Dope, Dollars, and Domination: A People’s History of Narco-Imperialism and the Making of the American Empire

When Empire Smells Like Dope

Every empire has a smell. The British Empire reeked of gunpowder, coal smoke, and rotting bodies in the colonies. The American Empire smells like gasoline, bleach, and burnt coffee at the night shift. But under all that, if you listen to history with your nose instead of your ears, there’s another scent that never goes away: the sour-sweet burn of dope. Opium, heroin, cocaine, crack, fentanyl—different names for the same function in the system. This essay is about that smell, and the world it built.

We’re taught to think of drugs as some wild side quest to capitalism: a moral failure, a cultural decline, a “crime problem,” a story about individual bad decisions and bad neighborhoods. The ruling class loves that story. It’s useful. It keeps the finger pointed down instead of up. But if you pull back from the police tape and the after-school specials and look at the thing in historical time—from the British opium monopoly in India to the CIA’s heroin flights out of Laos, from Colombia’s death squads to HSBC’s laundry machines in London—you start to see something else. Drugs are not a glitch in the system. They are part of the operating code.

Because the basic truth is simple, even if the ruling class will never admit it: narcotics have been one of the hidden arteries of capitalist accumulation for over two centuries. The British East India Company did not just “allow” opium; it organized the trade, monopolized it, forced it into China at gunpoint, and used the profits to bankroll industrial development. Yankee merchant dynasties did not stumble into the opium business by accident; they built fortunes on it. The Delano family—Franklin Roosevelt’s people—smuggled opium into China and turned that blood money into mansions, banks, and political power. The same names that show up on Ivy League libraries and presidential family trees show up in the ledgers of the old dope syndicates.

Once you see that, other pieces start to fall into place. The Kuomintang in China—sold to the American public as a Christian, modernizing, anti-communist force—ran a state built on corruption and narcotics. When Chiang Kai-shek’s armies were pushed off the mainland, they didn’t just retreat with their flags and medals; they took their drug networks with them into Burma and Thailand. There, under U.S. protection, the remnants of a Chinese narco-state helped to build the Golden Triangle, one of the largest heroin production zones the world has ever seen. The CIA looked at this and didn’t say, “This is illegal.” It said, “This is useful.”

That is one of the key threads of this story. Drugs are not just a business. They are a weapon. The British used opium to break Chinese resistance and drain Chinese silver. The French and Japanese used narcotics monopolies to pacify colonized populations. The CIA used heroin and cocaine networks to fund off-the-books wars from Southeast Asia to Central America, to arm warlords and death squads and counterrevolutionary armies without ever asking Congress for permission. And at home, in the heart of the beast, drugs were turned into a form of chemical counterinsurgency against Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities.

Black revolutionaries clocked this decades before any professor wrote a footnote about it. Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor called it plain: “Capitalism plus dope equals genocide.” George Jackson warned that anyone who looked at the so-called “drug problem” without understanding it as part of the war against the captive Black nation was sleepwalking into defeat. Mutulu Shakur and the comrades at Lincoln Detox treated addiction, not as a moral stain, but as a state-sponsored weapon. They understood that heroin in Harlem, like crack in L.A. later, was not some random misfortune—it was a political project.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the pipeline, the money was washing up pristine and respectable. While cops kicked in doors in the hood, cartel cash was being welcomed at the teller windows of major banks. Whole boxes of drug money were designed to fit perfectly through HSBC counters in Mexico. Wachovia moved hundreds of billions in suspect transfers and paid a fine that amounted to a tip. No CEOs did time. No boardrooms got raided at dawn. The same system that throws people in cages for a dime bag will protect a bank that launders billions for a cartel, because the bank is part of the architecture of empire and the prisoner is part of the surplus population empire needs to control.

So the question this essay asks is not, “Why did the drug war fail?” That’s the wrong question. The drug war has been fantastically successful at what it was built to do. It has militarized our hemisphere, justified foreign bases and police aid, financed black-budget operations, shattered revolutionary movements, and stocked prisons with the poor. It has kept vulnerable communities too busy surviving, grieving, or hustling to overthrow the system that put them there. It has allowed the same ruling class families who made their first fortunes in opium to keep compounding them in oil, finance, tech, and war.

What we are going to do in this piece is trace the long, crooked line that runs through all of this. We start with the British and Yankee opium rackets of the nineteenth century and follow the money and the guns forward: through the opium wars and the U.S. merchant dynasties; through the French and Japanese experiments in narcotics control; through the OSS and the Mafia; through Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang’s dope-soaked state; through the Golden Triangle, Air America, and the Vietnam heroin wave; through Panama’s offshore laundromat; through Iran–Contra and Colombian paramilitaries; through NAFTA, Mexico, and the militarized border; all the way to Wall Street, HSBC, and the present-day “war on drugs.”

This is not a neutral history. It is a people’s indictment. We are not interested in polite euphemisms or bipartisan myths. We are interested in showing, step by step, how narcotics have functioned as a financial engine, an imperial instrument, a counterinsurgency weapon, and a structural pillar of U.S. power. We are interested in arming the working class and the colonized with clarity about the world we’re trapped in, so we can better plan the world that needs to replace it. If the empire has always smelled like dope, then part of our job is to follow that smell back to the source—and prepare to burn the whole lab down.

When Capitalism Learned to Breathe Through an Opium Pipe

Before capitalism learned to run on oil, before Wall Street learned to juggle derivatives, before Silicon Valley learned to mine your data like a new colonial frontier, the system had a different fuel source: narcotics. Not as an afterthought. Not as a scandal. As a primary engine of early Western accumulation. When Europe needed silver, it pushed opium. When the U.S. needed a foothold in Asia, it pushed opium. When the great Yankee merchant dynasties needed startup capital, they pushed opium. Strip away the mythology of “free enterprise,” and the first great American fortunes weren’t built on ingenuity or thrift—they were largely built on dope, smuggled into China against the will of the Chinese people.

Let’s start with the British, because they industrialized narcotics like they industrialized textiles and death. The British East India Company didn’t dabble in opium; it ran the world’s first corporate drug cartel. It forced Indian farmers into poppy cultivation, extracted the raw product, processed it in Company-controlled factories, and smuggled it into China on a scale so vast that it inverted global silver flows. China was the world’s silver sink. Opium was the lever prying it open. When Chinese officials tried to stop the poison from flooding their people, Britain didn’t negotiate. It sent gunboats. That’s what the Opium Wars really were: not trade disputes, but imperial narco-violence on a world-historical scale.

And here’s the part Americans are never taught: the United States was right there too, sleeves rolled up, hands deep in the same drug economy. The Yankee merchant class—names that now adorn university libraries and philanthropic foundations—built fortunes by trafficking narcotics into a country that explicitly outlawed them. The dynasties were not marginal players—they were central pillars:

• The Delanos — Franklin Roosevelt’s maternal line, top-tier opium smugglers.
• The Forbes family — ancestors of John Forbes Kerry, deep in the China trade.
• The Peabody family — merchant-bankers whose early wealth flowed from opium routes.
• The Astors — among America’s richest families, with opium profits embedded in their rise.
• The Russell family — founders of Skull and Bones at Yale; opium traffickers and merchant-capitalists.
• The Perkinses — key Boston merchants with deep stakes in narcotics commerce.
• The Cushings — another New England line enriched by the China opium trade.

These families didn’t just “dabble.” They smuggled Turkish and Bengal opium into Chinese ports, laundered the profits through American banks, invested them into shipping fleets, textile mills, early railroads, and insurance houses, and then translated those fortunes into political power. This was narcotics money becoming industrial capital. Narcotics money becoming banking capital. Narcotics money becoming the seed corn of American empire. The same fortunes that built the Ivy League, endowed missionary societies, and staffed the U.S. foreign policy elite were fertilized by opium fields half a world away.

Warren Delano II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather, made his millions as a chief opium trader for Russell & Co. He knew exactly what he was doing. He wrote home about the “hazardous” nature of the business—hazardous not because of the moral cost or the mass addiction it inflicted, but because Chinese officials kept trying to seize the ships. Delano’s drug money paid for the mansions, the estates, the tutors, the investments, the dynastic respectability. That wealth shaped the future president’s life and, through him, the trajectory of American power. The Roosevelt name may conjure images of the New Deal and the fight against fascism, but its foundation stones were paid for in opium. That is not slander. That is the ledger.

