The struggle narrative is so disjointed and so contradictory that even the legacy media are choosing it aside.
Because the Trump administration started transferring US naval forces to the Caribbean and committing the wanton homicide of unidentified boat crews on the excessive seas, we have now tried to maintain a detailed eye on the reporting in mainstream US and Western media. What we have now discovered is that not like most different US-led army campaigns of current many years, the escalation of hostilities in opposition to Venezuela has loved, at finest, lukewarm help within the legacy press.
That doesn’t imply that sure media shops aren’t doing their bit to assist craft and promote a pro-war narrative, with the Murdoch-owned Wall Road Journal notably standing out. However many are doing so with much less enthusiasm than standard. Some shops, together with the New York Instances and CBS, have even uncovered a few of the obvious flaws and inconsistencies within the Trump Administration’s ostensible case for struggle — i.e., to fight drug cartels.
The lies are so brazen and the struggle narrative so disjointed and contradictory that even the legacy media are choosing them aside. Bear in mind this one?
Unimaginable. Tulsi Gabbard on October 31, 2025 claimed Trump was placing an finish to Washington’s infinite cycle of “regime change” & “nation-building.” In the meantime a full-scale regime change op is underway in Venezuela, and Trump has explicitly imposed US-led “nation-building” in Gaza pic.twitter.com/Wg9syNw4Nr
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 1, 2025
Eerie Echoes of Libya
On Saturday, Trump introduced he was ratcheting up his marketing campaign in opposition to Latin America’s drug cartels by closing “IN ITS ENTIRETY” the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela. The announcement bore eerie echoes of the no-fly zone the UN Safety Council imposed on Libya simply days earlier than NATO’s bombardment of the nation. And it appears to be working:
Not a single aircraft flying over Venezuela, a rustic of 30m individuals with world’s largest oil reserves
Its airspace has been closed by the US President sitting in White Home 2,000 miles away
Worldwide regulation is a chimera. World is run just like the mafia and Washington is the Don pic.twitter.com/MQ8UNOWNop
— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) December 1, 2025
Not all flights have been cancelled, nevertheless. As Spain’s El Diario stories, flights have been nonetheless coming in from Colombia, Panama and Russia on Monday. Colombian President Gustavo Petro Petro stated that Washington can solely limit its personal airways and referred to as on different nations to revive regular civil aviation hyperlinks with Venezuela, emphasising the necessity for dialogue.
In the meantime, as Tyler Pager reported for the Instances, lower than 24 hours earlier than shutting down Venezuelan airspace, “Mr. Trump had introduced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who in 2021 was convicted in america of drug trafficking prices and sentenced to 45 years in jail”.
In asserting the pardon of a convicted drug trafficker whereas threatening Venezuela, Pager notes, Trump is displaying contradictions (which is placing it mildly):
[Trump’s] two posts displayed a outstanding dissonance within the president’s technique, as he moved to escalate a army marketing campaign in opposition to drug trafficking whereas ordering the discharge of a person prosecutors stated had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their medication with the complete energy and energy of the state — army, police and justice system.” In reality, prosecutors stated that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to movement by Honduras en path to america…
The Trump administration has struggled to supply a transparent strategic rationale for why it has amassed such a big army presence within the Caribbean. The president has most frequently pointed to counternarcotics operations, however the measurement of the U.S. forces within the area suggests larger ambitions. In non-public, the president has proven an curiosity in Venezuela’s oil reserves, whereas he and his aides even have stated they wish to oust Mr. Maduro.
In a press release, Mr. Trump stated he had issued the pardon to Mr. Hernández as a result of “many associates” had requested him to take action, including, “They gave him 45 years as a result of he was the president of the nation — you would do that to any president on any nation.”
These “associates” presumably embody Secretary of State Marco Rubio in addition to the DC-based lobbying agency BGR Group. In accordance with a 2021 VICE report, Hernández signed a deal in 2020 with BGR Group to “buttress his picture as a devoted [US] ally and an implacable foe of organized crime”. Rubio has traditionally been one of many greatest beneficiaries of BGR’s spending:
Though BGR presents itself as a bipartisan agency, it has inextricable ties to the Republican Occasion. The corporate was co-founded by former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour. Its present workforce consists of distinguished Republicans, comparable to former Consultant Sean Duffy, a Wisconsin Republican, and Trump Administration State Division spokesperson Heather Nauert, who’s on the agency’s advisory board.
