It is not difficult to see why critics have called Trump’s forays in Latin America another instance of his hypocrisy and lies. Less than a month after Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who had recently been sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking, U.S. armed forces abducted sitting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on the same charges. But as Aslı Bâli observes, while Trump’s approach to rival powers like Russia and China diverges from past administrations, his actions “punching down” against the Global South follow the established pattern of U.S. imperialism. These seemingly contradictory moves reveal what the metaphorical ‘War on Drugs’ has always been about: maintaining conditions for global capitalism with the U.S. at its helm.
The Remaking of Empire
Experts have long viewed the War on Drugs as a failure. As a report by the DEA recently admitted, drug purity and potency remain high, prices remain low, and availability remains steady. Worse, increased border security has pushed traffickers to pursue drugs, like fentanyl, that are easier to manufacture and transport. But this focus on “failure” misconstrues the point of the war. As a mechanism for capitalist imperialism, it has been remarkably successful.
The War on Drugs facilitates not only direct accumulation for the security industry, but also the restructuring of formerly colonized economies for land and wealth extraction — a priority for the U.S. since it became the leading power of a global economic system (capitalism) that requires imperialism during an era of rapid decolonization.
To understand how this occurred, we need to begin with the economic context imposed upon the Global South in the 1970s and 80s. As I have explored in greater depth elsewhere, through its monetary and financial policy, the United States manufactured the Third World Debt Crisis, in which many formerly colonized countries, especially in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, were unable to repay large amounts of foreign debt. As Joseph Halevi and Yanis Varoufakis have argued, this crisis was more effective in breaking the efforts of newly decolonized states to assert economic independence “than any military operation.”
Desperate for IMF loans, much of the Global South agreed to implement austerity measures. As a result, they were forced to abandon efforts to replace colonialism-structured plantation economies that served a metropole with diverse, sustainable economies that could repair the de-industrialization they suffered under imperialism. They also agreed to enter into trade and investment agreements with the Global North that made them again become captive markets to the Global North and rendered their land and labor available for pillaging. This has led to the dispossession of many peasant and indigenous communities. Alienated from their means of subsistence, these communities have been forced to seek the scarce employment offered by industries owned by foreign investors. Accordingly, the profits of the remaining goods that are produced in these communities are largely captured by foreign capital.
With few other options, many of these dispossessed communities turned to illicit drug production. The export earnings from the illicit drug industry has supported the remaking of colonial economies because these earnings have softened the blow from the high rates of dispossession, dislocation, and unemployment left in the wake of IMF-imposed austerity measures and predatory trade and investment agreements, dampening revolutionary backlash. These earnings also enable Global South countries to finance the foreign debt they owe to these very same institutions — a significant source of wealth transfer from the Global South to the Global North.
Beyond creating the conditions for and benefitting from drug production in Central and South America, the U.S., through its War on Drugs, has also financed repressive police, military, and paramilitary forces that serve to expropriate yet more land for U.S. capital, while waging dirty wars against labor, environmental, and indigenous and peasant movements opposing this dispossession. This was most evident in Clinton’s Plan Colombia, which empowered the Colombian military’s repression of leftist movements. As Lesley Gill describes it, Plan Colombia unleashed “[a] violent counter-agrarian reform [that] washed over the countryside, consolidating some of the most fertile lands into the hands of paramilitaries and the elites whose interests they served.” (And even when the War on Drugs’ repressive tactics have directly targeted drug crop eradication, the “balloon effect” shifts production into previously untapped areas, further dispossessing peasants to make more land available for capital accumulation.)
The War on Drugs has also served as moral cover for disciplinary mechanisms deployed against Global South powers that resist U.S.-led capitalist imperialism. For instance, while the 1989 invasion of Panama and capture of Manuel Noriega were justified as part of the War on Drugs, the primary motivation behind the operation was to bring into power a friendly government that would ensure continued U.S. access to the Panama Canal. In serving this role, the War on Drugs is merely the latest disguise the United States has used to maintain its claim to moral leadership while deploying warmaking, economic sanctions, and political interference to undermine any threats to the global capitalist order and its privileged position within that order. During the Cold War, the crusade against the bogeyman of communism accomplished this task. The fall of the Soviet Union then gave way to the War on Terror in the Eastern Hemisphere and the War on Drugs in the Western Hemisphere. But despite their virtue signaling, these wars have primarily served the machine of capitalism, leaving death of democracies and dispossession of communities in their wake.
