US Increases Troop Deployment to Plunder Latin America Under Pretext of Drug War

Editorial Board

US imperialism, desperate to maintain its hegemony as the world imperialist superpower, has deployed more than 4,000 additional troops to waters off Latin America and the Caribbean. Ultra-reactionary US President Donald Trump has once again bypassed Congress in violation of the War Powers Resolution with naked threats of intervention, this time under the false pretext of fighting cartels in the so-called War on Drugs. The act of intimidation is designed to strike a blow at the semi-colonial countries, in particular Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, by threatening war in response to the increased influence of Chinese social-imperialism.

US imperialism has deployed its war machine, including a nuclear-powered attack submarine, more reconnaissance aircraft, several destroyers, and a guided missile carrier. This is in addition to imperialist armed forces already in the region, which includes Navy destroyers deployed in March to waters near the US-Mexico border.

In the context of the general crisis of imperialism, the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is depreciating and rival imperialist powers are seeking greater domination over the semi-colonies. This has led the current administration of the US government to take on a greater role in the economy—particularly in regard to the supply chain of materials critical to technology production. The situation expresses itself in the increased troop mobilization.

US Imperialism Is Not Out to Stop the Flow of Drugs, It Is Out to Secure Rare Earth Minerals

Rare earth minerals are essential to the production of technology, particularly around artificial intelligence but also connected to electric vehicles and wind turbines, not to mention military technologies as the imperialists arm themselves to the teeth.

Alcara, the US-based rare earth mining monopoly, has been in talks with the US government since last month seeking a $1.5 billion investment from the state to back its project of plundering mainly Brazil but also Chile and other Latin American countries. Stockpiling rare earth minerals is vital to the hegemony of US imperialism, which has pivoted heavily to maintaining its technological domination against the threats of its imperialist rivals. This indicates two things: first, the US imperialists are afraid of the third world struggles for liberation and new democratic revolution, hence their desperate overdrive in plundering and military shows of force, and, second, they are afraid of being toppled from their perch by another imperialist power.

Acquisition and control of stockpiles of rare earth minerals are reminiscent of the US imperialist plunder of the world for oil. Trump’s threats against Greenland, his increasingly hostile gestures toward Canada, a weaker imperialist power, and the negotiations between Trump and Zelensky and US and Russian imperialism regarding Ukraine all involve rare earth minerals—with Trump previously offering to broker a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russian imperialism in exchange for sole US rights to exploit vast expanses of Ukrainian mineral reserves.

Latin America is especially important. Rich deposits of rare earth minerals are found especially in Brazil, where unextracted minerals are abundant, suspended in ionic clays offering cheap but environmentally damaging extraction. Brazil is also a country with increasing agrarian revolutionary activity, where the people more and more fight for national liberation and democracy, and where the old-state has become the most corrupt servants of foreign finance capital. There are also rare earth minerals all across South America, notably in Venezuela which also contains vast oil resources, which US imperialism has sought control over for many years.

When it comes to importing rare earth minerals, since the US lacks deposits itself, it mainly relies on imports from its chief competitor in the technology sector, China. While China produces the most exports, the US is the world’s largest exporter of money along with the means of production, including the technology to produce. To maintain its global financial and military domination of the world, US imperialism must go to extremes to reduce reliance on competitors by transforming the semi-colonies of Latin America into its colonial possessions, in part by restricting their ability to trade with its imperialist rivals. This has long been the source of misery for the people of Latin America, and the greatest threat to their well-being. This extends to military dependency of the oppressed countries’ old-states on imperialism, a topic explored in a report recently published by Brazilian revolutionary newspaper A Nova Democracia. The Armed Forces High Command of Brazil recently “expressed alarm” at the opportunist Brazilian government’s threatened switch from US to Russian, Chinese, or European weapons contracts in retaliation for the recent US tariff-sanctions.

US imperialist world hegemony has always been reliant on its hegemony over Latin America, a fact of which the imperialist themselves were aware when developing the Monroe Doctrine, which on one hand claimed to end European colonialism on the continent while on the other hand established itself as the main oppressor of formally independent countries now dominated by mainly-US foreign capital. The masses of these countries have always rebelled against their domination, rejecting the status as “the backyard” of US imperialism, resulting in more US interventions in Latin American and Caribbean countries than anywhere else in the world.

US Imperialism Is to Blame for the Drug Cartels—It Is Not Going to End Them

Imperialism, in the colonialist tradition, has used drugs to as a weapon against the people, both as a means to subordinate and pacify its own populations and to increase the poverty (and lower wages) in the countries it oppresses; drugs and the drug trade operate as a whip against rebellious populations serving counter insurgency with sickness.

US imperialism arming and training drug cartels, and drug cartels morphing from or overlapping with the right-wing death squads also trained and armed by US imperialism, is nothing new. One of Mexico’s most violent and reactionary cartels, the Zetas, was founded by elite Mexican special forces directly trained by the 7^th Special Forces Group of the US military in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina in the 1990s. One of the founding members of MS-13, Ernesto Deras, was a former member of the Salvadorian Special Forces, trained by US Green Berets to fight the FMLN. The list of US banks involved in money laundering and financing drug smuggling is too long to list, but includes JP Morgan, Western Union, Bank of America, HSBC, and on.

Following this playbook, Trump’s claim of authorizing military force against the drug cartels is nothing but a cover to impose destabilization and mask US intervention. Fort Bragg, the center of US special forces, has been exposed for being involved in the drug trade. These include several murders on US soil within the vicinity of the military base, and a high murder and suicide rate, often related to drugs. In 2020 two soldiers, one of which was a Delta Force operator, were found murdered in a remote training range—investigators suggest the murders were the result of a drug deal gone wrong. From 2017-2021 Ft Bragg saw more fatal drug overdoses than any other military base according to the Department of Defense.