BGR has additionally given greater than $1 million to candidates for federal workplace in every of the final three election cycles, with roughly 90 p.c of its contributions going to Republicans. Rubio is amongst the highest beneficiaries of BGR generosity, and he has benefited from the corporate’s largesse all through his profession, together with BGR-hosted fundraisers throughout each his 2010 and 2016 Senate campaigns and his short-lived presidential bid.
Right here is Rubio assembly with Hernandez in 2018 to thank him for his “help of Israel and the US on the UN and his partnership focusing on drug traffickers.”
Which is curious provided that Hernández is the epitome of a narco politico. In accordance with courtroom paperwork, Hernández’s election campaigns have been funded with drug cash; he had Honduran police and army defend smugglers who paid him off; and his brother, Tony, was arrested in Miami in 2018 as a result of his ties to a trafficking group.
He even had an accused co-conspirator killed in a Honduran jail to guard himself, and had shut ties to Sinaloan capo Chapo Guzman. Hernández as soon as apparently boasted, “We’re going to stuff the medication up the gringos’ noses, and so they’re by no means even going to realize it.”
Selective Utility
In his resolution to pardon Hernández, Trump has not offered a single shred of proof that Hernandez’s trial was biased or corrupted, factors out the Grey Zone’s Wyatt Reed:
“Nor has he defined how the then-president of Honduras may have been unaware of the huge cocaine trafficking conspiracy which his personal brother – Tony Hernandez – was indicted for by Trump’s Division of Justice.”
After all, Hernández just isn’t the one US-aligned, Rubio-connected head of state, present or former, to be accused of ties to the narcotics commerce. As we’ve already famous on earlier events, the household enterprise of Ecuador’s Miami-born president, Daniel Noboa, has repeatedly been caught transporting cocaine in its banana consignments to Europe.
When senior figures inside Argentina’s Milei authorities have been proven to have acquired marketing campaign funding from recognized drug traffickers just some months in the past, Washington barely batted an eye fixed.
It’s an analogous story with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Simply over a month in the past, The Washington Submit revealed that Rubio had agreed to return to El Salvador 9 leaders of the MS-13 legal group who have been in US custody in change for Bukele’s settlement to permit the US to deport and detain a whole bunch of immigrants at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Middle.
Bukele’s request got here amid compromising stories of secret offers between his authorities and MS-13. The individuals Rubio promised to return to El Salvador included US authorities informants who have been underneath the safety of the US Division of Justice. Who is aware of what has occurred to them since their return?
Now, Trump’s proposed presidential pardon for a convicted narco presidente reveals the selective method the US tends to use its struggle on medication. As Decide Andrew Napolitano famous, “the proof on this case was overwhelming.” What the Trump administration is doing is “kill[ing] the individuals as to whom there is no such thing as a recognized public proof of guilt (i.e. the boat strike victims) whereas pardon[ing] the particular person convicted in a courtroom of regulation with overwhelming proof of guilt.”
The proposed pardon can also be definitive affirmation, if ever wanted, that the US’ quickly escalating struggle in opposition to the drug cartels is, at backside, a flimsy pretext for an additional marketing campaign of regional plunder and geostrategic domination, as we warned over three years in the past:
[I]t goes with out saying that the actual driving motivation behind the newest calls to increase the struggle on medication is to not stem the movement of medicine into the US, or to sort out the escalating violence of drug cartels throughout Latin America — if Washington was critical about that, all it must do is go laws to stem the southward movement of US-produced weapons and different weapons. However that may harm the income of arms producers. And if it was critical about tackling drug habit, it will by no means have let Massive Pharma unleash the opium epidemic within the first place. And as soon as it had, it will by no means have let the perps stroll free with the daintiest of economic slaps on the wrists.