This is the structural link U.S. history textbooks refuse to acknowledge: opium profits helped build the industrial, financial, and political infrastructure of the United States. The early American shipping industry—especially in New England—was capitalized with narcotics money. Insurance firms underwriting voyages, banks issuing credit, textile manufacturers feeding cotton mills: all of them were tied into the China trade. Opium profits flowed into railroad bonds, municipal development, elite private schools, missionary societies, and the foundations of Wall Street’s first great banking houses. The United States did not simply “rise” on ingenuity—alongside genocide and slavery, it rose on narcotics-fueled capital accumulation.

This is what we mean when we say narcotics were woven into the DNA of American capitalism. It wasn’t just the Delanos. The Forbes fortune—yes, the same lineage that produced John Forbes Kerry—was fertilized by opium money. The Russells built not only a narco-financial empire but the secret society at Yale (Skull and Bones) that went on to populate the CIA, State Department, and U.S. intelligence for generations. Capital compounds across time, and narcotics profits turned into shipping companies, railroads, insurance firms, philanthropic endowments, universities, foreign policy institutions, and ultimately the U.S. ruling class itself.

Meanwhile, the United States cultivated a missionary fantasy about its role in Asia. Yankee merchants smuggled opium at night and preached the gospel by day. They built churches, schools, and “China expertise” institutions that claimed moral authority even as they helped structure one of the most brutal narcotics economies the world had ever seen. Those missionaries later became diplomats, policy advisors, and architects of U.S. engagement with China. They shaped the worldview that would justify American alliances with the Kuomintang, and then later the CIA’s protection of KMT drug networks when Chiang Kai-shek fled to Burma and Thailand.

In other words, the narcotics that financed the rise of American capitalism also built the ideological scaffolding for American imperial strategy in Asia. The opium trade didn’t just produce money; it produced illusions—illusions of moral superiority, illusions of benevolent engagement, illusions of “helping China modernize.” All of it drenched in narcotics profits and missionary blindness. These illusions helped generate one of the greatest foreign policy catastrophes in U.S. history: the support of Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt, drug-running, anti-communist regime, and the subsequent Cold War alignment that birthed the Golden Triangle.

So by the time the twentieth century dawned, the template was already laid: narcotics as capital; narcotics as state policy; narcotics as imperial leverage; narcotics as the moral cover for domination. The British perfected the model. The Americans learned it, refined it, and embedded it into the core of their own rise. This wasn’t an accident, nor was it a marginal footnote in the story of the West. The early stages of global capitalism were literally financed by organized, state-protected, transnational drug smuggling.

And here’s the bitter irony: the same families whose fortunes were built on dope would spend the next century funding the think tanks, lobby groups, missionary organizations, intelligence agencies, and political institutions that would later claim to wage a “War on Drugs.” A war they never intended to win. A war designed instead to shift narcotics from an imperial tool abroad to a weapon of counterinsurgency at home. But to understand how that transformation happened, and how the drug racket went from opium fields in Bengal to CIA heroin flights in Laos, we first have to follow the imperial method as it evolved.

Empire Perfects a Weapon: Narcotics as Counterinsurgency

Before the CIA ever touched a poppy field, before the Kuomintang turned narcotics into a political operating system, before the French ran heroin labs under the tricolor, the British Empire had already written the manual. The first great experiment in narco-counterinsurgency happened in British India, where opium was not just a cash crop but a pillar of imperial governance. The British East India Company didn’t merely “permit” opium cultivation—it forced it. Indian farmers were locked into poppy contracts under threat of violence and ruin, compelled to grow a crop they could not eat, sell locally, or use for their own livelihoods. The Company set the prices, controlled the processing factories in Patna and Ghazipur, and built an entire administrative and policing system around extracting opium from a colonized population.

Opium wasn’t just an export commodity—it was a political weapon. It financed the Raj’s bureaucracy, its soldiers, its railways, and its expanding civil administration. It underwrote the colonial police who surveilled and repressed Indian resistance. It pacified regions by tying peasants into debt cycles and destroying alternative forms of agriculture. And it destabilized China, the British Empire’s greatest rival in Asia, by forcing open Chinese markets and draining Chinese silver into imperial coffers. This was narcotics as budget, narcotics as strategy, narcotics as geopolitical warfare. Every empire that followed—France, Japan, the United States—studied this model and adapted it to their own needs.

The French learned these lessons well in Indochina. What began as a colonial concession became a full-spectrum apparatus of domination. By the early twentieth century, the French colonial administration had perfected a narcotics monopoly that sustained its financial base and repressed the colonized at the same time. Opium dens, government stores, and licensed distributors weren’t signs of vice—they were instruments of control, taxation, and surveillance. The colonial administration used the revenue to fund its police, prisons, and military expeditions. And as resistance movements developed—from the Vietnamese communists to peasant rebels—opium was deployed as a way to demoralize, pacify, and divide.

When Japanese imperialism swept into Manchuria, it didn’t invent anything new—it just industrialized the French model. The Japanese Kwantung Army set up state-run narcotics monopolies, forced poppy cultivation across northern China, and used heroin as a weapon to dissolve resistance. Puppet governments, intelligence networks, and criminal syndicates collaborated to distribute narcotics that fed both Japanese coffers and Japanese counterinsurgency campaigns. This wasn’t some rogue operation. It was policy—formal, deliberate, and bureaucratically managed. The Japanese state used heroin the way it used railroads and machine guns: as infrastructure for conquest.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the French were developing another node in the global narcotics architecture: the Corsican-run refining labs in Marseille that later became famous as the “French Connection.” These labs turned raw Turkish opium into high-grade heroin for global export. The Corsican syndicates weren’t separate from the state—they were enmeshed with it. French intelligence tolerated them, protected them, and at times used them as instruments to suppress communist labor movements and resistance networks in Marseille’s docks. The heroin labs were part of a larger political economy of colonial extraction and Cold War anti-communism.

When World War II broke out, and later when the Cold War began to remake the world, the United States didn’t build a new system from scratch—it inherited one. Operation Underworld temporarily allied the OSS with Mafia networks in New York and across the Mediterranean. After the war, U.S. intelligence absorbed the French, Japanese, and remnants of fascist networks into its own global operations. In Indochina, the CIA stepped into the vacuum left by the French and adopted many of their narco-linked assets. In Japan, it rehabilitated wartime collaborators who had run narcotics empires under imperial protection. In Italy, it partnered with Mafia factions to suppress the left. In Southeast Asia, it relied on Kuomintang remnants, Hmong fighters, and warlords whose entire logistics networks were funded by poppy fields.

None of this was accidental. The U.S. wasn’t squeamish about narcotics because narcotics were never the problem. The problem—according to Washington—was communism, national liberation, and any threat to capital’s freedom to exploit. If narcotics could help wage covert war, fund proxy armies, or undermine revolutionary movements, then narcotics became a tool. A tool refined over a century by Britain, France, Japan, and every colonial power that understood the dual-use logic of drugs: profit plus pacification.

By the time the CIA was flying heroin out of Laos under the cover of Air America, the imperial method was already well established. In fact, it was inherited. What the United States added wasn’t the concept but the scale—and the integration of narcotics into a permanent, global counterinsurgency strategy that would eventually stretch from the Golden Triangle to Central America to Colombia and Mexico. But to understand how that machine evolved—from colonial monopolies to Cold War covert ops—we have to follow the networks that the Americans adopted next: the Kuomintang remnants in Burma and Thailand, the warlords of Laos, and the dealers, generals, and fixers who built the Golden Triangle into the heroin workshop of U.S. empire.

The Gangster, the General, and the Company: How the U.S. Adopted a Global Narco-Architecture

If the British wrote the first narco-imperial playbook, and the French and Japanese refined it, the United States perfected the art of inheriting criminal networks wholesale. But before the CIA began stitching together warlords and poppy fields in the mountains of Southeast Asia, Washington ran a smaller experiment closer to home.

During World War II, U.S. intelligence made an alliance that would echo for decades: the OSS partnered with the American Mafia in what became known as Operation Underworld. Officially, the mission was about protecting New York ports from Axis sabotage. Unofficially, it created a working relationship between U.S. intelligence and organized crime that proved too convenient to discard when the war ended. Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and others offered muscle, networks, and access in the Mediterranean. The OSS offered protection. It was a bargain born in wartime necessity, but like most imperial bargains, it outlived the war.