In 2023, former North Carolina State Trooper and deputized Drug Enforcement Agent Freddie Wayne Huff was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison for his involvement in narcotics trafficking. Huff has revealed the existence of narcotics gangs who he claims to have connected with the Zetas operating within the military based in Ft Bragg, particularly in the Joint Special Operations Command (the infamous JSOC), as reported by the monopoly outlet Rolling Stone, among others.

The US consumes 90% of all cocaine produced in Latin America. The small-time drug dealers, like most in the drug trade, are users or addicts themselves, but face excessive sentencing in state and federal court, making up most prisoners in the US and disproportionately comprised of Black and Latino people. The old-state has a long-established track record of promoting the use of drugs as an effort to weaken and destabilize social movements. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, there are more than 48.5 million Americans with Substance Abuse Disorder, and the vast majority of these receive no treatment. Like the murders, suicides and overdoses in the military, the number of addicts among the people is often drastically under-reported.

The existence, promotion, and preservation of such a large domestic drug consumer market objectively serves imperialism by neutralizing sections of the masses in a counter-revolutionary way at home, but mainly it serves imperialism by propping up foreign networks beneficial to the flow of finance capital and carrying out national oppression—especially in Latin America—and when necessary offering the pretext for greater intervention.

The use of drug cartels by imperialism and their lackeys is well established. A few examples include the 1989 assassination of the leading presidential candidate in Colombia by members of the Medellin cartel who had been videotaped receiving military and assassination training from former Israeli Colonel Yair Klein alongside other Israelis. The assassination served as the pretext to justify further US intervention in the name of halting drug violence—violence which was orchestrated by imperialism to begin with. Klein has since stated the CIA recruited him to train right-wing death squads in Colombia in the 1980s.

In 1989, the US imperialists launched a military operation against the people of Panama under the pretext of toppling General Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking, when in reality this was an effort to secure the interests of US finance capital against peasant rebellions. Then just as now, US control over the Panama Canal was of utmost interests to the security of the supply chain for US imperialism. This year, Trump has threatened to seize the Panama Canal by force, a plan to transform the country from a semi-colony to a colony of the US.

US imperialism via the CIA has been indicated in providing up to $10 million to the Peruvian reactionary right hand of the fascist Fujimori, Vladimiro Montesinos, in the 1980s and 1990s along with the most advanced surveillance technology to be used by the old state, to suppress the People’s War led by the Communist Party of Peru. Montesinos was an intelligence officer in the old state, trained at the School of the Americas where the US imperialists train lackey regime soldiers in genocide, torture, and counter-insurgency. He founded and led the anti-drug unit of the ultra-reactionary SIN (National Intelligence Service), and he was deeply tried to the drug cartels. Montesinos is now serving 19 years in Peruvian prison for drug trafficking and murder charges.

While the US imperialists falsely accused the Communists of narcotics trafficking in Peru, in spite of reports from the traffickers and masses that the Party opposed drugs, it was the imperialists themselves who financed and utilized drugs and the drug trade in an effort first to contain and undermine the People’s War in a counter insurgency effort and second as a pretext to invade the country with military force. In 1989 under the false claim of combating drugs, the US imperialist DEA invaded Peru as part of “Operation Snow Cap” which included black ops on Peruvian soil to combat the People’s Guerrilla Army and the armed peasant masses, motivated to prevent the conquest of political power by the workers and peasants.

The methods of imperialism and much of their tactics have not changed. Their desperation to secure rare earth minerals in Brazil and Venezuela, as well as the oil reserves of the latter, leads to efforts first and foremost to crush the struggles of the masses in those countries and secondly to install representatives they find the most cooperative and sympathetic to US imperialist to run the country on their behalf.

In addition to Navy destroyers being sent specifically to the coast of Venezuela, US imperialism via the Trump administration has doubled its bribe to $50 million for the abduction or murder of Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela who has long been seen as unsuitable to the US imperialist objective of transforming that country into a US colony. Maduro has recently called for 4.5 million militia members to mobilize to defend the country from imperialist invasion.

In Brazil the old-state run by the reactionary “left-wing” Lula government proves submissive but less than what the US prefers, while the agrarian revolution and mass social movements of the people strike fears into the heart of the US ruling class. More than anything, agrarian revolution would halt all US plans to plunder Brazil’s rare earth minerals.

All the facts indicate that, far from Trump’s isolationist rhetoric in his first term, he is now positioning for an escalation of US imperialist intervention in Latin America, which is the flash-point and the weakest link in its chain of world domination. Trump is following in the footsteps of his predecessors and repeating some of his old gestures in increasing the bribe against Maduro, openly stating his intentions to effect regime change. He is only taking a page from the old playbook of Reagan by calling it an effort to combat drugs.

The switch from isolationist rhetoric to more or less open intervention in foreign governments operates in the context of the economic sanctions and threats of economic sanctions and creates a contradiction within the US imperialists themselves, and within Trump’s own administration. Not only has Trump broken all his promises to end support for foreign wars, but he actively seeks to provoke them. The general crisis of imperialism is continuing to deepen, and although its effects are least felt in the US, they are felt, and the threat to the hegemony of the US imperialists has thrust them into even hotter water. They lash out in every direction; their military power and its steady gluttony is the first indicator of how fearful and weak they really are. Such provocations against the heroic masses of Latin America will result in an even worse predicament for US imperialism.

Image: US Navy destroyer squadron sails with the Peruvian old-state’s navy off the coast of Peru in 2009. Wikimedia Commons, US Navy.

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