is the type of guy who is sort of in the milieu of this crew that ran this drug trafficking organization that Marco Rubio’s brother-in-law had sort of ascended relatively to the number two spot in essentially.
Another thing that is interesting about Rubio’s own biography is that he has said that his father trained at 18, I forget where, but he trained in some training camp in Central America to — this would have been back in the 40s — for a mission that never came off to overthrow and possibly assassinate [Rafael] Trujillo, the 30 year dictator of the Dominican Republic, who was sort of a C.I.A. asset and then sort of a C.I.A. thorn in its side for many years.
So I don’t know, that’s the only sign I’ve ever gotten that Rubio’s own family was involved in any of this stuff. His family came to Miami before the revolution, escaping Batista, and then subsequently would move back and forth, trying to kind of scrape some money together because I don’t think that anybody in his family was particularly privileged.
Rubio would change all that. And one thing that’s really also fascinating is that the prosecutor that prosecuted his brother-in-law and the entire drug trafficking organization, then the following year prosecuted Manuel Noriega in a really fascinating trial that is another one of these unbelievable windows into the C.I.A. involvement in drug trafficking.
Because Noriega’s defense attorney, and a lot of evidence was suppressed in this case, but his defense attorney was constantly cross-examining various government witnesses saying like, okay, wasn’t the C.I.A. paying Noriega this whole time as well? And Noriega claimed that he’d made $10 million cooperating with the C.I.A. over the years.
Panamanian military leader Manuel Noriega in a 1990 mugshot taken after his capture by U.S. forces. (U.S. Marshals Service / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)
They never had any problem with him facilitating money laundering. And that’s the other thing, so there’s a lot of rich history. That prosecutor then, his wife, gives Rubio his first job literally like the year after the indictment. I think that this might still be going on during the trial or directly after the trial. The prosecutor’s wife, Ileana Ros[-Lehtinen], God, what is this last name? I can never… she’s a giant in the Congress in Miami, a good friend of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
And her father was another Cuban exile deeply involved in Voice of America, I believe [he hosted shows for U.S.-funded Radio y Televisión Martí.] But this congresswoman gave Marco Rubio an internship when he got out of high school. They were very early on, it was decided that he was sort of a preternatural political talent. His ties to drug traffickers never stopped Marco Rubio, but he is very sensitive about the story, he really went on a little jihad against Univision when they broke the story.
And it’s just not really necessarily part of the conventional wisdom of who he is. And I think it’s important not because I would accuse Marco Rubio of being involved in drug trafficking himself, but understanding the landscape of social capital, not to sound annoying, in Miami in the 1980s to understand how intertwined right-wing politics and drug trafficking are in that community and how sort of this cognitive dissonance is just something that everybody lives and breathes down there.
Drug crimes are only illegal when the wrong people are committing them and that is something that is understood in, I think, throughout Latin America that we don’t seem to comprehend.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, you succinctly write,
“Drug traffickers who were allied with the C.I.A.’s ideological objectives were protected, assisted and/or recruited as assets, while drug traffickers who bribed or cooperated with leftists, crossed the Agency, or outlived their usefulness were set up for prosecution or discarded.”
That’s precisely correct. And I want to also mention, and you may have heard this, but the common understanding is that Maduro, like [Claudia] Sheinbaum in Mexico, was fairly clean.
Maureen Tkacik: Oh my god, yes. I have read the indictment against Maduro. There are episodes, it’s a strange document. Nothing like the indictment of Juan Orlando Hernández, which is very, it’s a classic indictment. The evidence is there. You see it. I don’t know how the grand jury that… I could see a Florida grand jury going for this, but it’s not very strong.
And one of the things, one of the pieces of evidence, one of the passages that was most bizarre to me was this, they have a section about toward this 2013 drug bust, the biggest drug bust in the drug seizure in the history of commercial air travel was 2013 Charles de Gaulle Airport, probably one of the biggest, most busiest airports in the world — 1.3 tons of cocaine are found in 33 suitcases in this Air France flight from Caracas.
Immediately Maduro, who is very new, Chavez has just died, he’s just taken over, he has 25 airport security and sort of military officers who are involved in the airport operation arrested. And then this strange British guy gets arrested for having claimed on a wiretap that he was the actual owner of the 1.3 tons of cocaine.
He’s a very strange figure, supposedly a big crime boss in the U.K., but he’s never really been written about before that except for some very strange harassment charges, doesn’t seem particularly bright.
And his lawyer claims, and then he later claims, no, he was just saying that the coke was his on the wiretap to get them off his back. I don’t understand. I’ve been meaning to kind of look into this a little bit more closely, but it seems like it was some sort of setup, this whole thing. It’s a very strange way to try and traffic cocaine, just putting it into suitcases in a commercial airliner that is destined for the busiest passenger airport in the world.
Something about that is a little off to me. The whole thing is a little off. And there was never any suggestion that Maduro had any involvement or knowledge in that. And at the time, none of the investigations revealed anything of the sort. But it’s used in this, it’s deployed in this indictment as like this sign of what an unbelievably prodigious drug trafficker Maduro is. So a lot of it is stuff like that.