After 1945, the United States inherited a Europe where criminal syndicates were already deeply entangled with the politics of labor, docks, and anti-communist repression. Nowhere was this clearer than in Marseille. As France rebuilt, the Corsican underworld—protected by segments of French intelligence and used as a bludgeon against leftist dockworkers—operated heroin labs that would later become infamous as the French Connection. These labs refined Turkish opium into high-grade heroin for the global market. French intelligence tolerated them because they helped defeat communist influence in Marseille’s ports. The United States tolerated them because they fit neatly into Washington’s own priorities: weaken the French left, stabilize an anti-communist Europe, and maintain a dependable supply chain of irregular assets.

So when the CIA stepped into Southeast Asia after the French colonial collapse, it didn’t arrive as a naïve newcomer. It arrived with decades of experience working alongside gangsters, fascist collaborators, intelligence-linked smugglers, and counterinsurgent criminals. In Indochina, the agency absorbed many of the networks the French had cultivated—military officers, colonial police, opium middlemen, mountain intermediaries—because Washington viewed them as more reliable than the emerging communist or nationalist movements.

This transition—from Operation Underworld to Marseille to Indochina—wasn’t a series of accidents or improvisations. It was a pattern: wherever the U.S. confronted a left-wing movement or an anti-colonial uprising, it turned to criminal networks with narcotics revenue streams. The logic was simple: criminals don’t ask political questions, and drug profits don’t require congressional approval. Narcotics were not a vice to be eradicated. They were an asset—a self-financing counterinsurgency fund.

From there, the path led directly to the Kuomintang. When Chiang Kai-shek’s forces lost the Chinese mainland and retreated to Taiwan, large segments of his intelligence services and military remnants fled into Burma and Thailand. They did not arrive empty-handed. They brought smuggling networks, intelligence contacts, and a political culture soaked in corruption. The CIA saw them as ready-made Cold War assets: fiercely anti-communist, experienced in insurgency, and already tied into narcotics as a funding base.

As Washington’s Cold War obsession deepened, these KMT remnants evolved into key intermediaries for U.S. operations in the region. Their connections to local warlords and poppy producers formed the backbone of the Golden Triangle’s heroin economy. While the French and Japanese had experimented with narcotics monopolies, the United States now helped build a fully integrated narco-counterinsurgency architecture—complete with airlifts, covert weapons shipments, intelligence-sharing, and the laundering of drug profits through front companies and allied banking institutions.

This was the template the CIA carried into Laos, Burma, and Thailand: criminal syndicates and political exiles as paramilitary proxies; narcotics networks as financial arteries; and covert war as the organizing principle. By the time U.S. forces hit the ground in Vietnam, the Company already had relationships with KMT generals, mountain warlords, and drug traffickers who would serve as the logistical foundation of the Golden Triangle. Heroin wasn’t an unfortunate by-product of the war. It was a structural component of how the war was fought.

But the Golden Triangle wasn’t the end of the story—it was only the next chapter. Once the U.S. had perfected the model of marrying narcotics networks to anti-communist insurgencies, it exported that method to the next battlefield: Central America. There, cocaine would replace heroin, the Contras would replace the KMT, and a new narco-geopolitical machine would take shape.

The Golden Triangle: When Heroin Became a Pentagon Budget Line

By the time the United States stumbled into Southeast Asia with the swagger of a drunken giant, the Golden Triangle was already humming. But what the CIA did there, and what it inherited from the Kuomintang, transformed that region from a patchwork of mountain poppy fields into the heroin workshop of U.S. empire. Burma, Laos, and Thailand became the chemical bloodstream of Washington’s war machine. And the Company didn’t just tolerate the trade—it structured and protected it.

When the Chinese Revolution drove Chiang Kai-shek’s forces off the mainland, the KMT didn’t simply retreat to Taiwan. Large sections of the party-state’s intelligence services fled into northern Burma and Thailand, dragging with them a corrupt political culture and an entire narco-economic apparatus. These were not clean-handed nationalists betrayed by history. They were seasoned traffickers. Their political survival had already depended on the opium economy during their final years on the mainland. The CIA saw all this and immediately recognized an opportunity: ready-made anti-communist proxies with their own built-in funding source.

That is where the Golden Triangle begins. The KMT remnants forged alliances with Shan and Wa warlords, local generals, and militia leaders, creating a multi-layered narco–counterinsurgency architecture. Heroin production skyrocketed. Caravans moved along mountain routes policed by KMT units. Opium taxes became military budgets. Narcotics profits subsidized intelligence operations. The Company didn’t have to invent anything—it just had to plug in. The KMT provided the networks and the poppy fields; the CIA provided airlifts, weapons, cover, and geopolitical purpose.

And here we must name a family that sits at the center of this entire architecture of illusion, corruption, and American fantasy: **the Soong family**. This was not just a wealthy clan—it was the political-financial brainstem of the KMT state. T.V. Soong, the finance minister and later premier, was one of the richest men in Asia, a Wall Street–linked banker whose power derived from his ability to merge KMT statecraft with foreign capital. His sister, Soong Mei-ling—Madame Chiang Kai-shek—became the American ruling class’s favorite Chinese aristocrat. Trained in U.S. missionary schools, fluent in elite American cultural codes, she charmed Congress, seduced the press, and fed U.S. elites a fantasy: that the KMT was a Christian, modernizing, democratic force standing as a bulwark against communism.

This fantasy—cultivated through U.S. missionary networks, China “experts,” and State Department illusions—created the political space for Washington to overlook the uncomfortable truth: that the KMT was running a narco-state. T.V. Soong’s financial empire intersected with smuggling networks and corruption across the collapsing nationalist regime. His influence reassured American officials that Chiang’s government was a respectable ally. His sister’s glamour masked the brutality and criminality of the KMT’s actual operations. And when the KMT remnants dug into Burma and Thailand, their deep experience with narcotics economies—quietly tolerated at the highest levels of their old government—became the backbone of the Golden Triangle. The Soong family’s myth-making in the U.S. helped guarantee CIA protection for KMT forces who were financing themselves through opium and heroin.

This is the structural connection that U.S. historiography tries to blur: American illusions about Chiang Kai-shek were not innocent mistakes—they were produced. The Soong family was instrumental in manufacturing the ideological justification that allowed the U.S. to integrate KMT heroin networks into its Cold War counterinsurgency strategy. Without the Soongs, there is no political cover for the CIA–KMT partnership. Without that partnership, the Golden Triangle does not become the backbone of America’s covert war machine.

As the U.S. escalated in Vietnam, these networks became indispensable. Air America—the CIA’s proprietary airline—moved weapons, supplies, and at times provided the logistical cover that allowed allied warlords and KMT remnants to keep the opium flowing. Heroin flooded U.S. military bases in Vietnam, hollowing out the very army Washington had deployed to crush Asian revolution. By 1971, an estimated 10–15% of U.S. GIs in Vietnam were addicted to high-grade Golden Triangle heroin. The United States had built the machine that was now consuming its own soldiers.

None of this was accidental. It was the product of a geopolitical calculus: the U.S. needed anti-communist fighters, and those fighters needed money. Washington refused to fund them openly. Narcotics solved the problem. The heroin economy wasn’t a tragic oversight—it was a structural pillar of U.S. Cold War strategy in Asia. The Company accepted heroin the way it accepted coups, assassinations, and death squads: as the natural cost of maintaining empire.

The Golden Triangle proved a simple truth: if the United States can outsource counterinsurgency to drug traffickers and finance covert wars off the books with narcotics profits, it will. And once that method worked in Southeast Asia, it was only a matter of time before Washington exported the model to the next front line. That front line would be in the Americas, where cocaine—lighter than heroin, easier to smuggle, infinitely profitable—would become the financial bloodstream of the next phase of U.S. empire.

Panama: How Wall Street Built a Laundromat Before the Coke Arrived

Long before cocaine money began washing through Panama like a biblical flood, the country had already been engineered—quite literally—into a financial sluice gate for American capital. This did not start with Noriega, the Medellín Cartel, or the Reagan years. It started with Wall Street bankers, U.S. railroad magnates, and the creation of the Panama Canal Zone as an extraterritorial corporate empire. In the early twentieth century, as the United States seized Panama from Colombia and carved out the Canal Zone, American banks moved in behind the Marines, shaping Panama into a dollarized, offshore, deregulated financial space tailor-made for secrecy.

