How to Stop Trump From Doing Another Maduro? End the War on Drugs

One night in January, while locals were still recovering from their New Year’s Eve celebrations, US troops poured into a Latin American capital before dawn. Their mission? To arrest the leader of a sovereign nation, force him onto a military plane and drag him back to the US to answer charges of drug trafficking. Within hours, the head of a foreign state was standing in a US courthouse, now a criminal defendant. This is not the story of Nicholas Maduro. It is the story of the Panamanian military leader Manuel Noriega, which unfolded on January 3, 1990, almost 36 years to the day before Maduro’s.

Maduro’s dramatic capture has led experts around the world to decry the death of the international rules-based order. It is undeniable that Trump’s action has removed the mask of equality that the international community likes to wear, revealing an underbelly of raw, imperial violence. Yet it is by no means unprecedented. The war on drugs has for decades been a useful veneer for naked territorial violence, resource extraction and the overriding of sovereignty, in large part by the US.

Trump’s indictment claims that the grounds for Maduro’s arrest is the accusation that Maduro has used his position as president of Venezuela to lead an international drug trafficking network. The US government initially accused Maduro of being the leader of the so-called “Cartel of the Suns”, a major cocaine trafficking and terrorist organisation that the US designated a foreign terrorist group in November. In the revised indictment, however, the Department of Justice quietly dropped the claim, confirming many experts’ belief that this cartel never existed.

An obvious issue with Maduro being a major cocaine trafficker is that cocaine is neither grown nor processed in Venezuela; bordering the Caribbean Sea and the north Atlantic Ocean, the country is largely a transit country for the global cocaine produced in the “coca triangle” of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, the last of which Venezuela shares a long and leaky border with. By the US’s own estimates, only 10-13% of the global supply of cocaine flowed through the country in 2020.

Rather than having anything to do with the drug war, it seems the capture of Maduro is just the latest example of US anti-drug policy serving as a pretext for regime change in Latin America, a story that has been repeated everywhere from Panama to Nicaragua to Colombia ever since the drug war was launched in the mid-20th century. Noriega and Maduro are far from the only Latin American leaders accused of being a “narcotrafficante”. The US sanctioned Colombia in 1996 and 1997 over suspicions that its president Ernesto Samper Pizano had ties with the Cali cartel. In 2015, the US Drug Enforcement Administration launched an operation to undermine the administration of Bolivian president Evo Morales, accusing him of turning the country into a “narcostate”. In 2022, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was extradited to the United States and convicted of drug trafficking, although he was pardoned and released in December by none other than Donald Trump (Hernández, unlike Maduro, has been very amenable to American foreign policy objectives in the region). From Plan Colombia in 1999 to the Merida initiative launched in Mexico in 2007, the US consistently used the drug war as a rationale for inserting itself into the security apparatus, the economic structure and the political systems of countries across the western hemisphere. What Trump is doing is not new. What is new is how brazen he is being about it.

Trump’s capture of Maduro is in some ways not the betrayal of a rules-based international order, but the product of it. The war on drugs was built into the foundations of international law: drafting on the international laws that anchored the war on drugs commenced in the very first year of the UN’s existence, so from the very beginning, the institution that anchored modern international law considered the drug war to be an area where powerful member states were allowed to interfere in the domestic affairs of smaller countries, if they wanted to. Drug prohibition was built into the rules-based order, making an exception – that the sovereignty of nations didn’t have to be respected, at least not always – that proved the rule. The US has long justified its direct and indirect military presence across Latin America (where it has stationed thousands of military personnel for decades, and has recently been ramping up its presence) on the thin pretext of dismantling trafficking routes.
Amid already scarce territorial rights, the punitive police repression of the cocaine trade has left ecosystems and communities across Latin America facing increased threats and violence, hindering the development of new, climate-resilient economies.

To prevent the chaos sparked by Maduro’s capture from spreading across the continent, and to reduce Trump’s ability to use the same justification to intervene in the governments of Colombia and Mexico as he is threatening, political leaders and advocates must not just call for a return to the rules-based order – they must call for an end to the war on drugs. For countries and communities historically affected by drug prohibition to uphold their sovereignty, we must dissolve the system that allows for its persistent undermining. Until then, the US will always have a licence to ride roughshod over any sovereign nation-state in the Americas. The US has looked at the entire Western Hemisphere as its backyard ever since its fifth president, James Monroe, gave birth to the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Now, as its 47th president seeks to enact what he is calling the “Donroe doctrine”, if we want to stop him and let the people of Latin America have the freedom to choose their own future, we need to dismantle the architecture of drug prohibition that has for so long justified their subjugation to the US.