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President Donald Trump has pardoned former president Juan Orlando Hernandez and released him from a 45-year prison sentence in the US for weapons and drug trafficking offenses as the country launches strikes on Venezuelan boats and threatens a land invasion in response to alleged drug trafficking networks.

Since September, US military strikes on at least 21 Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 80 people. The Trump administration claims that these vessels were importing drugs into the US, but it has not provided any supporting evidence to support these claims.

In addition, the US has a long history of using drug gangs and narcotics trafficking to support its international policy objectives, starting with the Opium Wars with China in the 19th century.

Is the US really fighting a drug trafficking crisis in Venezuela?

According to the UNODC, cocaine production reached a record 3,708 tonnes globally in 2023.

However, it was discovered that cocaine originated in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, and that Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, not Venezuela, which is only a small transit corridor, is where most cocaine travels.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported last year that 84 percent of US-seized cocaine comes from Colombia and did not mention Venezuela as a source.

Why did Trump pardon Hernandez if he wants to crack down on drugs?

On November 28, US President Donald Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, a member of the nation’s right-wing National Party, for drug use.

On Monday this week, Hernandez was released from his 45-year prison sentence at the high-security facility of USP Hazelton in West Virginia in the US.

Hernandez was found guilty of conspiring to import cocaine into the US and of possessing machineguns in the US in 2022 after being extradited there in 2022.

In a social media post on Friday, Trump claimed Hernandez had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” and that he had been justified in pardoning him.

However, some observers believe this shows that Trump’s real objective in targeting Venezuela is a desire to unseat the country’s left-wing president, Nicolas Maduro, who is accused by the US of having links to drug cartels and of even overseeing drug trafficking networks. A reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest was recently increased to $50 million.

How has the US previously been a source of drug trafficking?

The US has been accused of making use of drug trafficking networks to support its own aims at many points throughout history.

We examine US involvement in drug trafficking for the first time in nearly two centuries.

1800s: The Opium Wars

Trump has accused China of recently supplying the US with fentanyl and has used trade tariffs to compel it to cooperate in preventing the flow of this highly addictive drug.

However, in a bid to increase their influence through trade, Western imperial powers like the United Kingdom, France, and the US were pushing opiates in the opposite direction 200 years ago.

The imperial powers were facing a trade imbalance with China due to high demand in the West for Chinese goods such as tea, porcelain and silk.

British traders began importing Indian-grown opium into southern China as a way to correct this imbalance. Soon, American traders were turning to opium to boost their own exports to China.

In 1839, Chinese forces attempted to crack down on the inflow of opium, confiscating and destroying it and marking the beginning of the First Opium War. In a naval conflict between the British and Chinese, the British won the battle of 1842. American traders were active in China and reportedly brought opium from Turkiye and India, despite the US’s lack of military involvement in the conflict.

In 1844, the US and China signed the Treaty of Wanghia, their first treaty together. In reality, this treaty opened five ports for Western-Chinese trade in Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai, enabling US traders to increase their opium sales.

20 years later, between 1856 and 1860, the Second Opium War occurred. French and British forces fought with diplomatic assistance from Russia and protection from American forces. One of Britain’s top demands was forced upon China to sign a treaty legalizing opium, which was under pressure.

1960s-1970s: In Laos during the Vietnam War.

Between 1955 and 1975, the US was engaged in armed conflict in Vietnam and parts of neighbouring Laos and Cambodia in a war between the communist North Vietnam, backed by the Soviet Union and China, and anti-communist South Vietnam, backed by the US.

To combat communist forces in Southeast Asia, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted covert operations in Laos, which is northwest of Vietnam, at this time.

According to a 2003 CIA report, CIA officers trained militias from indigenous tribes in Laos to combat Laotian forces and the Pathet Lao, a Laotian communist group.

At the time, the Hmong were heavily economically reliant on the cultivation of opium poppies as a cash crop.

The CIA secretly operated an airline called Air America to transport opium from remote mountain regions to be sold in Southeast Asia and international markets, including the US, according to historian Alfred W. McCoy, who wrote the 1972 book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. The funds were used to pay for the militias.

McCoy presented the findings of his book during a 1972 congressional testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The CIA has never formally acknowledged direct involvement with the drug operation.

1980s: During the Soviet-Afghan War

In 1979, the Soviet army launched an invasion of Afghanistan to bolster a communist government facing internal threats. The Soviet Union fought the mujahideen, an affiliate of the Afghan rebels, between 1979 and 1989.