No, that is primarily about what the US struggle on medication has at all times been about: pursuing geopolitical and geostrategic dominance in key areas of the world whereas controlling and imprisoning for critical sums of cash the restive populace at house. This can be a level that’s defined elegantly by Jorge Retana Yarto, a former director of the Intelligence Faculty for Nationwide Safety of Mexico’s Centre for Nationwide Intelligence (CNI), in an article for the information web site Contralinea:
The ideology of the “struggle” on medication and arranged crime in america is an immense fabrication. That doesn’t imply that the issues linked to the multinational trafficking of prohibited medication and the legal organizations which have specialised in it, and every thing that this entails, don’t exist. They exist and are very acute, however each phenomena have been ideologized for the needs of geopolitical and geostrategic dominance, and have been imposed by exportable reactive and punitive public insurance policies in issues of intelligence and safety, inflicting social, political-institutional, cultural and financial devastation. By assuming a army dimension, (the Battle on Medication) laid the foundations for armed intervention within the Latin American area and transformed the territories, in addition to nationwide sovereignties, into areas of geostrategic motion.
A “Clear Break” for the Western Hemisphere
Below Trump 2.0, that geostrategic motion is being aimed toward governments which are considerably left of centre and are unwilling to show their nations into US vassal states. As worldwide relations professor on the College of Chicago, John Mearsheimer notes, the US “doesn’t tolerate left-leaning governments… and as quickly as they see a authorities that’s thought of to be left-of-centre they transfer to exchange that authorities.”
As we famous in early September, the US is actually trying to merge two “failed” wars in Latin America, the struggle on medication and the struggle on Terror. Or as Max Blumenthal put it in his newest podcast with Aaron Mate, it’s about taking the Undertaking for a New American Century’s “Clear Break” program for the Center East and making use of it to the Western Hemisphere.
Battle crazed former Bush and Trump official Marshall Billingslea says the final word goal of a US regime change assault on Venezuela is all the Latin American left, from Cuba to Brazil to Mexico to Nicaragua
Medication is simply the quilt for management, like WMD pic.twitter.com/RGd7PK9aLg
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 20, 2025
In the meantime, because the struggle in Ukraine runs out of funding and cannon fodder, Trump’s quickly escalating pretend struggle on narco-terrorism is opening up new profit-making alternatives for the MIC. Because the Wall Road Journal stories, with the US army turning its consideration southward, the defence trade is lining as much as promote it the instruments for a distinct form of struggle:
Protection-tech corporations and artificial-intelligence startups have discovered a significant new market in President Trump’s quickly escalating drug struggle. Weapons and AI platforms that have been designed for a future battle with China or struggled to show themselves on the Ukrainian battlefield have discovered a distinct segment within the administration’s tech-enabled crackdown on drug trafficking.
Drone and imaging corporations are helping the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy with interdiction operations within the Caribbean. AI corporations from Silicon Valley to Dubai are pitching platforms that promise to map the hidden networks of fentanyl traffickers. On the southern U.S. border, a counterdrone system developed in Ukraine is being repurposed to deflect incursions from Mexico.
As Washington has revived the rhetoric and authorized instruments of the worldwide struggle on terror, extra corporations giant and small have staked their claims to the rising market, at occasions retooling to suit the newest mission. They’ve rebranded their drones, sensors, AI instruments and information platforms as customized instruments for Trump’s struggle in opposition to “narco-terror.”
The trouble has accelerated since early September, when the U.S. army started an unprecedented marketing campaign in opposition to small drug-trafficking vessels, executing strikes which have killed greater than 80 individuals. Some regional allies have accused the U.S. of extrajudicial killings of civilians. The Trump administration maintains that drug cartels pose an imminent menace to America’s nationwide safety.
If that have been the case, why would Trump be looking for to pardon a convicted narco-president?
It’s most likely no coincidence that Trump introduced his intention to pardon Hernández on the very same weekend as Honduras’ presidential elections. As we reported on Friday, Trump has brazenly intervened in these elections by endorsing Tito Asfura, the candidate of the right-wing Nationwide Occasion, the identical get together as Hernández’, and promising “lots of US help” if he wins.
On the similar time, Trump pilloried left-wing frontrunner Rixi Moncada as a “Communist” and centrist Salvador Nasralla as a “borderline Communist.”
Asfura’s marketing campaign seems to have benefited from the endorsement, and is at present main the vote. Nevertheless, the governing Libre Occasion has alerted of an alleged hack of the TREP system earlier than the Nationwide Electoral Council printed 34.25% of the tally sheets, simply as allegedly occurred in Venezuela final summer time.
This threat of electoral fraud was flagged months in the past following the publicity of a plot involving a high-ranking Nationwide Occasion laws and his get together colleague on the Nationwide Electoral Council. Whereas the standard suspects in Miami are already declaring victory for the Nationwide Occasion, the governing get together candidate, Rixi Moncada, has introduced she’s going to solely recognise the ultimate outcomes and never preliminary ones.
