[News] Sure, But Venezuela is the Narco State...

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14794


  Sure, But Venezuela is the Narco State...

By Oscar Forero – February 24, 2020
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Both inside and outside Venezuela it is becoming more common to hear the 
term "narco-state” as a way of accusing not only the Venezuelan 
government but the entirety of the country’s institutions of being 
immersed in the crime of drug-trafficking.

This description is particularly brazen because amongst those who 
describe Venezuela this way are Colombia, the main global cocaine 
producer, and the United States, the fourth largest opium consumer and 
principal cocaine, cannabis, amphetamine, pharmaceutical stimulant and 
ecstasy consumer in the world.

Using this description generally looks to open the way for the 
intervention that the Trump administration is pushing full scale. These 
kinds of accusations, along with adjectives such as “terrorist” and 
“anti-democratic” to name just two, are a kind of tool used to demonise 
governments that are not to the liking of the White House. 
Paradoxically, countries that actually practice state terrorism or those 
that maintain bloody dictatorships that violate any and all principles 
of human rights receive Washington's blessing, as long as they comply 
with the US’ mandate.

International media, in their creeping and subservient role, broadly 
respond to this information without presenting any half-serious evidence 
that may at least address the subject from a documented perspective.

It is an outright barbarity that from the United States, Colombia, or 
Spain they accuse Venezuela of being a narco-state. This accusation 
principally looks to negate the rationality of the population, with 
moral annihilation being the step prior to physical annihilation, as we 
have seen in Yugoslavia, Libya and Iraq.

Those governments allied to the White House and international media are 
the same ones that told us that if [Colombian drug baron] Pablo Escobar 
died, then drug shipments would stop. These governments, in their role 
as victims, are trying to make us conclude that the drug trade exists 
because the Venezuelan authorities are responsible for buying and 
producing huge quantities of cocaine that are going to end up, who knows 
how, on the streets of the global North, the victims. They also allege 
that this trade enriches the entire Venezuelan political establishment, 
including judges, ministers, deputies, governors, mayors and many 
others. This is an insistent attempt to render Chavismo synonymous with 
drug trafficking.


    The Venezuelan drug route?

Venezuela is located in a geographically privileged area, with ample 
coastline and a 2,150-kilometre border with Colombia. This makes it a 
phenomenal potential route for the shipment of drugs to the United 
States and Europe, routes which previously included stop-offs mainly in 
the Dominican Republic, Aruba, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The Venezuelan route, however, despite being so attractive, is not the 
main one used.

The bulk of cocaine and heroin shipments produced by Venezuela’s 
neighbours leave via the Colombian Pacific, arriving in Panama, Honduras 
and Mexico, countries where the United States has at least 18 military 
bases. Another route, the second most used, departs from Cartagena City 
on the Colombian Caribbean coastline and arrives to the Bahamas, a small 
island of 13,000 square kilometres where the northern power also has a 
military base in Nassau. On this point, the Colombian, and even US, 
authorities agree.

The transit of drugs through Venezuelan territory en route to the United 
States and Europe is nothing new, nor is the relocation of [Colombian] 
drug lords to [Venezuela’s] western cities such as Merida or San Cristobal.

In 1997, Justo Pastor Perafán, the "last great drug lord” after the 
death of Pablo Escobar, was captured in the centre of San Cristobal. 
This former Colombian military man had been living for at least a year 
on Venezuelan soil where he could move freely.

Venezuela has been a historical stop-off for international drug 
shipments, something which at no point do we want to hide.

In 1999, a Boeing 727 belonging to Saudi Prince Nayef Bin Fawwaz 
al-Shaalan departed Caracas after he finished a meeting of the 
Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The jet was 
stopped in Paris with two tons of high quality cocaine. The prince has 
been protected by Saudi Arabia ever since, despite an arrest warrant 
being issued for drug trafficking.

For all this to have happened, there was undoubtedly cooperation between 
the [Venezuelan] military, police and civilian officials, as well as in 
all the countries considered part of the cocaine route. It is never our 
intention to deny the existence of networks governed by by this 
industry’s obscene profits; this is a historical and real fact. What 
cannot be accepted is the idea that the institutions of the Venezuelan 
state are designed for this purpose. There is a huge gap between the 
reality and these accusations, which if analysed with information from 
international organisations, leaves those who happen to be quickest to 
accuse us in a weak position.


    The Colombia-US axis of narco-capitalism

According to the most recent report published by the United Nations 
Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), revenue from the drug trade is 
estimated to be at least US $320 billion in 2017. Of this, at least 95 
percent is allegedly made in the recipient countries, i.e. US, Canada 
and Europe, while the remaining 5 percent is made by the producing 
countries.

These figures do not differ at all from the profit margins that 
industrialised countries (the consumers) and developing countries 
(producers-extractivists) receive through the marketing of any raw 
material, say iron, copper, gold, diamonds or coltan.

