In a gradual process, beginning in the 1960s and intensifying in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States launched its “War on Drugs” in Latin America. In 1961, the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was signed, an international treaty that laid the foundations for global drug control and which the United States would later use to pressure other countries. In 1971, Richard Nixon formally declared the “War on Drugs,” calling drug abuse the “public enemy number one” of the United States. This declaration initially focused on domestic consumption, but it laid the groundwork for foreign policy. In 1973, Nixon created the DEA, the federal agency responsible for combating drug trafficking both inside and outside the United States. The creation of the DEA institutionalized the international projection of this “war.”
Since 1980, the war has become internationalized and militarized, spreading massively and aggressively to Latin America. They said they wanted to attack the problem at its source, production and trafficking in producing countries, rather than just focusing on reducing domestic demand. By 1990, this war was consolidated with Plan Colombia, which was billed as a comprehensive aid plan integrating peace and development, but was executed as a massive militarization with billions of dollars in aid for US military advisers, aerial spraying of coca crops with glyphosate, and training of Colombian special forces. Plan Colombia is the clearest and most costly example of the export of the “war” model to the region. The fumigation damaged legal crops, affected the health of the population, and caused forced displacement, compounded by the radicalization of violence and the deepening of systematic human rights violations.
By the first decade of this century, the war on drugs had shifted to Mexico and Central America with the Mérida Initiative, launched in 2008 and known as “Plan Mexico.” As in Colombia, this plan consisted of another massive economic aid package for military equipment, surveillance technology, and training that led to extreme violence. The militarization of the fight against the cartels unleashed a wave of brutal violence that has left hundreds of thousands dead and missing, the most sadly emblematic case being that of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School. The strategy of “decapitating” drug lords fragmented the cartels, multiplying criminal groups and increasing violence. It also led to massive infiltration of political, police, and judicial institutions at all levels and systematic human rights violations against the population.
After almost half a century of the war on drugs in Latin America, the result is total failure, as the drug trafficking business has grown stronger and spread throughout the continent. The human cost to our countries has been extremely high, with thousands of people murdered, disappeared, tortured, imprisoned, and displaced. There has been a growing and systematic violation of human rights by the state and criminal groups. The increasing militarization of public security has further weakened Latin America’s precarious democracy. The drug trade has become linked to other illicit businesses such as human, organ, and arms trafficking, coyotes (middlemen), illegal mining, etc., consolidating and strengthening criminal capital in the region. Fumigation has brought environmental destruction and serious damage to the health of the inhabitants of the affected areas.
All this disaster so that former US President Barack Obama himself would acknowledge the failure of the war on drugs, an acknowledgment affirmed by former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, other regional leaders, and the United Nations itself.
What they do not acknowledge is that in the context of the Cold War, they used the fight against drugs to combat the advance of communism in the region and intensify military intervention. Nor did they say that Washington turned it into a huge tool for putting pressure on Latin American governments. Even less did they say that they used the drug trafficking network of the “Muchachos de Blandón,” connected to the Cali cartel and the US dealer “Freeway” Ricky Ross, who had been selling tons of cocaine in Southern California in the 1980s, to finance the Nicaraguan Contras. The general link between the CIA and the Contras with drug trafficking was exposed by journalist Gary Webb (1998). According to his investigations, the CIA allowed and protected these drug trafficking operations so as not to hinder the flow of money to the Contras, one of the Reagan administration’s top priorities.
What they don’t say is how US military interventions have often stimulated drug production, as in Afghanistan, which during the 20 years it was under US occupation became the world’s largest narco-state (Harp, 2025). What they don’t say is that most of the money from drug trafficking stays and is laundered in the US financial system; what they don’t say is that drug trafficking is a criminal capitalist business whose network passes through the US. What is not said is that drug trafficking is one of the most lucrative businesses of neoliberal globalization. What is not said is that the big financial capitalists have no interest in putting an end to the most profitable business, whose networks span the globe.
Despite all this truth that imposes itself on our countries, our territories, our lives, and that has caused so much suffering to our peoples, we now have to accept that, in the name of the war on drugs, attempts are being made to intervene directly with the heaviest weaponry in South America. They want us to accept the lie that the war on drugs, taken to its exponential level, is against the “cartels” of fishermen who traffic in motorboats, while mega export ships leave, circulate, and unload drugs at will in full view and with the patience of the authorities. Now they want us to believe that their interest in the Caribbean is to combat drugs and not to gain total control of the region, in the context of the geopolitical war between the US and China. Now they want us to believe that they are after Maduro, when they are after our continent’s resources (oil, gas, water, lithium).
In the end, it turns out that the war on drugs has not been a failure but a complete success, as it has created chaos and violence on the continent, which is the perfect scenario for imposing the Pentagon’s policy in the region. Now, with the success of their war, they seek to entrench themselves in Latin America in their hegemonic dispute with the Eurasian axis and take advantage of the chaos, disorder, and authoritarianism they have caused to once again make our territories “their backyard.” Vice President J. D. Vance’s statement (2025) that he doesn’t give a shit that the murder of 11 citizens of another nation is a war crime warns us of what the US government plans to do in Latin America because they don’t give a shit about us, just as they don’t give a shit about international law.
References
- Harp, S. (2025) “El Cártel de Fort Bragg”: Un libro expone la participación de las Fuerzas Especiales de EE. UU. en el narcotráfico y asesinatos.
- Vance, J.D. (2025) https://x.com/JDVance/status/1964341436096057502
- Webb, G. (1998) Alianza Oscura: La CIA, los Contras y la explosión del crack.
Original text by Natalia Sierra published in Desinformémonos on September 11th, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.