By the 1920s and 1930s, J.P. Morgan, National City Bank (the precursor to Citibank), and other U.S. financial houses were using Panama as a booking center for foreign loans, tax avoidance schemes, and the early architecture of offshore banking. Panama’s decision to adopt the U.S. dollar as legal tender—encouraged by American financiers—created a financial ecosystem that required no currency conversion, no capital controls, and minimal regulatory oversight. By mid-century, U.S. shipping companies, multinational corporations, and wealthy individuals were already funneling money through Panamanian subsidiaries, trusts, and shell structures. Panama was a laundromat decades before the first kilo of Colombian cocaine ever crossed the Darién.

This early Wall Street–engineered offshore model is what made the later narco-economy possible. When the cocaine explosion hit in the 1970s and 1980s, traffickers did not need to invent new laundering methods. They simply plugged into a pre-existing financial architecture built to handle anonymous flows of capital. The banks, the lawyers, the corporate registries, the dollarized economy, the secrecy—it was all already there, designed to service American capital. The cartels just became another client.

By the time Manuel Noriega stepped into the spotlight, Panama was already a financial pivot point of the Western hemisphere—a place where money could appear, disappear, or reappear with no one the wiser. Noriega did not build the system; he inherited it. What made him valuable to Washington was not just his intelligence contacts, but his control over a financial geography that made covert operations cheaper, faster, and harder to trace.

For the CIA, Panama was a dream: a friendly strongman, a strategic canal, pliant banks, and an offshore system that could launder black-budget funds, sanctions-busting transfers, and covert war money. Noriega’s relationship with U.S. intelligence was not an aberration—it was the logical product of the political economy that U.S. banks had constructed half a century earlier. When cocaine dollars started pouring in from Colombia, they flowed into an infrastructure originally designed for American corporations evading taxes and funding imperial projects.

It is in this historical light that Panama becomes legible. The 1980s image of Noriega as a rogue narco-dictator obscures the deeper continuity: Panama functioned as a U.S. financial instrument first, a narco-laundromat second. Cocaine merely intensified a dynamic that was already structural. The United States created the conditions, wrote the laws, trained the bankers, and enforced the political order that allowed Panama to become a clearinghouse for illicit capital.

So when the Medellín and Cali cartels needed a place to wash billions, Panama was waiting for them—doors open, dollarized, deregulated, and policed by a U.S.-backed regime. The line between “drug money” and “good capital” dissolved instantly. Narco-cash and corporate profits were processed by the same banks, using the same shell companies, under the same legal protections. And Washington looked the other way because the flows served U.S. geopolitical ends.

This is the real significance of Panama: it shows that the drug economy did not corrupt an innocent financial system. The financial system was already built for corruption—built for secrecy, built for extraction, built for the offshore circulation of capital beyond the reach of democratic control. The cartels didn’t break the rules. They followed the blueprint that Wall Street had drawn.

When the U.S. turned against Noriega in 1989, it wasn’t because he laundered drug money—that had always been part of the arrangement. It was because he stopped serving U.S. interests. The invasion of Panama was a message to every client and asset across the hemisphere: your survival depends on obedience, not usefulness. And for the narco-networks that had grown dependent on Panamanian banks, the message was just as clear: Washington controls the architecture. You only rent space in it.

From here, the model would migrate north and south. The next chapter—Central America and the Iran–Contra cocaine pipeline—would scale this financial architecture into a hemisphere-wide covert apparatus. But the beating financial heart of that system, the offshore template that made it all possible, was laid in Panama decades earlier by the same banks that now claim to fight the “War on Drugs.”

Iran–Contra: When Cocaine Became a Covert Budget Line

By the 1980s, the United States had perfected the imperial art of outsourcing dirty work. It had learned from the French in Indochina, the Japanese in Manchukuo, the British in India, and its own experiments in the Golden Triangle. It had mastered the narcotics-financed counterinsurgency model abroad. Now it would bring that model home to the Western Hemisphere—into Central America, into the barrios and ghettos of the United States, and into the very bloodstream of American political life. This was the era of Iran–Contra, when cocaine stopped being a “drug problem” and became a line item in the shadow budget of the American Empire.

But to understand what happens next, we must be explicit about why cocaine became the Cold War commodity of choice. Heroin, for all its geopolitical usefulness, had limits: bulkier shipments, more easily detected supply chains, and declining profitability as global production diversified. Cocaine, in contrast, was the perfect covert commodity. Its profit-to-weight ratio was astronomical. A single suitcase of cocaine generated more revenue than an entire truckload of marijuana or opium. It was highly transportable, highly concealable, and chemically stable, able to survive long flights, humid climates, or rough handling. It aligned perfectly with covert air logistics: small planes, clandestine runways, nighttime landings, deniable routes.

Cocaine also fit the political moment. Colombia and Peru—already producing coca for generations—had the labor, the land, and the networks to scale up rapidly under the pressure of U.S.-aligned paramilitaries and oligarchic elites. Demand in the United States was skyrocketing among both wealthy consumers and soon, through crack, among the poor. For the CIA, cocaine offered the ideal formula: enormous profits, minimal bulk, established routes, pliant local elites, and deniability baked into the logistics. It financed proxy war far more efficiently than heroin ever had. By the early 1980s, cocaine wasn’t just a commodity—it was a covert funding mechanism engineered for maximum geopolitical return.

The official story is tidy: renegade operatives sold weapons to Iran, used the money to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and some “bad apples” looked the other way while cocaine trickled into the U.S. We’re told this was a scandal, an embarrassment, a “breakdown in oversight.” But the true story—revealed by investigative journalists, whistleblowers, defectors, and people who paid with their lives—is that the CIA didn’t just ignore cocaine trafficking. It managed it. It coordinated it. It made it a pillar of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy.

Nicaragua in the 1980s was the epicenter of the empire’s panic. The Sandinista Revolution had overthrown a U.S.-backed dictatorship. Land reform, literacy campaigns, worker cooperatives, anti-imperialist internationalism—the kind of thing that sends Wall Street and the State Department into night sweats. The United States needed a proxy army to crush this threat, and that army—the Contras—needed funding. Congress, under pressure from antiwar and anti-intervention movements, had cut off aid.

So the CIA built a funding stream that Congress couldn’t veto: cocaine. Planes full of weapons flew south into Contra-controlled regions of Honduras and Costa Rica. The same planes flew back north, loaded not with coffee or fruit but with cocaine, which was delivered to U.S. distributors who cooked it into crack and moved it through the shattered economies of Black and Brown neighborhoods. This wasn’t a “weird coincidence.” This was a political economy.

The Contras got their budget. The CIA got its covert war. The cartels got protection. And the inner cities of the United States got a chemical firestorm.

Then there was Barry Seal: pilot, drug runner, CIA asset. Seal flew C-123 cargo planes packed with weapons to Central America and returned with tons of cocaine. When Seal realized he was being hung out to dry, he turned whistleblower. He exposed the nexus between the CIA, the Medellín cartel, and U.S. covert operations. For this, he was assassinated in 1986—gunned down outside a halfway house in Baton Rouge. His murder was blamed on the Medellín cartel, but the logistics of his death, the timing, the intelligence irregularities—all of it reeks of a clean-up operation, not cartel vengeance. Dead men tell no tales.

What the CIA built in Central America was not an alliance—it was an ecosystem. Costa Rica, Honduras, and El Salvador became staging grounds. Panama became the laundromat. Colombia became the production hub. Miami became the financial gateway. And Black America became the dumping ground for the fallout.

The crack epidemic wasn’t an accident. It was the domestic front of the same counterinsurgency strategy the U.S. had been using abroad for decades. In the 1960s and 70s, Black radical movements—Panthers, BLA, grassroots liberation struggles—had shaken the U.S. state to its core. By the 1980s, those movements were decimated by COINTELPRO, police terror, assassinations, and imprisonment. What happened next was chemical warfare. Crack flooded neighborhoods already destabilized by deindustrialization, mass unemployment, and political repression. Addiction rose. Violence rose. Community institutions collapsed. And at the exact moment Black America was reeling, the U.S. government launched the “War on Drugs”—a militarized policing campaign framed as a moral mission but functioning as a counterinsurgency operation.

While the CIA coordinated cocaine shipments abroad, the DEA and local police militarized Black and Brown neighborhoods at home. SWAT teams, no-knock raids, mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, sentencing disparities, mass incarceration—all justified by the very crisis the state helped create. Meanwhile, the U.S. media framed the epidemic as a pathology of Blackness, producing the racist moral panic needed to transform entire communities into carceral zones.