The exploitative relationship and the international division of labour 
is also identical for illegal industries. The actors are the same. On 
the one hand there are the winners, the great international banking 
system, the corporations, and the military-industrial apparatus. On the 
other, there are the losers, those who provide the blood and the sweat 
in the war: the unemployed, peasants without opportunities and thousands 
of children who offer their labour as leaf scrapers or "raspachines".

Coca production in rural Colombia is directly influenced by poverty. The 
areas where there is the highest concentration of this crop coincide 
with levels of government abandonment and the domination of para-legal 
groups. The Colombian government’s signing of the Free Trade Agreement 
(FTA) with the United States [in 2012] has meant that the land destined 
for these crops has multiplied greatly. Areas where previously there was 
food crop production, virgin forests or even national parks are now 
large areas dedicated to coca cultivation.

While the coffee-producing area, the main industry of the Colombian 
economy, has remained virtually stable between 2002 and 2018, the 
planting of coca leaves occupies increasingly important spaces. To date, 
and according to projections, the coca leaf is the third most planted 
product in the country, behind only bananas (which it is near to 
overtaking) and coffee.

Society, highly influenced by what the press writes, sees the problem in 
the rural population and demands solutions that even threaten the lives 
of the campesinos. It is truly difficult for a farmer from [the 
Colombian regions of] Antioquia, Nariño or Norte de Santander to launch 
into the neoliberal arena of "free trade,” to compete against a producer 
which may be subsidised and enjoys a broad protectionist policy in [the 
US states of] Nebraska or North Dakota.

Likewise, the signing of the FTA made it a crime to store and preserve 
seeds, while it became law to have to only use "certified" seeds 
marketed by large multinationals such as Monsanto (now Bayer) and Dupont.

As with the international coffee market, of which coffee growers are 
estimated to receive only US $2 out of every US $1,000 that is 
generated, the income for the Colombian farmer who sows and transforms 
the coca leaf into the basis for cocaine is small next to that of the 
great drug lords. These barons, it is worth noting, are not Colombian, 
Mexican, and much less Venezuelan, but US, Spanish, Portuguese, French 
or Dutch.

While in the Colombian countryside a kilo of coca hydrochloride (the 
final product, ready for consumption) costs on average US $1,500, on the 
streets of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Detroit it can reach a much 
higher price. In Europe, the influx of gigantic shipments of cocaine - 
mainly through Spain and Portugal - increases its cost, always depending 
on the purity and quality.

Contrary to what government-constructed publicity in Colombia and the 
United States try to portray, there is a steady growth in the planting 
of the coca leaf and its subsequent production, with a similar growth in 
its demand in the developed countries.

By 2009, an estimated 210 million people were consuming [illegal] 
narcotics in the world. In 2017 this figure has increased to 271 
million. At least 76.2 million are from North America (United States, 
Mexico and Canada), reflecting the huge public-sector complex (including 
the military and police), as well as the private sector, which operates 
around this lucrative business.

It is believed that 188 million people consume cannabis every year, of 
which 36 percent are in the United States and Western and Central Europe 
where only 10 percent of the world's population live. This exponential 
growth, coupled with the trend of legalising marijuana use, has been 
exploited by large corporations that have been displacing the two 
traditional producers: Mexico and Morocco. Right now, the leader in 
global production is curiously the world's self-styled anti-narcotics 
policeman, the United States.

At the regional level, the planting of coca leaves and the production of 
coca hydrochloride have been increasing.

Despite more than US $11 billion invested in Plan Colombia, nine U.S. 
military bases and an indeterminate set of "quasi-bases" that are housed 
in at least 51 buildings and 24 leased facilities (which could be more) 
being installed and dedicated entirely to "combating" this scourge, 
hundreds of contractors who enjoy total immunity as if they were 
accredited diplomats, thousands of square kilometres of virgin 
rainforest bathed with glyphosate (which Monsanto dispenses), large 
losses for the peasantry, effects on the water they consume and the air 
they breathe, displacement, years of “democratic security” under [former 
hard-right President Alvaro] Uribe and the demobilisation of the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, historically 
marked as the great producers of the alkaloid, it can be said that 
Colombia, instead of eradicating drug production, has been monopolising 
the cocaine market ever more, almost quadrupling its production in just 
4 years.

The most recent data published by UNODC highlights that in Colombia 
48,000 hectares (ha) of coca were planted by 2013, representing 40 
percent of the total amount grown on the planet. By 2017, the area in 
use increased to 171,000 ha., or 70 percent of the world's production. 
By 2020 this figure could reach 250,000 ha., an area similar to the 
surface of [Venezuela’s] Margarita Island and La Guaira State put together.


