Narcotics trafficking and crime are tools of 21st century dictatorships

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 18/04/2024

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The permanent attacks of dictatorships to destabilize and supplant democracy have always used criminal methods such as sedition, conspiracy, disinformation, assassination of reputation, terrorism, guerrillas, kidnapping, extortion, murder and more. Factual reality shows that 21st Century Socialism’s dictatorships in the Americas have increased the use of narcotics trafficking and crime in general as their essential tools.

Conspiracy by the dictatorial group now-a-days called 21st Century Socialism, or Castrochavism, always starts by exacerbating a community’s problems, assassinating the reputation of its political leaders, organizations, and parties, promoting institutional crisis, and intensifying the social unrest to then use violence or electoral manipulation. They install discontentment with populist proposals from the left and counterfeit narratives, all while they destroy the society’s leaderships, history, and structure.

Demagoguery is the structural basis of populism and is defined as “the strategy used to gain political power by appealing to prejudices, emotions, fears, and hopes of the people to get popular support, using the rhetoric, disinformation, agnotology (the ignorance or doubt introduced by incorrect or skewed data), and propaganda. . .”

From the beginning of the 21st century, the entire region endured the expansion of Cuba’s dictatorship -started with Venezuela’s resources and followed by Hugo Chavez’s surrender of the entire country of Venezuela to Fidel Castro- thus starting the so-called “Bolivarian Populism” that consolidated “20th Century Castroism” as “21st Century Castrochavism.”

To establish and sustain a dictatorship is only possible by making freedom disappear, violating human rights, extinguishing the rule of law, or eliminating law enforcement, concentrating all power in the hands of the chieftain, or the group that wields power, annulling the freedom of political and social organization, and manipulating the popular will. To be able to do all of that through criminal operations that affect the population at large, dictatorial constitutions that eliminate freedom and false pseudo-legislatives that only produce “despicable laws” that violate human rights have been instituted and a “vote-catching dictatorship” in which people vote but do not elect and a “functional opposition” was created.

Reality shows that all actions of dictators and their inner circles are criminal. From the counterfeiting of narratives, corruption, divestment of the country, political persecutions, imprisonments, and exiles, torture, and assassinations, the subjection to foreign potencies, the electoral farses, and more. To indefinitely and inpunely wield power -which is already a crime by itself- is only possible with the daily commission of crime that dictatorships have institutionalized through the abhorrent misdeeds of “dictatorial constitutionalism.”

The crimes perpetrated by heads and operators of 21st Century Socialism dictatorships established in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, are committed against their own peoples and against democratic States of the Americas, their peoples, and the international community. Internally, its basic tool in “State terrorism,” in the international arena it continues using “diplomatic terrorism,” conspiracy, guerrilla, terrorism, extortion, assassination of a person’s reputation, kidnapping, murder, and more. This has ben proven by; the failed coup of President Castillo in Peru, the scot-free reinstallation of the dictatorship in Bolivia, the divestment of their nationality of persecuted Nicaraguans, the electoral farse in Venezuela, the assassination of Fernando Villavicencio in Ecuador, the kidnapping and murder of Lieutenant Ronald Ojeda a Venezuelan refugee in Chile, and a long litany of crime that is continuously repeated.

Twenty-First Century Socialism has increased its use of narcotics trafficking and common crime as tools to destabilize democracy. The first corroboration is that dictatorships from Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua are NARCO-STATES, that is “countries whose political institutions are influenced -in a significant way- by the power and wealth of narcotics trafficking, whose leadership are -simultaneously- government officials and members of illicit narcotics trafficking networks, protected by their legal empowerment.” They seek to legalize narcotics trafficking as a Narrative of the State and repeat Fidel Castro’s proclamation “to use narcotics trafficking as an antiimperialist weapon,” and today as an “antidemocratic weapon.”

Since the population’s security is an essential need and expectation of the peoples, the crisis in this area is generated by means of the promotion, coverup, sustainment of trans nationalized common crime that -based on the trafficking of drugs- generate situations in which the dictatorships can cover itself up more easily. Let us look at Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica.

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

Translation from Spanish by Edgar L. Terrazas

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