Dangerous permissiveness of democracies for dictatorships and narco-states

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 26/01/2024

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Factual reality and ample proof demonstrate that the peoples from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are subjected by dictatorships that have turned those countries into narco-States with their transnational organization known as “21st Century Socialism.” Democratic governments have the obligation to stop the dangerous permissiveness they have with dictatorships and narco-States that are the greatest threat against security and development in the Americas.

Dictatorship is “the regime which, by force or violence, concentrates all power onto one person, group, or organization and represses human rights and individual freedoms.” Narco-State is “the country whose political institutions are influenced in a significant way by the power and wealth of narcotics’ trafficking and whose political leaders are simultaneously government officials and members of illegal narcotic drug networks, protected by the empowerment of the government.” The explosive mix of these two criminal concepts is the dictatorship/narco-State that is “the organized crime’s regime that wields power illegally and illegitimately through State-terrorism and whose officials are part of a narcotics’ trafficking network.”

Twenty-First Century Socialism, or Castrochavism, has a head and it is Cuba’s dictatorship whose condition as a narco-State goes back to the past century and has been amply demonstrated and documented with the proven partnership of Fidel Casto with narcotics’ traffickers Pablo Escobar from Colombia and Roberto Suarez from Bolivia since “the beginning of the decade of the eighties” started by “Cuba’s ambassador to Colombia Fernando Ravelo” following the dictatorship’s direct orders. The Castroist dictatorship attempted to cover up Fidel and Raul Castro’s direct involvement with the execution by firing squad of General Ochoa, Colonel de la Guardia, Captain Martinez Valdez, and Major Padron Trujillo on 13 July of 1989 by order of the dictatorship’s military tribunal but what it accomplished instead, was to produce more proof of it being a dictatorship and a narco-State.

Recently, Infobae has documented the book by “former narcotics’ trafficker Carlos Lehder” ratifying the direct connection of Raul Castro as ruler of Cuba with the Medellin Cartel and cocaine trafficking deals with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN in Spanish) of dictator Daniel Ortega from Nicaragua.

Since the first Summit of the Americas in 1994, narcotics’ trafficking was sustainably defeated in the region with; drastic reductions of illicit coca-leaf harvesting in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, the dismantling of cartels, the defeat of narco-guerrillas as the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) and Shining Path in Peru, the “Plan Colombia,” the imprisonment and extradition of narcotics’ traffickers, identification of and sanctions against governments involved with or linked to narcotics’ trafficking such as the case “President Ernesto Samper, Process 8,000” in Colombia, the exchange of inter-governmental information and more, getting to the year 2000 with the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime or the Palermo Convention.

The success of the war on drugs and crime in the Americas came to a screeching halt with the appearance of the movement led by Hugo Chavez and based on Cuba’s dictatorship with the creation of “21st Century Socialism or Castrochavism” that established dictatorships in Venezuela with Chavez/Maduro, in Bolivia with Morales/Arce, in Ecuador with Correa and in Nicaragua with Ortega/Murillo, all of them claiming the nature of “narcotics’ trafficking to be a weapon in the fight against imperialism.” This is how dictatorships and narco-States of the 21st Century Socialism evolved using the foreign affairs of the countries they subject and the governments they finance and impose as in Mexico with Lopez Obrador, Chile with Boric, Colombia with Petro, and Brazil with Lula, discrediting the war on drugs, they seek the legalization of drugs, extoll the rights of criminals at the expense of the rights of the people, and promote the persecution of anyone involved in the war against crime.

Today, Venezuela is the most notorious and publicized dictatorship/narco-State with Nicolas Maduro at the helm despite an international arrest warrant and a bounty of $15 million Dollars issued against him for his role as member of the “Los Soles Cartel” a narco-group comprised by a great part of his regime. Bolivia, with Coca/Cocaine Harvesting Federations turned into the “Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) political party as the foundation of the regime, is also the Center for training, protection, and reidentification of internationally sought traffickers. Nicaragua with Ortega/Murillo now under the light due to the last seizure of a ton of cocaine sent from Nicaragua to Russia and seized in Saint Petersburg without knowing who sent it and who was meant to receive it.

Cuba’s dictatorship, in command of 21st Century Socialism, is now executing a hybrid war against Ecuador in an effort to recover it as a narco-State. Cuba promotes the legitimization of crime in Colombia with the FARC and the ELN and throughout the region, but is also the shipment base point of cocaine, as proven by the seizure in Panama of “401 kilograms of cocaine destined to Belgium” in April of 2016 and of “46 bags with 1,517 packages of illicit substances… from Cuba and with Turkey as its final destination” in May of 2019 (Infobae). Cuba exports cocaine!

*Attorney & Political Scientist. Director of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy.

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas

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