Trump is using the “war on drugs” to justify imperialist aggression in Latin America. As he put it, “The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels.”

The drug epidemic pulls on the heartstrings of American workers. Drug overdoses have killed over a million people since 1999. But Trump and his gang of reactionaries are lying. The number one enabler of drug trafficking is the American ruling class itself.

Wall Street’s coffers are overflowing with money tied to the drug trade. The opioid epidemic was jumpstarted by pharmaceutical giants like Purdue Pharma, which made a killing from the over-prescribing of addictive painkillers.

American imperialism uses drugs to secure its dominance across the world, in particular in Latin America. The infamous “School of the Americas”—also known as the “School of the Assassins”—has served as a training ground for dictators and drug lords across the region.

Mexico

In Mexico, Los Zetas—one of the most violent drug cartels in history—originated as an elite unit of the Mexican military trained by US Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Upon returning to Mexico, they used the tactics they learned in North Carolina to form their own cartel.

Cartel wars created a very profitable market for weapons in Mexico. Gangs now need high-end military equipment to match their competitors in a new arms race. There is only one legal gun store in Mexico, so 75% of the demand is met through the United States. Dubbed the “Iron River,” American arms manufacturers use backchannels to offload their surplus weapons, fueling a drug war that kills over 25,000 people each year. Money made from these “legal” weapons sales ends up flowing all the way to Wall Street.

The most powerful cartels are billion-dollar businesses. They need to launder their money. Mom-and-pop laundering operations won’t do at this scale. But big banks don’t ask indelicate questions when given hundreds of millions of dollars of “capital investment.”

In 2024, TD bank got a slap on the wrist for laundering cartel money, just 12 years after HSBC was caught doing the same. This practice is not limited to the boardrooms of two banks—all of Wall Street is gushing with bloody drug money, as finance capital and imperialism have a synergistic relationship with cartels.

Nicaragua and Panama

In 1979, revolution erupted in Nicaragua, the poorest country in Latin America. After 43 years of US-backed dictatorship, the masses overthrew the hated Somoza government. Since this threatened US multinationals’ interests, the CIA funded and trained the counterrevolutionary “Contras”—among them cocaine producers and distributors. The secret agency facilitated the Contras’ drug smuggling into the US, leading to the crack epidemic.

Manuel Noriega of Panama was a key conduit for these transactions. First as intelligence director then as national dictator, he was on the CIA payroll while running his own drug-smuggling business throughout the 1980s.

Colombia

Historically a key ally of US imperialism, the Colombian ruling class regularly leans on cocaine cartels to assassinate labor leaders, socialists, and communists. In the 1980s, government-supported paramilitaries decimated the left-wing Uníon Patriotica—murdering close to 8,000 of its activists.

Among the perpetrators were prolific drug lords Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez and the Castaño Brothers. Salvatore Mancuso, leader of a reactionary paramilitary group, recently admitted that these groups merge seamlessly with drug cartels, politicians, and big capitalists, all under the auspices of US imperialism.

It is the highest hypocrisy for Trump to call Petro—the first left-leaning president who came to power on the back of the 2021 general strike—a “Drug Lord,” when the US has relied on the Colombian ruling class’ links to the cartels to crush dissent for decades.

Worldwide horror

None of this is unique to Latin America. During the Vietnam War, the US used the heroin trade to support its puppet regimes in South Vietnam and Laos. The “Golden Triangle” of Southeast Asia, a region dominated by the French and later the US imperialists, was the world’s leading producer of heroin until US-occupied Afghanistan took the top spot. Here too, the US leaned on, armed, and supported local drug lords to fight the Taliban.

For the US to use drugs as its casus belli for its imperialist aggression in Latin America is the height of hypocrisy. American imperialism will not stop the cartels. It will only cause more suffering, wars, chaos, and drug epidemics.

This is one more reason why communists are internationalists: the drug war has brought untold horror to workers across Latin America and here at home. Fighting the scourge of addiction requires a militant struggle against our own ruling class.