The drug war abroad and the drug war at home were not two separate policies. They were one unified strategy: destabilize revolutionary movements in Central America while criminalizing and containing the descendants of enslaved Africans in the imperial core. Cocaine paid for bullets in Nicaragua and prison beds in the Bronx. It paid for death squads in Tegucigalpa and police tanks in South Central. It paid for the Contras’ massacres and the NYPD’s overtime.

Peter Dale Scott has argued that the real meaning of Iran–Contra wasn’t its illegality but its integration of covert operations with global narcotics economies. In Southeast Asia, heroin had been a Cold War subsidy. In Central America, cocaine became the same. The CIA didn’t fail to stop the flow of drugs—it facilitated it. The U.S. didn’t accidentally create crack—it manufactured the conditions for its spread. And when the explosion hit, the state used it to justify militarized social control.

By the late 1980s, the U.S. had successfully tested a new model: the cocaine-financed counterrevolution. It would become the template for the next phase of narco-imperialism—in Colombia. A place where paramilitaries, death squads, oligarchs, oil companies, and the United States would fuse into the hemispheric headquarters of drug-backed repression. And once again, Panama would be right there—cleaning the money, stabilizing the flows, and making sure the empire’s blood-soaked profits continued circulating through its financial veins.

Colombia: Narco-Paramilitarism and the U.S. Laboratory of Counterinsurgency

Before Iran–Contra ever erupted, Colombia was already a cocaine-producing and exporting country. The Andean region—Colombia, Peru, Bolivia—had cultivated coca for centuries, and by the 1970s Colombia was emerging as a key refining and trafficking center. But this early phase was still relatively fragmented: small producers, regional networks, loosely connected smugglers, and embryonic cartel structures. What Iran–Contra did was transform this pre-existing cocaine economy into a fully militarized, vertically integrated narco-state apparatus aligned with U.S. counterinsurgency goals. The Contra air pipeline, offshore laundering systems, and covert protection networks built by the CIA didn’t create Colombian cocaine—but they supercharged it, reorganized it, and plugged it into a hemisphere-wide U.S.-managed political economy.

By the 1990s, Colombia had become the epicenter of hemispheric drug production. But more importantly, it had become the epicenter of U.S. imperial panic. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist peasant army born out of political exclusion and rural inequality, had survived decades of counterinsurgency and controlled large territories. The left-wing Patriotic Union (UP) had emerged as a political threat—and in response, Colombian elites, military officers, and drug traffickers carried out one of the most systematic political extermination campaigns of the twentieth century. Over 4,000 UP members—mayors, legislators, unionists, journalists—were assassinated.

This was the birth of the modern Colombian narco-state. And the American Empire was not a spectator—it was the architect.

The paramilitary AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) became the centerpiece of this counterinsurgent model. Funded by cocaine trafficking, backed by ranchers and landowners, supported by multinational corporations, and shielded by Colombian security forces, the AUC waged a scorched-earth campaign across the countryside. They displaced millions, murdered union organizers, exterminated leftists, and seized land for agribusiness and resource extraction.

What made this system possible was not just Colombia’s internal contradictions but the external machinery built during and after the Iran–Contra era. The same covert air routes used to move cocaine for the Contras now fed the growing Colombian cocaine export machine. The same laundering nodes in Panama—refined during the Contra war—now absorbed Colombian profits. The same U.S. intelligence networks that coordinated weapons, logistics, and clandestine finance for Central American proxy armies now fused with Colombia’s paramilitary and oligarchic elites. In other words: the U.S. didn’t just support Colombian counterinsurgency; it integrated Colombia into a regional narco-security architecture that it had spent a decade constructing.

And throughout this carnage, the United States stood firmly behind the Colombian state. Washington labeled the FARC “narco-terrorists,” but ignored the fact that the AUC was the hemisphere’s largest cocaine-trafficking organization. The U.S. condemned drug trafficking while arming, training, and funding the very forces that trafficked the most.

This wasn’t hypocrisy. It was policy alignment.

In 2000, the U.S. unveiled Plan Colombia: a multi-billion-dollar aid program framed as anti-drug assistance but in reality designed to militarize Colombia’s state apparatus and crush leftist insurgency. The plan included:

• Military hardware: Black Hawk helicopters, intelligence systems, special forces units.
• Corporate contracts: DynCorp mercenaries, oil company protection units, private security firms.
• Paramilitary integration: Quiet collaboration with AUC intelligence and territorial control.
• Aerial fumigation: Toxic glyphosate sprayed over peasant territories, destroying food crops and livelihoods.
• Financial alignment: Narco-profits routed through offshore nodes—especially Panama—to stabilize the system.

The Colombian oligarchy’s perfect political instrument—Álvaro Uribe—was lifted into power with full U.S. backing. Uribe’s political rise had been shaped by deep relationships with narco-networks, paramilitary blocs, and elite landowners. The U.S. didn’t see this as a liability. They saw it as a guarantee of discipline. Under Uribe, military “successes” against the FARC were often manufactured through “false positives”—the execution of thousands of civilians dressed up as guerrillas to inflate body counts and earn bonuses.

Meanwhile, the drug trade flourished. Cocaine production didn’t drop under Plan Colombia—it expanded. The AUC, even when formally “demobilized,” simply rebranded into BACRIM (criminal bands). Many of the same commanders continued trafficking. Colombian generals collaborated with traffickers while receiving U.S. military training. The DEA knew. The CIA knew. Wall Street knew. Everyone in power knew. Because the real purpose of Plan Colombia wasn’t to stop drugs—it was to stop revolution.

And in this entire operation, Panama remained indispensable. Its banks laundered Colombian cocaine profits. Its free-trade zones hid cartel logistics. Its shell companies moved “cleaned” money into global markets. If Colombia was the narco-military front line, Panama was the financial oxygen tank keeping the whole project alive.

Villar and Cottle call this the “narco-paramilitary state,” but it’s more precise to call it the U.S.-supervised narco-counterrevolutionary state. The state, the cartels, and the paramilitaries were not separate forces. They were three heads of the same hydra. The U.S. trained the army. The oligarchs funded the paramilitaries. The paramilitaries trafficked cocaine. The CIA provided political cover. Wall Street laundered the profits. And Panama tied the entire circuit together with offshore financial plumbing.

Colombia became the demonstration case: a functioning narco-state that served U.S. geopolitical goals while providing multinational corporations with oil, gold, coal, and palm oil extracted from territories cleansed of political resistance. This model would shape the hemisphere for decades. And its logic would spread northward—to Mexico—where the U.S. and its junior partners would industrialize the drug economy under NAFTA, militarize entire regions, and unleash another wave of state-cartel fusion under the banner of “security cooperation.”

But before we cross that border, it’s important to recognize what Colombia represents in the imperial genealogy: the moment when the U.S. narco-imperial method became a permanent fixture of its hemispheric strategy. Not a scandal. Not a deviation. Not a conspiracy. But the operating system.

Mexico: When Neoliberalism, NAFTA, and Narcos Became One Machine

By the late 1990s, the United States no longer needed to improvise narcotics alliances or invent new covert supply chains. It now had a fully developed hemispheric architecture: production and paramilitarism in Colombia, laundering in Panama, logistics in Central America, and demand in the United States. What remained was to scale the model. And nowhere in the Western Hemisphere was better suited for mass industrial expansion than Mexico: a nation dismembered by centuries of U.S. intervention, economically strangled by neoliberal reforms, and positioned at the geopolitical crossroads of the hemisphere.

Crucially, the transformation of Mexico must be read as a continuation of the Colombia–Panama–Contra system. The U.S. had already proven in Colombia that narco-capitalism could be fused with counterinsurgency, state-building, and neoliberal restructuring. The shift into Mexico wasn’t a rupture—it was an expansion. The same U.S.-constructed narco-security architecture that militarized Colombia in the 1990s now crossed the Río Grande.

The story we are told is simple: Mexican cartels “rose” because Colombia’s cartels fell. The U.S. cracked down, supply routes shifted, and Mexican gangs took over. But this is mythology. The real story is far more direct: the United States helped build the conditions that turned Mexico into the world’s most advanced narco-corporate complex, using the same methods perfected in Colombia—forced rural displacement, militarized policing, intelligence penetration, offshore laundering, and the strategic use of paramilitary violence.