Poppy cultivation thrived in mujahideen‑held provinces such as Helmand in southern Afghanistan and Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan. According to McCoy and other historians, CIA-backed mujahideen fighters used opium cultivation and trafficking to fund a large portion of their war effort. Through Pakistan and Iran, both Middle Eastern and European markets were served by trafficking routes.

The Soviet-Afghan War resulted in one of the sharpest spikes in global heroin supply in the late 1980s. Afghanistan produced 79 percent of the world’s illegal opium in 1999, according to a UNODC report from 2001.

In addition, a CIA report from 1986 asserts that Soviet troops frequently used drugs in Afghanistan and that those soldiers smuggled them back to the Soviet Union.

The CIA has never publicly admitted to backing opium cultivation and trafficking in Afghanistan.

Post-Afghan War spillover to Pakistan in the 1980s

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA partnered with Pakistan’s Inter‑Services Intelligence (ISI) to arm the Afghan mujahideen as part of Operation Cyclone.

Afghanistan’s Golden Crescent region, which includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, saw a rise in heroin production as a result of the war. The tribal belt of Pakistan, particularly the provinces of Balochistan and modern-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, served as gateways for the West’s heroin exports.

1980s: The Iran-Contra Affair

The CIA supported local efforts to impose itself on communist forces in Latin America from the 1950s until the 1980s.

In Nicaragua, the CIA supported a right-wing organization called the Contras, who were waging a 1980s-era war against the left-wing Cuba-backed Sandinista government. In 1985, then-US President Ronald Reagan heaped praise on the Contras, calling them “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers”.

However, all of this occurred in the context of a different international conflict in which the US was interested.

Iran and Iraq engaged in combat between 1980 and 1988, which started with Iraq’s invasion of Iran. In 1985, Iran secretly requested to buy weapons from the US. The US was unable to sell arms to Iran in public at this time due to an arms embargo.

Iran was given the weapons by the Reagan administration so that the US could strengthen its position in the Middle East and secure the release of American hostages, mostly diplomats and missionaries, who were being held by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

While Reagan had initially publicly denied selling weapons to Iran, he later admitted that the weapons had been sold to secure the hostages ‘ release.

The Boland Amendment, which forbids US funding for the Contras, was passed around the same time that the US Congress passed. Without the consent of the Congress, members of the National Security Council used profits from Iran’s arms sales to fund the Contras.

In his 1998 book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, US investigative journalist Gary Webb traced links between Contra supporters and the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles.

According to Webb, a group connected to the Contras smuggled cocaine into the US, which was later sold as crack cocaine in Los Angeles, ultimately triggering the epidemic. The Contras were then supported with the money raised. Webb claimed that the CIA knew about these transactions and backed them.

During the Manuel Noriega era, 1970-1980

Manuel Noriega was a military dictator who ruled Panama from 1983 to 1989.

Since the 1960s, Noriega has been a valuable and CIA informant. He obtained information about Latin American political movements and Soviet and Cuban activities in the area.

Simultaneously, Noriega is alleged to have been a facilitator for Colombian drug cartels, particularly the cocaine ring, the Medellin Cartel, enabling the shipment of cocaine through Panama. According to local media reports, Medellin was alleged to be responsible for more than half of the cocaine smuggled into the US at the time.

Noriega cooperated with US intelligence until the US Justice Department indicted him in 1988 on charges including money laundering, racketeering, and drug trafficking.

1980s-1990s: During the coup, in Haiti.

Haitian politics were in turmoil during the late 1980s and the middle 1990s. A succession of coups, military rulers and short‑lived democratic governments destabilised the country.

Numerous Haitian military and police officers with connections to CIA intelligence networks were also accused of facilitating the flow of cocaine into the US at this time.

These officers allegedly used Haiti as a port of transshipment for cocaine into Florida and other areas of the US as intermediaries for Colombian cartels.

Have US soldiers been accused of drug trafficking?

Yes, there have been instances where US soldiers have been accused of drug trafficking.

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, a book by investigative reporter Seth Harp, was released this year. It details the ten years of extensive corruption committed by US Special Forces at Fort Bragg.

In 2023, at least 17 service members of the United States Forces Korea (USFK) were arrested for smuggling drugs in South Korea. There hasn’t been a public update on this.