Honduras has rejected socialism on the poll field overwhelmingly.
Even because the final votes are counted, the message rings like a bell: the individuals selected liberty, prosperity, and democracy over the failed guarantees of the left.
We now stand by for the official outcomes.
— Rep. María Elvira Salazar (@RepMariaSalazar) December 1, 2025
These official outcomes have nonetheless not been printed, two days after the elections. The echoes with what occurred in Venezuela in July 2024 are putting. In the meantime, because the drums of struggle maintain beating louder in and round Venezuela, the standard hubris is as soon as once more on show amongst DC and Miami’s packs of hardcore neo-cons.
“This isn’t going to be laborious,” says Salazar.
Salazar: This isn’t going to be laborious. 80% of the Venezuelans voted for the opposition. You will have eight million Venezuelans in exile, speaking concerning the largest reserves of oil on the planet that can be doing enterprise with the American oil corporations, and that is one thing that I… pic.twitter.com/9QSRGmrvu2
— Acyn (@Acyn) November 30, 2025
Elliot Abrams recommends focused strikes in opposition to Venezuela’s air defence methods, F-16 fighter plane on the Palo Negro Air Base, and Sukhoi jets on the air base situated on La Orchila, an island about 100 miles off the coast, in addition to the focused assassination of Inside Minister Diosdado Cabello, “the regime’s chief thug.”
“It isn’t doubtless that [President Nicolas Maduro’s] regime may face up to such an assault,” predicts Abrams, who additionally emphasises that apart from the potential deployment of particular forces to apprehend to “apprehend indicted regime leaders,” “[i]t could be neither smart nor essential to deploy U.S. floor forces to Venezuela.”
Nevertheless, as Jim Lobe factors out in Accountable Statecraft, this rosy image departs wildly from the findings of struggle video games performed by contributors from all related US authorities businesses in early 2019. Because the Instances stories, these struggle video games instructed that Maduro’s ouster by an inner coup, standard rebellion, or US army motion would produce “chaos for a sustained time period with no chance of ending it.”
That chaos would most likely unfold past Venezuela’s borders, even perhaps far past, simply as occurred with the US-led wars within the Center East. Nevertheless, whereas the US was largely untouched by the preliminary waves of blowback from the wars it unleashed upon the Center East and South Asia, that may most likely not be the case with a large-scale army intervention in Venezuela.
Put crudely, the US could be crapping by itself doorstep. Migration would develop into an excellent larger drawback to include, particularly if Venezuela is was one other Libya. There would even be the prospect of drone strikes performed in opposition to strategic targets on US soil, very similar to Ukraine has been doing in Russia.
Up to now, each try to intimidate Maduro into abandoning his authorities and his nation seems to have failed. Yesterday, in response to Trump’s newest (and maybe final) ultimatum. Maduro swore “absolute loyalty” to the Venezuelan individuals. With the Venezuelan skies kind of closed, round 20,000 US troops stationed within the area, together with in Puerto Rico, and the Trump administration designating Maduro as each a cartel chief and a terrorist, army intervention of some form appears kind of unavoidable.
Until he can conjure some form of get-out clause, Trump, the US’ self-described “peace president”, may very well be about to launch the US’ most unpopular struggle in current historical past. An awesome majority of US residents (round 70%, based on a current CBS ballot) already opposed army intervention just some days in the past. That was earlier than Trump introduced his plans to pardon one in every of Latin America’s most infamous narco politicians.
That is all occurring on the similar time that the cracks within the US economic system are rising, public help for Trump is slumping and an increasing number of questions are being requested concerning the legality of US boat strikes within the Caribbean and Jap Pacific. No matter Trump decides to do within the subsequent few days will most likely find yourself defining — and fairly probably derailing — his second time period.
* Maybe the identical may very well be stated of Marco — or as some are calling him, “Narco” — Rubio:
Marco Rubio has by no means adequately defined his familial narco-trafficking hyperlinks
Rubio’s brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, saved kilos of cocaine within the bed room of a home the place Marco Rubio lived
Cicilia was one of many prime drug traffickers in South Florida, and was sentenced to… pic.twitter.com/iPB858X2PX
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 15, 2025
