The United States and the Drug Trafficking Business

Published at: 17/10/2025 05:00 PM

Drug trafficking will never end, unless the United States (USA) wants it; and it will never end it because it is a weapon to politically intervene in countries and take possession of their wealth, in addition to the fact that through this business it exercises strong control over their population. It is the country that manages drug trafficking.

According to Mexican researcher and journalist Jesús Escobar Tovar, “the way to combat drug trafficking, through violence, is just a pretext to attack in reality, it doesn't combat anything. If they really wanted to combat drug trafficking, Donald Trump wouldn't have to be sending drones, rather he would have to start with prevention campaigns, to improve medical care for sick people, to bring information to young people, to stop what happens in their customs, to educate about the damage caused by fentanyl, to inform North American society about the ravages caused by this type of drug.”

Escobar Tovar also denounced, in the program called Hard Data, in July, that “the United States is the most drug user country in the world and has never carried out a prevention campaign, why? Because you don't fight drugs, you don't fight criminal organizations, because they're all part of the same structure.” He added that drug trafficking is not at odds with the United States, it is part of it and that is how it has been used historically to impose its policy, and it also goes hand in hand with the financial system and governance that we have today.”

Escobar Tovar added that “from the breadth of the world system, capitalism has ramifications and drug trafficking is one of them; therefore, you cannot really combat drug trafficking if you fight the financial system that protects and produces it. Therefore, when they tell us they are fighting drug trafficking, without combating the causes, without combating the effects as such around them, they are lying to us.”

An essential part of that American strategy are seizures: tons of drugs withheld, drug traffickers arrested, weapons... but... What impact do these events actually have on the structure of organized crime? Well, very little.

As Noam Chomsky explained, “everything is explained through money, and for this, we must talk about the capitalist system, which I define as a system of government and not as a financial system, because it was carried out in such a way that they make political decisions based on economic issues, and not the other way around. Since the 1970s, the world no longer exercises political power, but economic power.”

Chomsky added that “we must start with the consolidation of an economic world that has ramifications and uses violence to different degrees to exercise social control over peoples and governments; territorial social control, because it is not the war against drug trafficking, it is the perfect excuse to generate other wars in the world”, we can see that only in 2024 we had more wars and armed conflicts since the 1940s.

When resuming the interview with Escobar Tovar, when they asked him: Who created drug trafficking? He explained that “it was after the Opium War in the 16th century, that the conflict between China and England between the years 1839 and 1842. The trigger was the introduction into China of opium cultivated in India and marketed by the British East India Company, the administrator of India. England used this war to attack and boycott China on the whole commercial issue of what was then the predominance comprised of Bangladesh, India and China. This war helped the West to take control of world hegemony, this is how the West was built: with drugs and with wars, and it was England that carried it out, and this was learned by the United States”. As we review history, we begin to find out what the political management of part of the American empire has been like.

Journalist Escobar Tovar also explained that the United States is “the great boss of bosses, it is the instrumentalizer of the drug market. And to take an example, we can review what happened in Afghanistan: they entered, invaded and bombed. A country rich in gas and exported it as its main product, which after the Gringo invasion, became one of the main producers of opium in the world and the largest supplier to Europe.”

Now, analyzing history, it is important to ask ourselves: Who sets the strategy against drugs? Well, after the Second World War, the United States began to build a series of international organizations and intelligence agencies to establish an international security policy that has allowed it to outline intervention policies for countries.

Given this scenario and the threat that the United States maintains against Venezuela, it is worth questioning the reasons for the attack. Is it a matter of combating drug trafficking or is it simply a matter of land control and what does that entail? The fight against drug trafficking is a façade used to invade, intervene and appropriate everything: resources, territory and peoples' sovereignty.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team