There’s something about Malaysian heating oil. The fact is that commerce itself in Venezuela is mostly criminalized because of the severity of the sanctions that we’ve imposed over the years on that country.
I think that we almost feel like, as you see with the blowing up the oil tankers, there’s this sense of entitlement that we have to sort of get our way with Venezuela because we’ve literally criminalized most of the economic activity that that country is involved in.
Another thing about Maduro is that he has two nephews who were apparently arrested for narco trafficking a few years back and they sort of claimed that they were framed.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, 2016. (Cancillería del Ecuador via Flickr)
They don’t seem particularly intelligent. They were trying to do a drug deal so that they could get some money to win, I think, the 2018 election. But this massive quantity of cocaine apparently was found in their room at La Romana, I think that’s what it’s called. It’s a resort in the Dominican Republic. It’s owned by the Fanjul family.
One Bob Menendez in 2013 claimed that he was, that the Fanjul family was trying to set him up by sending whores to his villa at La Romana. It just triggered something in my mind, like, hmm, I wonder if there’s something to that. I wonder if that cocaine they found really belonged to the narco-nephews. What’s really going on there? I wanna delve a lot more deeply into this, but the indictment against him, I don’t understand how they think…
Now, Miami, if they were trying him in Miami, he might be a dead man. But in New York, are they going to get a conviction in New York? On this? It seems absurd.
Chris Hedges: I want to go back to Rubio. You’re right, when Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco trafficking in favor of military operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump’s speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists, yes.
But he is also pining for a kind of Cold War-era blanket license to commit dirty war in the name of some bigger goal. I was telling you before we went into the interview that I was in Argentina at the end of the dirty war.
Of course, Carter had imposed some sanctions, which Reagan lifted, a full-throated support under the Reagan administration for this junta, which disappeared 30,000 of its own citizens. But it was common knowledge that in police stations there were large industrial-sized freezers full of cocaine.
And when we talk about that dirty war, that nexus, which I think you capture in the story between drug trafficking and the desaparecidos, the killing of labor union leaders, student leaders, they’re intimately intertwined.
Maureen Tkacik: There’s a book called Powderburns, I believe, by a former D.E.A. agent, recalling his odyssey of being rat fucked by C.I.A. guys in his efforts to combat drug trafficking in Latin America in the 80s and early 90s. And at one point he recalls a few conversations where somebody’s like, well, the war on drugs is important, but the war on communism is even more important.
And he’s like, where are you from? Because I’m from, I forget, I’m from a city that’s been devastated by deindustrialization and now is being brought to its knees by addiction. I’m not a fan of communism, but I don’t really think that it’s a threat to my society. He just describes how he was not able to understand that rationalization. But now we’re using the drug war as its own, as the same sort of blanket license.
And what it really is, I guess, is the same as the Cold War, is this country has decided to threaten… This is another thing, there’s so much talk about the oil curse, and it is true. I grew up, a lot of my youth I spent in China, my dad was in the State Department, and I always wondered, gosh, the Taiwanese, they had a lobby just like the Miami lobby, the Cuba lobby and the Zionist lobby, they have the China lobby.
And they trafficked drugs and they were bad guys and they were right-wing. But at some point, maybe they switched drugs for bicycles and then semiconductors and they started to build factories in China even though they were technically at war and those two places are very interdependent right now.
There’s a lot of parallels that we like to make, but why were they allowed? Why was China allowed to build an industrial economy? And why did we allow our agents in Taiwan to facilitate this? Would they have been even able to do it if they hadn’t sort of all done it in Taiwan first and they had the language, yada yada? It’s just such a different story.
And it seems like part of the benefit that China had other than its 1 billion people was that they didn’t have any resources to exploit. It had to be their human capital, as they like to say in the business. But, we do not allow countries with resources to nationalize those resources in hopes of trying to nationalize the surpluses that they might bring and then diversify their economy into something more sustainable.
The resource curse is something that countless nations, obviously Libya, Iran, Venezuela, Russia have all tried to sort of reverse and figure out how to deal with and whenever they do, they feel our wrath. And so it really pisses me off when pundits talk about the resource curse as though it’s not really the sort of gratuitous sanctions for having the temerity to threaten hegemony curse.
Chris Hedges
Well, that’s how [Allende] was overthrown in ‘73. It was at the service of Anaconda Copper. It’s how [Jacobo] Árbenz was overthrown in ‘54 in Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit. As soon as you go, and that’s what’s happening with Venezuela. Trump, unlike previous presidents, was quite open about it. It’s about the oil, the largest reserves of oil in the world.
And the article is smart and good and people should read it, “The Narco-Terrorist Elite.” It’s in The American Prospect, where Moe works as the investigative editor. It’s really a fine piece of journalism and important for understanding what’s driving this policy and who Marco Rubio is. Thank you, Moe.
Maureen Tkacik: Thank you so much. It’s an honor.
Chris Hedges: And thanks to Victor [Padilla], Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones], Sofia [Menemenlis] and Thomas [Hedges], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