Honduras: Restructuring Economies for Extraction
Trump’s pardoning of Hernández becomes comprehensible in this context, exposing how the War on Drugs and efforts to restructure the Global South as neo-colonies for U.S.-led global capitalism are two sides of the same coin.
For decades, the United States helped dispossess small-scale farming communities and impoverish Hondurans via a combination of IMF structural adjustment programs, Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Then, in 2006, the election of Manuel Zelaya was poised to bring change to Honduras’ poor and peasant communities. Elected as a conservative, Zelaya soon shifted leftward—internally, committing to land reform and raising the minimum wage, and externally, signing Venezuela’s regional energy agreement and joining the Bolivarian Alliance of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, which sought to counterbalance U.S. neocolonial trade agreements.
Threatened by Zelaya’s “susceptibility” to “leftist influences,” a right-wing coup in 2009 provided the Obama administration an opportunity to install a government more amenable to U.S. capitalist interests. Secretary of State Clinton helped prevent Zelaya’s return and legitimize the post-coup elections of Porfirio Lobo and Juan Orlando Hernández, under whom Honduras was transformed into a narco-state.
Drug cartels infiltrated the Lobo and Hernández administrations, and cocaine became central to the economy. Meanwhile, the U.S. provided millions to militarize Honduras’s War on Drugs. U.S. financing led to the repression of a campesino movement and the subsequent dispossession of peasants and indigenous communities of their land. The U.S. also convinced Honduras to allow extradition for drug trafficking, a move that strengthened U.S. influence in Honduran politics by forcing drug traffickers and state actors “to confront and negotiate directly with the authority of the US.”
The flip side of their role in the War on Drugs was Lobo and Hernández’s integral role in turning Honduras into a foreign investor haven, inscribing a legal framework that facilitated the creation of Honduras’s first “charter city”—what Quinn Slobodian has described as “Silicon Valley’s dream of capitalism untethered from democracy.” Apart from essentially recreating a colony on Honduran territory, where U.S. investors could construct their own legal system to facilitate direct wealth capture, the charter city threatened to further dispossess Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people. (When Honduras’s left returned to power in 2021, the government rescinded the legal framework enabling the charter city. The Biden administration condemned the rescission for likely violating trade and investment agreements, and Honduras now faces a multi-billion dollar claim brought by U.S. investors under CAFTA.)
Given these commitments, it is not difficult to see why Trump pardoned Hernández. The pardon sought to bolster support for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, the candidate put forth by Hernández’s party and who ran on these U.S. priorities in approaching elections.
Venezuela: Suppressing Threats to the U.S.-Led Imperial Order
Similarly, Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of Maduro exposes how the morally righteous War on Drugs provides cover for thwarting any resistance to U.S. imperialism.
Following years of IMF-recommended austerity, Hugo Chávez led the “Bolivarian Revolution,” achieving independence from the IMF, World Bank, and the United States while constructing a socialist alternative. The U.S. predictably retaliated. The Bush and Obama administrations long tried to destabilize Venezuela by supporting a 2002 coup and sowing left division through USAID programs and the National Endowment for Democracy. They also declared Venezuela a “national security threat” while imposing targeted sanctions, laying the legal groundwork for Trump’s broader, more devastating sanctions.
The sanctions, first implemented under Trump I but largely maintained by Biden, made Venezuela’s recovery from economic crisis impossible and contributed to 40,000 excess deaths in just one year. As I explore elsewhere, these sanctions can achieve such devastation, in part, because they operate within a specifically dollarized debt-based imperialism, which the U.S. constructed to replace what decolonization eliminated: the empire necessary for global capitalism to function. (Their effectiveness, I should note, also renders them a form of illegal coercion in violation of international law.)
Attempting to withstand these sanctions, Maduro, like Iran, defied the dollarized global order by using the Chinese yuan and other currencies. His actions thus undermined the status of the dollar, thereby threatening the United States’ primary “non-military instrument of coercion with which to police international order.” Here again, then, while the United States has used the pretext of the War on Drugs to justify Maduro’s kidnapping—casting him as a rogue narco-terrorist—the intervention is better seen as communicating its continuing dominance as the global capitalist leader to the world.
Trump’s contradictory treatment of Hernández and Maduro reveals the consistency of U.S. foreign policy: the War on Drugs serves as a flexible tool for maintaining global capitalism’s necessary periphery. Whether through pardons or kidnappings, militarization or law enforcement rhetoric, the function of the war is to restructure Global South economies for extraction and suppress resistance to U.S.-led domination. The brazenness may vary with the administration, but the fundamental logic remains unchanged.
