War on drugs or war for trusteeship? Petro tears down US narrative
10 Min Read
Gustavo Petro’s bold accusations against Colombian conservatives reignite scrutiny of the US-backed drug war, revealing how it has long served geopolitical control rather than justice.
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A man wears a shirt with an image of US President Donald Trump during a government-organized rally against foreign meddling, in Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025 (AP)
When Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced he could prove close links between right-wing Colombian politicians and the country’s powerful cocaine-trafficking networks, Washington largely brushed them aside.
Puedo demostrarlo, los políticos colombianos que fueron a hablar con los congresistas de La Florida, amigos de Rubio, tenían nexos directos o familiares con las mafias del narcotráfico de cocaína de Colombia. https://t.co/faqcBZI5ij
— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) November 9, 2025
But his declaration pierced the core of a decades-long US hypocrisy, one in which the so-called war on drugs has often served as a smokescreen for propping up the top tier, while turning a blind eye to their ties with the very cartels the war claims to tussle with.
For more than half a century, the United States has used the “war on drugs” not merely to fight narcotics but also to go after Latin American governments that stray from its geopolitical orbit. From Colombia to Venezuela, drug policy has become an instrument of trusteeship, a convenient moral cloak for regime-change ambitions.
Petro’s remarks, amplified by journalist Ben Norton in a post on X, pointed directly at conservative Colombian figures who, he said, traveled to Washington to meet allies of Senator Marco Rubio.
Colombia's President Gustavo Petro says he has evidence that the right-wing Colombian politicians who went to the US to meet with Trump admin officials are closely linked to drug cartels.
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 9, 2025
Marco Rubio is a close ally of notorious Colombian drug-trafficking oligarch Álvaro Uribe. https://t.co/HNjCpbS4x8 pic.twitter.com/QghmdfWoS3
The president said these politicians had “direct or family links with the cocaine-trafficking mafias of Colombia.”
One photo Norton shared tells its own story: in 2014, Rubio appeared alongside former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe and other right-wing politicians. Uribe, once Washington’s most loyal partner in the Andean region, has long faced accusations, some documented in US intelligence reports, of connections to paramilitary groups that financed themselves through narcotics.
Rubio, in a recent X post, even called the judicial pursuit of Uribe a "witch hunt".
The narcotics allegations are not new. Declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency documents from 1991, released years later, by the National Security Archive, included Uribe among figures “linked to narcotics trafficking.”
Uribe-Escobar ties
The released US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report from 1991 unmasked that then-Senator Álvaro Uribe Vélez, President of Colombia from August 7, 2002, to August 7, 2010, was a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” and collaborated with the Medellín drug cartel “at high government levels.”
The document describes Uribe as one of several high-profile Colombian figures connected to the cartel’s narcotics operations.
The declassified intelligence memo, dated September 23, 1991, lists Uribe among “important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement.” Although parts of the report remain censored, it notes that some of its information was cross-verified with other agencies.
According to the DIA document, Uribe “was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States” and “worked for the Medellín cartel,” led by Escobar until his death in 1993. It further states that Uribe participated in Escobar’s political campaign and, as a senator, “attacked all forms of the extradition treaty” with the US.
The document was declassified in May 2004 following a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive. Its classification markings, “CONFIDENTIAL NOFORN WNINTEL,” indicate that it contained sensitive intelligence not meant for foreign dissemination.
Michael Evans, director of the Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project, said that while the report’s sources and evaluation comments were not declassified, US intelligence officials deemed it serious enough to distribute to analysts in Washington.
Uribe’s name appears as number 82 on the list, alongside notorious figures including Escobar.
A political chameleon
That same year, and after the enlistment of Uribe, then-US President George W. Bush visited Colombia under heavy security, including warplanes, battleships, and 15,000 troops, to praise what he painted as the country’s campaign against narcotics and insurgents.
Standing alongside Uribe, Bush claimed the operation was succeeding, asserting that “this courageous nation can win its war against narcoterrorists.”
Bush lauded what he described as “significant progress” under Uribe in curbing drug production and weakening rebel forces. “The number of acres under cultivation are down significantly,” he said. “The number of arrests are up. The number of murders is down. In other words, this man’s plan is working.”
Bush also reaffirmed US support for Plan Colombia, the $3.3 billion military and anti-drug initiative launched in 2000. “We will request enough funds to make the plan effective,” he said, alleging its importance in combating “narcoterrorists.”
“We have made progress, but the serpent is still alive,” Uribe remarked at the time, a striking admission from a leader hailed in Washington as a pillar of anti-narcotics reform. But to critics, Uribe was less a hero than a political chameleon, adept at shifting tones to blend into a carefully curated image of integrity, all while operating within a system deeply stained by ties to drug cartels.
The myth of “Plan Colombia”
To understand today’s tension between Petro and Washington, one must revisit Plan Colombia. Allegedly designed to eradicate coca and combat insurgents, the plan militarized vast regions of Colombia, deepened dependence on US security contractors, and displaced hundreds of thousands of rural civilians.
