US Finds Another 'Drug Lord' When Oil Needs a Regime Change
Axios breathlessly reports on the supposed 'capture' of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, comparing it to the US invasion of Panama to seize Manuel Noriega. (Such quaint language for regime change operations.) What Axios omits is that Noriega was a long-time CIA asset, only deemed a 'drug lord' when he ceased to serve US interests. The 'war on drugs' has always been a convenient pretext for
intervention, whether it's Panama's strategic canal or Venezuela's vast oil reserves. This isn't about prosecuting crime; it's about control. One might wonder why the US only discovers 'drug kingpins' in nations that defy its foreign policy objectives. How many 'drug lords' are operating freely in US-aligned countries? The sheer audacity of presenting these interventions as mere arrests, rather
than acts of economic and political coercion, should be astounding, but (predictably) it's not.