When NAFTA came into effect in 1994, it devastated Mexico’s rural economy. Millions of peasants—especially Indigenous farmers—could not compete with heavily subsidized U.S. agribusiness. Prices collapsed. Maize—corn, the sacred core of Mesoamerican civilization—was displaced by U.S. imports. Entire regions fell into poverty. The result was not merely economic collapse but mass proletarianization, producing exactly the kind of surplus population that narco-capitalism requires. Cartels absorbed these displaced farmers as labor, foot soldiers, smugglers, and local enforcers.

In this sense, NAFTA functioned as the Mexican branch of the same counterinsurgency logic that governed Plan Colombia. In Colombia, peasants were displaced by fumigation, paramilitary terror, and neoliberal land grabs. In Mexico, they were displaced by free trade, privatization, and U.S.-backed austerity. In both cases, the result was the same: a dispossessed rural workforce pushed into the narco-economy while the state militarized to manage the fallout.

Meanwhile, U.S. weapons flooded south. The American gun industry—protected by Congress and politically shielded by the NRA—became the primary supplier of cartel arsenals. Barrett .50-cal rifles, AR-15s, tactical optics, night-vision equipment—all purchased legally in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, then smuggled across the border with ease. U.S. immigration enforcement tightened, but the weapons pipeline remained wide open. The border was a wall for people and a revolving door for guns.

While the U.S. had spent the 1980s and 1990s training Colombian paramilitaries and reorganizing their intelligence systems, it was simultaneously embedding the DEA and CIA inside Mexican institutions. Intelligence “cooperation” became a mechanism for deep penetration of Mexican security forces. Commanders learned quickly: either align with U.S. agencies or lose funding, equipment, and political viability. Those who resisted found themselves isolated, blackmailed, or eliminated.

The next stage came with the Mérida Initiative in 2007: a NAFTA-era parallel to Plan Colombia. Mérida was marketed as counter-narcotics policy but functioned as a hemispheric counterinsurgency package, complete with:

• U.S. military assistance and intelligence integration
• militarized police restructuring patterned after Colombia
• joint U.S.-Mexican operations that bypassed national sovereignty
• deepening CIA and DEA influence inside Mexican command structures

The result was the Colombianization of Mexico. The same process that fused cartels with the Colombian state now fused cartels with Mexican police, military units, and political elites. The cartels themselves mutated: no longer street-level traffickers but vertically integrated multinational corporations, with:

• global supply chains linking Andean coca to Chinese fentanyl precursors
• offshore financial networks routed through Panama, Cayman, and U.S. banks
• military divisions staffed by U.S.-trained special forces (e.g., Los Zetas)
• political alliances with governors, mayors, legislators, and police forces
• paramilitary governance in territories abandoned or destroyed by neoliberal restructuring

What emerged was not a failed state but a restructured state—one in which U.S. policy, narco-capital, privatization, and militarization became indistinguishable. Mexico did not collapse by accident. It was engineered to absorb the violence and instability required to sustain U.S. imperial economic flows while preserving the comfort of the imperial core.

And, once again, Panama remained indispensable. Its banks laundered Mexican cartel profits. Its free-trade zones hid logistics. Its secrecy laws protected the networks. Cartel fortunes flowed through the same offshore circuits that laundered Colombian cocaine and Central American Contra cash. The architecture was already built; Mexico simply plugged in.

To understand this stage of narco-imperialism is to see Mexico not as a separate drama but as the next link in the U.S.-managed narco-security chain that runs from the Andes to Wall Street. The United States does not fight cartels. It governs the flows. It regulates violence. It decides which cartel factions are assets, which are enemies, which regions must be militarized, and which can be sacrificed.

Mexico is not an anomaly in this history. It is the refinement of the model. The place where U.S. neoliberalism, militarization, and narcotics fused into a single governing logic. And it sets the stage for the final revelation of this story: that the real cartel is not Sinaloa, Jalisco, or the Zetas—it’s Wall Street.

The Western Banks: The Real Cartel Behind the Cartels

By the time Mexican cartels became household names and Colombian paramilitaries were laundering billions, one truth had become impossible to ignore for anyone willing to look past the propaganda: the drug trade is not a challenge to global capitalism—it is one of its engines. And the engine room, the beating financial heart of the entire system, does not sit in Medellín or Sinaloa. It sits in lower Manhattan, in the City of London, in Zurich, in Frankfurt.

This was the missing piece in the entire hemispheric evolution. Panama showed how U.S. banks built offshore laundromats before the first kilo even crossed a border. Colombia showed how counterinsurgency could be fused with narcotics to stabilize client states and crush leftist movements. Mexico showed how neoliberal restructuring could mass-produce disposable workers and militarized criminal corporations under the banner of “trade integration.” But all of it—all the violence, all the logistics, all the displacement—was only the front end of a larger machine.

The backend was always the banks.

The world’s most powerful drug traffickers wear suits, not balaclavas. They work behind marble lobbies, not jungle airstrips. They speak in the calm, antiseptic language of “liquidity,” “compliance,” “risk mitigation,” and “market exposure.” The real cartel—the one that never gets raided, never gets extradited, never gets sentenced—is the Western banking sector. Not because it is metaphorically criminal, but because it is structurally integrated into the global narco-economy.

When HSBC was caught laundering billions for Mexican cartels, it wasn’t an aberration; it was an audit that arrived early. When Wachovia (later absorbed into Wells Fargo) admitted to laundering more than $370 billion in drug cash through its wire transfers and casas de cambio, it wasn’t a scandal; it was a revelation of normal operating procedure. When Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and Bank of America were implicated in laundering networks tied to Colombia and Central America, it wasn’t exceptional; it was routine. They did what the system requires: recycle illicit capital into legitimate markets, stabilize financial flows, protect U.S. dollar supremacy, and ensure that capital never stops moving.

This is why the United States never crushes the drug trade. The drug trade is too profitable, too useful, and too deeply woven into the architecture of U.S. financial power to be eliminated. The DEA chases street dealers and mid-level traffickers—those who lack political value. But the banks? They pay fines that amount to parking tickets, never lose their charters, and never see their executives arrested. The state performs morality; capital performs continuity.

Panama’s laundromat. Colombia’s paramilitarism. Mexico’s industrial narco-capitalism. All of them are front-end nodes of a supply chain whose terminus is Western finance. The U.S. doesn’t govern narcotics because it is incompetent; it governs narcotics because doing so allows it to regulate violence, manipulate political outcomes, and control financial flows across the hemisphere. Narco-capitalism is not a parallel economy. It is a subsystem of the imperial economy.

And at the center of that system are the banks that clear U.S. dollars, orchestrate global transfers, and provide safe passage for illicit profits. Wall Street doesn’t just benefit from the drug trade—it depends on it. It incorporates it. It stabilizes it. It cleans it. It recycles it into the bloodstream of international finance.

The DEA raids cartel houses to create the illusion of enforcement. The Pentagon militarizes borders to create the illusion of security. Presidents declare wars on drugs to create the illusion of moral resolve. But the banks, the investors, the hedge funds, and the offshore financial networks keep the real flows moving. They are the ones who make narco-capitalism possible. They are the ones who reinvest its profits. They are the ones who guarantee its continuity.

This is the true architecture of the American Pole: a hemispheric system where the U.S. state manages the violence, the cartels manage the logistics, and the banks manage the money. And as long as Wall Street remains the clearinghouse of global capital, the narco-economy will remain one of the pillars of U.S. imperial power.

Everything else—the cartels, the paramilitaries, the militarized police, the media narratives—is window dressing for a deeper truth: the real cartel has a ticker symbol.

The Myth of the “Drug War”: The Empire’s Most Successful Failure

For fifty years, the United States has insisted it is waging a “War on Drugs,” a heroic, Sisyphean struggle against cartels, traffickers, and shadowy foreign enemies. But once you trace the genealogy—from the Golden Triangle to Iran–Contra, from Panama to Colombia to Mexico—the mask falls off. The drug war has never been about eliminating narcotics. It has been about managing them. Regulating them. Weaponizing them. Using them as a geopolitical instrument in the service of U.S. hegemony.

The drug war militarizes the hemisphere. It arms client states, trains police forces, expands special operations, and justifies U.S. basing agreements from Central America to the Caribbean. “Security cooperation” becomes a Trojan horse for intelligence penetration, command restructuring, and counterinsurgency alignment. Every crackdown becomes justification for another Pentagon contract, another DEA joint task force, another CIA liaison office inside a foreign ministry.