    Colombia: A narco-bourgeoisie with political power

In the [Colombian] cities of Bogota, Medellin or Cali, little is known 
about the painful consequences left in the bosoms of society and the 
family by coca farming. There, in the centres of power, citizens only 
enjoy the millions of dollars which come into the Colombian economic system.

The richest man in the country, Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, is 
currently worth more than US $11 billion. This magnate, who is the owner 
of the principal Colombian bank, has laundered billions of dollars 
coming from criminal activities which stimulate the productive apparatus 
of the country, a fact which doesn’t at all bother the politicians, 
business class, and investors. This is where the “success” of Uribe’s 
policies originates.

While this goes on, in the impoverished towns on the outskirts, the 
semi-legal economy is what props up the law itself. The value of the 
coca leaf crop fields in the ten municipalities with the largest crop 
production in Colombia is almost double that of the public budget 
destined to these municipalities by the national government.

The same phenomenon occurs in the three states with the largest coca 
production: Putumayo, Nariño and North Santander. It is worth pointing 
out that these three states are border regions, the first two with 
Ecuador and the last with Venezuela.

By including itself in the drug industry, the Colombian state looks to 
bring down costs, and as such it is an accomplice of many of the other 
connected crimes.

One of these is fuel smuggling, which can be seen from Ecuador and 
Venezuela and which bleeds both countries out significantly.

The dominance of pseudo-demobilised paramilitary groups and the 
establishment of crop fields and laboratories close to international 
border lines allows for the permanent supply of fuel and other materials 
at often ridiculously cheap prices, such as car fuel, cement, and 
petrochemical products made in Venezuela. To produce one kilogram of 
base cocaine, 282 litres of gasoline are required, as well as thousands 
of litres for the laboratories which are generally set up in deserted 
areas with no electrical power.

The fact that Venezuelan and Ecuadorian fuel is of better quality than 
that produced in Colombia has also contributed to improving base cocaine 
output. The specialist technical support which is carried out by 
semi-legal groups has also increased the per-hectare output in the crop 
fields. In 2013, 205,000 tonnes of coca leaf were produced, whilst in 
2017 this rose to 930,900 tonnes, a 453 percent rise. This fact is no 
coincidence, as scientific investigation has been working in line with 
drug production for many years, not just in Colombia but globally.


    The First World: pharmaceutical dependency and accumulation of drug
    profits

So-called opioids are the cause of the very real public health epidemic 
in a large percentage of the developed countries. These are natural 
derivatives of morphine and poppies or are synthetically made, which are 
the most damaging versions.

The two best known opioids are fentanyl and oxycodone, both of which are 
synthetic analgesics and anaesthetics created in laboratories, and are 
50 times more powerful than heroin. Opioids are responsible for more 
than 2,000 overdose-related deaths in the USA in 2007, and 47,000 in 
2017 according to conservative UN data. Cruder official report from US 
health authorities suggest that overdose deaths for the same year are 
closer to 63,000, more than the entire number of US lives lost in the 
Vietnam War.

The global corporate system has known how to take advantage of this 
dependency on pharmaceuticals which threatens to devastate millions of 
lives in the next few years. Its alienating strategy generates juicy 
profits for the great laboratories which are backed up by the complicity 
and consent of governments. Even more worrying is the support they 
receive from the legal and political establishment.

Chinese, US, Colombian, Mexican, and South Asian laboratories compete 
for the immense booty which, apart from producing billions of dollars 
every year, also produces 600,000 deaths, something which transnational 
capital is not concerned about.

Johnson & Johnson is globally known for baby talc. Nonetheless, this 
firm is one of the principal producers of opioids. Not content with 
this, it is faced with an endless demand for its products, having 
sneakily pushed millions of people towards consumption and dependency. 
The transnational is on the brink of achieving an agreement with the 
[US] federal government for which it will have to pay a fine as if it 
had gone through a red light, which will free it up of any 
responsibility. Once again, all of this happens with the complicity of 
the system.

The system also regulates its own metabolism to efficiently guarantee 
the supply of narcotics from its primary production sites. The drug 
economy has been one of the principal motors which drives the world 
economy for some time, especially for consumers and producers.

If we bring together all of the criminal activities (drug running, 
piracy, illegal arms sales, fuel smuggling, informatics crimes, etc.), 
the contribution of the drug industry to global GDP is as high as 5 percent.

The Colombian banking system is not the only one which is stabilised 
from the money coming from this criminal economy, with the world banking 
system laundering astronomical amounts of money. According to the UN, US 
$1.6 trillion go into the system every year after having been laundered. 
During the last decade, financial institutions like the Bank of America, 
City Group, HSBC and even the Institute for the Works of Religion 
(popularly known as the Bank of God or the Vatican’s Bank) have been 
splattered with anti-laundering investigations.

But, even with all these official figures and data, the narco-state is 
apparently Venezuela.

/The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff./

/Translation by Paul Dobson for Venezuelanalysis./

-- 
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