ANTI-IMPERIALISM AS AN ALIBI TO BUILD NARCO-STATES

Carlos Sánchez Berzaín
november 7, 2017 

(Interamerican Institute for Democracy) The regimes of Cuba with the Castro’s, Venezuela with Chavez and Maduro, Bolivia with Evo Morales, Nicaragua with Daniel Ortega, and Ecuador with Rafael Correa, have proclaimed themselves to be “antiimperialist” and against the United States and on that basis, have recreated and developed different ways to cause harm, weaken, discredit, and pretend to defeat their enemy, the North American imperialism. They have ousted governments, control governmental organizations and institutions, support guerrillas and terrorists, exert control of the press, have instituted new dictatorships, implemented regimes of organized crime, and use the anti-imperialism rhetoric as an alibi to build narco-states.

Anti-imperialism is a political expression of the later part of the 19^th Century used by Englishman Jeremy Bentham and its impetus in America is attributed to Mark Twain when in 1898 he founded the United States’ Anti-imperialist League to oppose the US’ actions in Cuba’s war. Twain considered Jose Marti as “Latin-America’s first drafter of the anti-imperialist thought” that “related from its very origins, the anti-imperialist thought with the anti-north American feelings”. According to Twain, Marti thought that “Latin America’s nations are more free and prosperous the more they get away from the United States”.

Anti-imperialism served the Castroist guerrilla movements in the region. During the seventies, anti-imperialism formulated political economic programs known as the “programs of national liberation” founded on the “independence, sovereignty and self-determination, opposition to imperialism, anti-Americanism, industrialism, the promotion of internal markets, rejection to multinational enterprises, nationalizations, government owned enterprises, third worldism, and Latin-American unity …”. In the 21^st Century, Castro, Chavez, Correa, Morales, and Ortega widely spread the validity of anti-imperialism considering that “the globalization per se is an imperialistic phenomenon” and applying state run programs, nationalizers, and third worldism plagued with corruption that have taken their nations to situations of crisis and backwardness with still unforeseeable consequences.

Invoking anti-imperialism has served the governments of the “Castroist-Chavist” system well to eliminate democracy in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador… expanding Cuba’s Castroist model with the absolute control of power, the disappearance of the Rule of Law, the use of the Judicial Branch for political persecution, jailing, and exiling members from opposition parties, controlling the press, and electoral manipulation by institutionalizing fraud and giving the ruling party an unconditional advantage, systematically violating human rights, legislating “despicable laws” that secure the impunity and their indefinite tenure in the government …

Anti-imperialism has also been used to turn Venezuela (the country with the largest oil reserves in the world) into a country with a humanitarian crisis, hunger, and misery. The anti-imperialism regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, some sooner than the others, are taking their nations to the abysm of secretive amounts of multimillionaire debt, the submissive delivery of their natural resources to the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, to the technological backwardness, to the squandering of the boom in the prices of natural resources, to governmental models that bring greater poverty with unlimited corruption such as in the Odebrecht case, to the creation of a novo rich elite in the families and inner circles of Castro, Chavez, Maduro, Morales, Correa, and Ortega…

Anti-imperialism is the “ideological justification” to establish narco-states and sustain them. Castroist-Chavist regimes have placed emphasis on promoting and growing narcotics trafficking destined to the United States as a component part of the anti-imperialism’s “anti-Americanism”, to the point of getting Venezuela with Nicolas Maduro and Bolivia with Evo Morales to be identified as narco-states, in other words as countries “whose political institutions are influenced by narcotics trafficking and whose leadership simultaneously serve in governmental functions and as members of narcotics trafficking networks, under the guise of their legal empowerment.”

In the Venezuelan case the concept of a “narco-state” is met as evidenced by the legal prosecution of Maduro’s nephews who admitted to have trafficked the FARC’s drugs, or the “Pollo Carvajal’s” case freed from DEA’s custody in an official narco-state operation of Venezuela, or the Tareck El Aissami’s case that involved Venezuela’s vice-president appointed by Maduro himself, and many more.   Bolivia is identified as a “narco-state” because its Head of State and Government, Evo Morales, is also the head of the coca harvesters’ unions who under his helm have incremented their cultivation of illicit coca leaf (and with it the production of drugs) from 3,000 to more than 40,000 hectares and the cultivation of the legal coca leaf from 12,000 to 20,000 hectares. Evo Morales’ top anti-narcotics drug czar was captured in Panama and sentenced for narcotics trafficking in the United States. Recent arrests in Brazil and Argentina show members of the Morales’ government as narcos, all while government officials and their PR efforts spread fake news against persecuted members of the opposition parties and exiles.

The journal “Veja do Brasil” just published actual data of presumed “links between La Paz, Havana, and the Mexican cartels who traffic drugs into the US.”   The book titled “Cocaine’s King: My Life with Roberto Suarez Gomez and the Birth of the First Narco-State” (amazon.com) provides precise data on the role of the dictator Castro ever since the seventies. The relationship of the FARC from Colombia with Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, is without a doubt, in politics, violence, and narco-logistics. The increase in cocaine production is identified as a source of support to Islamic terrorist groups who have also proclaimed themselves to be anti-imperialist. Anti-imperialism is an alibi of organized crime regimes who use narcotics trafficking as an “anti-imperialist weapon”.

Published in Spanish by Diario las Americas on Sunday November 5th, 2017

Translated from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas, Member of the American Translators Association, ATA # 234680.