The drug war funds covert operations. From Laos to Nicaragua, from Afghanistan to Colombia, narcotics have been the empire’s most reliable off-the-books budget. Drugs pay for proxy war. Drugs pay for counterrevolution. Drugs pay for black ops Congress never authorized. The drug war is not the failure of U.S. policy—it is the cover story that hides its success.

The drug war controls Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations. At home, it is domestic counterinsurgency masquerading as morality. Black revolutionary theory—from George Jackson and Assata Shakur to the Panthers, the BLA, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Dr. Mutulu Shakur—understood this far earlier than academia ever dared admit. They saw the drug war for what it was: a chemical proxy war on the descendants of enslaved Africans. A strategy to capture the ghettos the state could no longer politically control. A mechanism to criminalize political dissent, destroy community institutions, and justify militarized policing in zones deemed “hostile.”

When COINTELPRO could no longer assassinate or imprison every revolutionary, the drug war filled the vacuum. Crack wasn’t simply a drug; it was a counterinsurgency weapon. Mandatory minimums weren’t policy; they were chains. SWAT teams weren’t policing; they were invading. The carceral state didn’t grow out of chaos; it grew out of strategy.

The drug war weakens sovereign states resisting U.S. domination. It destabilizes governments that refuse alignment, erodes their institutions, forces dependency on U.S. “security aid,” and creates the chaos needed for IMF intervention, privatization, and militarized neoliberalism. The U.S. decides which cartels are “terrorists” and which are “partners.” Which governments are “narco-states” and which are “strategic allies.” The designation is never moral. It is always geopolitical.

The drug war keeps Western banks solvent. The empire does not need to choose between “fighting drugs” and “laundering money”—it does both simultaneously. The DEA raids stash houses while Wall Street launders the profits. HSBC, Wachovia, Citi, Deutsche Bank—they clean the capital, stabilize the dollar, and keep global liquidity flowing. Without illicit capital flows, Western banks would collapse under their own speculative weight. The drug war bans the poor from participating in an economy whose richest beneficiaries depend on their suffering.

The drug war justifies the prison-industrial complex. Millions locked up. Billions in contracts. Surveillance normalized. Entire populations reduced to raw material for warehousing. Every prison expansion and policing surplus is explained as a moral necessity to “stop drugs,” even as the state coordinates the flows it claims to fight.

The drug war serves counterinsurgency at home and abroad. It is the ideological glue that binds the repressive apparatus together—military, police, intelligence, courts, media. It turns poverty into crime, rebellion into pathology, resistance into “gang violence,” and imperial intervention into “public safety.” It delegitimizes liberation movements by associating them with narcotics, even when the U.S. itself is the primary organizer of the hemispheric drug economy.

The truth is simple: the drug war has never been a war on drugs. It has been a war on people, on sovereignty, on revolution. A war on any force that challenges the imperial architecture built from Panama to Wall Street. It is the most successful failure in modern history because it was never meant to succeed. It was meant to rule.

Narco-Imperialism Is a System, Not a Scandal

The story we have uncovered—from opium clippers to CIA airlifts, from Panama’s offshore laundromat to Colombia’s paramilitaries, from Mexico’s NAFTA-made killing fields to Wall Street’s balance sheets—is not a conspiracy theory. It is a system. A coherent, historically developed architecture of power. A political economy. A statecraft. A mode of imperial accumulation born in the age of sail and refined in the age of satellites.

Narcotics have always been one of the lubricants of Western wealth. The Delano and Forbes dynasties grew fat off the Qing Empire’s decay. Boston merchants bankrolled their fortunes by addicting entire regions of China. U.S. support for Chiang Kai-shek helped consolidate a KMT narco-state whose drug profits stabilized American foreign policy interests in Asia. The CIA’s covert wars in Burma, Laos, and Thailand knitted intelligence, warlords, and heroin into a single operational matrix. The Vietnam War’s logistics networks doubled as opium corridors. None of this was accidental. None of it was aberrational. It was the scaffolding of U.S. empire.

When the empire pivoted to the Western Hemisphere, the same logic followed. Panama became the offshore financial laboratory. Colombia became the proving ground of narco-paramilitary counterinsurgency. Mexico became the neoliberal crucible where free trade, state disintegration, and industrialized cartel power fused into a single political economy. The cartels merely replaced the old warlords. The banks remained the same. The coordinating apparatus remained the same. The state violence remained the same.

This is the continuity the U.S. hopes the world never sees: The U.S. did not “lose” the drug war. It built the drug war. It perfected it. It globalized it. And above all, it uses it.

It uses narcotics to finance operations Congress would never approve. It uses narcotics to destabilize sovereign states resisting U.S. domination. It uses narcotics to control Black, Brown, and Indigenous populations inside its borders. It uses narcotics to justify militarization, surveillance, and mass incarceration. It uses narcotics to keep Western banks solvent. It uses narcotics to maintain U.S. dollar supremacy. It uses narcotics to discipline rebels, crush revolutionaries, and uproot the social base of resistance.

Every scandal—from Iran–Contra to HSBC—was treated as a deviation, a shocking revelation of misconduct. But scandals are only scandals when the public discovers what the state has always done. The truth is that narco-imperialism is not Washington’s dirty little secret. It is Washington’s operating system.

The empire needs drugs the way a machine needs oil. It needs illicit capital flows to stabilize its financial system. It needs criminal organizations that can be selectively empowered or destroyed depending on Washington’s geopolitical needs. It needs the violence, the chaos, the destabilization—because all of it creates the conditions under which U.S. power thrives.

And this is why the drug war can never “end.” It is not a war. It is a managerial regime. A strategy of social control. A hemispheric political economy. A method of counterrevolution.

The only real threat to narco-imperialism is not a new DEA task force, a new interdiction program, or a new set of sanctions. The real threat is organized, politically conscious, internationalist rebellion—from the barrios of Medellín to the favelas of Rio, from the ghettos of the United States to the Indigenous territories resisting militarized extraction. The threat is the emergence of movements that understand the drug war not as a public safety campaign but as a pillar of imperial domination.

When people see the architecture clearly—when they recognize that narcotics, capitalism, and empire form a single circuit—the imperial narrative collapses. The drug war is revealed for what it is: a counterinsurgency doctrine disguised as virtue. A financial mechanism disguised as law enforcement. A colonial strategy disguised as humanitarian concern.

Narco-imperialism is not the rot at the margins of the system. It is the system.

And until that system is dismantled—root and branch, from Wall Street to the Andes—the violence will continue, the prisons will fill, the banks will feast, and the empire will keep pretending to fight what it quietly depends on.

Narco-Imperialism Is a System, Not a Scandal

There is a certain comfort in believing that the ugliness of the world is a series of accidents. A rogue general here, a corrupt politician there, a few bad bankers, a few bad cops, a few unlucky nations caught in the crosswinds of “failed policies.” This myth lets the empire sleep at night. It lets liberals rehearse their outrage. It lets Western journalists pretend they are documenting aberrations rather than reporting from inside a machine that feeds on the very horrors they lament.

But once you sit with the long sweep of history—once you trace the line from the opium dens of Canton to the cocaine fields of the Andes, from Boston merchant houses to Wall Street clearinghouses—the pattern refuses to disappear. Narcotics have never been the empire’s enemy. They have been its infrastructure. Its lubricant. Its hidden transcript. Its scaffolding.

The British did not stumble into the opium wars; they engineered them to pry open markets and break empires older than their own. The United States did not accidentally inherit that legacy; it absorbed it, studied it, and modernized it for a century in which informal domination mattered more than overt conquest. The Delanos and Forbes families weren’t hustlers—they were architects of early American capitalism. The KMT wasn’t simply corrupt—it was a narcotics-funded counterrevolution backed by Washington. The Golden Triangle wasn’t a battlefield—it was a laboratory where the CIA learned how to run covert wars with heroin as the operating budget.

By the time cocaine emerged as the commodity of choice, the United States didn’t need to invent anything. It simply extended the model. Panama became the offshore vault. Colombia became the prototype of a narco-paramilitary republic designed to strangle revolution at the root. Mexico became the neoliberal Frankenstein stitched together by free trade, rural dispossession, and U.S.-trained militarized cartels. And in the imperial core, Wall Street quietly opened its books to the torrent of illicit capital that kept its balance sheets from collapsing under the weight of speculation.

Viewed from above, the whole system looks less like chaos and more like choreography—an imperial ballet of blood and profit. Drugs flow north. Guns flow south. Money flows upward. Violence flows downward. The state takes the posture of a weary guardian battling vice, even as its banks launder the profits, its intelligence agencies direct the flows, and its politicians campaign on the crises they themselves cultivate.