Academic assessments, including a study by economist Daniel Mejía titled "PlanColombia: An Analysis of Effectiveness and Costs," published by Foreign Policy at Brookings, concluded that while the program led to short-term declines in coca cultivation, it had minimal long-term impact and failed to produce meaningful improvements in social and economic development. The findings underscore the limitations of militarized drug policies and raise serious questions about the sustainability of Washington’s flagship “counter-narcotics” scheme.
But Plan Colombia’s real success lay elsewhere: it secured US geopolitical dominance in northern South America and tied Colombian security elites to Washington’s strategic priorities.
That is how Uribe’s presidency became a laboratory for fusing counter-insurgency with counter-narcotics, an approach exported later to Mexico under the Mérida Initiative. The drug war thus became a profitable business for US defense firms and a political weapon against left-wing movements.
Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, threatens that legacy. His foreign policy emphasizes regional integration with Venezuela and Brazil, peace attempts with insurgent groups, and an end to fumigation campaigns that devastated rural ecosystems. For Washington’s hawks, such autonomy is intolerable. Smear campaigns branding Petro as soft on crime, or insinuating ties between his allies and traffickers, echo Cold War tactics used to discredit reformist governments across the Global South.
Venezuela: The perpetual scapegoat
The same script plays out next door. Since the early 2000s, successive US administrations have accused Venezuela’s leadership of running the so-called “Cartel de los Soles,” a claim largely unsubstantiated by international courts but endlessly recycled in US media. The accusation serves a political purpose: to paint the Bolivarian government as a "narco-state" and justify sanctions that have crippled the country’s economy.
Professor of Comparative Politics at the School of Public Policy, Central European University, Julia Buxton has shown how these sanctions, far from promoting democracy, have strangled the legal economy and empowered illicit networks.
Washington’s narrative thus becomes self-fulfilling: sanctions produce scarcity and criminality, which are then cited as evidence of what they dub "the regime’s corruption." Meanwhile, Venezuelan officials argue that the true traffickers operate with impunity through US-backed Colombian intermediaries, using Caribbean routes protected by Western intelligence cooperation.
This dynamic intensified after the US placed bounties on Venezuelan leaders in 2020, accusing them of “narco-terrorism". While no credible international body corroborated those claims, the US and co. used drug trafficking as a pretext for naval deployments in the Caribbean and covert support to opposition groups. Today’s sporadic US strikes in the region, justified as "anti-smuggling operations", echo the same logic: policing the hemisphere under the banner of drug control while targeting governments that refuse to align with Washington.
Drugs as diplomacy by other means
Behind the moral rhetoric lies a cynical calculus. The global cocaine trade, worth more than $130 billion annually based on figures referenced in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Report 2025, cannot thrive without financial systems that launder its profits. Major Western banks, from Wachovia to HSBC, have been fined for processing drug money, yet none of their executives faced prison. The selective enforcement of justice mirrors the selective definition of “narco-states".
Today, Colombia and Venezuela sit at opposite poles of this hypocrisy. Uribe's Colombia, under right-wing leadership, was rewarded with aid and free-trade agreements despite being the world’s largest cocaine producer. Venezuela, after nationalizing its oil sector and defying US interests, was branded a criminal enterprise.
Petro’s attempt to expose the nexus between Colombian elites, US politicians, and drug cartels touches a nerve precisely because it inverts the narrative. Instead of a benevolent United States rescuing Latin America from narcotics, he depicts a system in which US power has long relied on those same flows to maintain leverage. Washington’s decades-long presence in Colombian military bases, its training programs, and its intelligence sharing all operate under the premise that controlling drug routes equals controlling politics.
A region pushes back
Across Latin America, governments are beginning to question this premise. Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has repeatedly accused the US Drug Enforcement Administration of violating sovereignty. Bolivia restored relations with Venezuela and expelled US counternarcotics agents years ago. And now Petro calls for a new paradigm.
These shifts terrify Washington’s foreign-policy establishment because they erode the ideological foundation of US dominance in the hemisphere. A drug war that no longer convinces Latin Americans of its moral purpose becomes transparently political.
The latest wave of US hostility toward Petro’s government, and the military pressure on Venezuela’s borders, must therefore be understood not as isolated reactions but as attempts to reassert control over a region moving toward multipolarity.
Cost of US hypocrisy
The human toll of this weaponized drug war is staggering. In Colombia, aerial fumigation destroyed food crops and poisoned rivers. In Venezuela, sanctions have deprived hospitals of medicine and pushed millions into migration. Yet the architects of these policies continue to preach about democracy and human rights. Their real objective, as history shows, is to prevent any government from using its natural resources outside US dictates.
Petro’s challenge and Venezuela’s defiance represent more than national struggles; they are part of a continental demand for sovereignty.
Today, every “anti-narcotics” mission will carry the stench of geopolitical manipulation.
The United States may have built its global influence on the rhetoric of law and order, but Latin America has long learned to read between the lines. The so-called war on drugs was never truly about narcotics; it was a pretext for regime change, military aggression, and the extraction of resources.
Today, in a shifting geopolitical landscape marked by rising multipolarity and regional defiance, Washington’s grip is loosening, and its old playbook is losing credibility.