And inside the United States, the same narcotics economy the empire midwifes abroad becomes the pretext for militarizing and containing Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities at home. The drug war is not an external war. It is an internal occupation. It is COINTELPRO with better branding and a pharmacological twist. It is the criminalization of people whose very existence testifies to the unfinished business of colonialism.

What makes narco-imperialism so effective—so resilient, so difficult for people to grasp—is that it never announces itself. It wears the mask of humanitarian concern, public health, national security. It speaks the language of treaties and task forces. It appears fractured, decentralized, chaotic. But beneath the spectacle lies a simple truth: the empire needs narcotics the way it once needed cotton, rubber, sugar, and gold. They keep the financial system liquid, the proxy armies funded, the rebellious nations destabilized, and the internal colonies under the boot.

This is why the drug war will never be “won.” It was never meant to be. A real war on drugs would starve the banks, defund the black budgets, weaken the national security state, and empower the very populations the empire fears most. So the war continues—not against drugs, but against the people who stand in the way of imperial order.

And yet, clarity brings its own kind of power. Once the drug war is stripped of its mythology—once its function as a pillar of U.S. hegemony is understood—the terrain of struggle shifts. We stop chasing symptoms and begin confronting the architecture. We stop debating reforms and begin imagining rupture. We stop seeing cartels as foreign aberrations and start recognizing that the empire itself is the cartel—the largest, most violent, most globally integrated cartel in human history.

Narco-imperialism is not the rot of an otherwise healthy system. It is the system. And like every system built on domination, it will not be reformed out of existence. It will be dismantled by the people it was built to contain.

Bibliography

I. Core Works on Narco-Imperialism, the CIA, and the Global Drug Economy

• McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Revised ed. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003.
• McCoy, Alfred W. In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.
• Scott, Peter Dale. American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
• Scott, Peter Dale, and Jonathan Marshall. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America. Updated ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
• Paley, Dawn. Drug War Capitalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.
• Villar, Oliver, and Drew Cottle. Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011.
• Avilés, William. The Drug War in Latin America: Hegemony and Global Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 2018.
• Figueira, Daurius. Cocaine Trafficking in the Caribbean and West Africa in the Era of the Mexican Cartels. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2012.
• Bagley, Bruce. “Colombia and the War on Drugs.” Foreign Affairs 67, no. 1 (1988): 70–92.
• Bagley, Bruce. “Dateline Drug Wars: Colombia: The Wrong Strategy.” Foreign Policy 77 (1990): 154–165.

II. Asia, Opium Capitalism, and the KMT / Golden Triangle

• Bradley, James. The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.
• McCoy, Alfred W. The Politics of Heroin (esp. chapters on French Indochina and Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle).
• Lintner, Bertil. Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency Since 1948. 2nd ed. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999.
• McCoy, Alfred W. “The Stimulus of Prohibition: A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade.” In Dangerous Harvest, edited by David G. Campbell and Michael A. Dixon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

III. Latin America, Counterinsurgency, and Narco-States

• Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.
• Gill, Lesley. The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
• Paley, Dawn. Drug War Capitalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014. (On Mexico, Colombia, Plan Colombia, and the Mérida Initiative.)
• Villar, Oliver, and Drew Cottle. Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011. (On paramilitarism, class struggle, and U.S. strategy in Colombia.)
• Avilés, William. “US Intervention in Colombia: The Role of Transnational Relations.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 25, no. 3 (2006): 379–400.
• Avilés, William. “War, Peace, and Human Rights in Colombia.” Peace Review 24, no. 1 (2012): 64–71.
• Hernández, Anabel. Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers. London: Verso, 2014.
• Payan, Tony. The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security. 2nd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016.
• Figueira, Daurius. Cocaine and Heroin Trafficking in the Caribbean. Port of Spain: iUniverse, 2004, and subsequent volumes in his “Illicit Trades” series.
• Paley, Dawn. “Drug War as Neoliberal War: Plan Colombia and Beyond.” Various essays and reportage, esp. for Upside Down World and Briarpatch.

IV. Banking, Offshore Finance, and Money Laundering

• Hudson, Peter James. Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
• Shaxson, Nicholas. Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World. London: Bodley Head, 2011.
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Estimating Illicit Financial Flows Resulting from Drug Trafficking and Other Transnational Organized Crimes. Vienna: UNODC, 2011.
• Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Transnational Organized Crime and the Impact on the Private Sector. Geneva: GI-TOC, 2017. (On money laundering 2% of global GDP / US$1.5 trillion estimates.)
• United Nations. “Tax Abuse, Money Laundering and Corruption Plague Global Finance.” UN DESA Policy Brief, 2021. (On $7 trillion hidden wealth, $500 billion lost revenue, etc.)
• U.S. Department of Justice. “Statement of Facts” in United States v. HSBC Bank USA, N.A., and HSBC Holdings plc. Deferred Prosecution Agreement, December 11, 2012.
• U.S. Federal Reserve / HSBC Holdings Plc. “Expiration of 2012 Deferred Prosecution Agreement.” Press Release, December 11, 2017.
• “How a Major U.S. Bank Laundered Billions in Mexican Drug Money.” Business Insider, April 4, 2011. (On Wachovia’s $378–420 billion laundering case and 2010 settlement.
• “HSBC Bank PLC – The Preferred Financial Institution for Drug Cartels and Money Launderers.” Cornell International Law Journal Online, May 20, 2017.
• Costa, Antonio Maria. “Drug Money Saved Banks in Global Crisis, Claims UN Advisor.” Interview coverage in The Observer / CommonDreams, December 13, 2009.

V. Official Documents, Declassified Material, and Policy Reports

• U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations (Kerry Committee). Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989.
• UNODC. World Drug Report 2024. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2024.
• International Narcotics Control Board (INCB). Annual Reports, various years (esp. on international drug control regimes and enforcement patterns).
• Transnational Institute (TNI). The International Drug Control Treaties: How Important Are They to U.S. Drug Reform? New York City Bar Association report, 2011.
• CIA and U.S. government declassified cables and memoranda on Laos, Air America, and Southeast Asia’s heroin trade (as referenced and reproduced in McCoy, Scott, and related scholarship).
• U.S. Congressional Research Service reports on Plan Colombia, Mérida Initiative, and U.S. security assistance to Latin America (various years).

VI. Journalism, Investigative Reporting, and Movement Writing

• Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998.
• Webb, Gary. “Dark Alliance” series. San Jose Mercury News, 1996.
• Hernández, Anabel. Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers. London: Verso, 2014. (Investigative work on cartels–state–elite nexus in Mexico.)
• Paley, Dawn. Long-form reporting on Mexico, Colombia, and Central America in Upside Down World, Briarpatch, and other outlets (later synthesized in Drug War Capitalism).
• Avilés, William. Various articles and interviews on Plan Colombia, U.S. hegemony, and militarization of the Andes.
• Friends of the Earth / Tax Justice Network reports on illicit financial flows and tax havens, complementing Shaxson and Hudson’s work.

VII. Black Revolutionary and Anti-Imperialist Sources on Drugs as Counterinsurgency

• Tabor, Michael “Cetewayo.” Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide. New York: Black Panther Party, 1970.
• Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1970.
• Jackson, George. Blood in My Eye. New York: Random House, 1972.
• Mutulu Shakur and the Lincoln Detox Collective. Writings, interviews, and communiqués on heroin, state repression, and community-based detoxification in Harlem and the South Bronx (1970s–1980s).
• Newton, Huey P. “The Correct Handling of a Revolution,” and other speeches/essays referencing crime, drugs, and counterinsurgency in Black communities.
• Umoja, Akinyele. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2013. (For broader context on U.S. counterinsurgency and Black liberation.)

VIII. Imperialism, Empire, and Structural Context

• Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.
• Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965.
• Amin, Samir. Accumulation on a World Scale. 2 vols. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
• Horne, Gerald. The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020.
• Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Avíles, William. Global Capitalism, Democracy, and Civil-Military Relations in Colombia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.

IX. Drug Control Regimes, “Drug War” Ideology, and Policy Critique

• Nadelmann, Ethan. “Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society.” International Organization 44, no. 4 (1990): 479–526.
• Nadelmann, Ethan. Key speeches and essays on U.S. and international drug policy reform (e.g., ACLU remarks, 1995).
• Carpenter, Ted Galen. “How the Drug War in Afghanistan Undermines America’s War on Terror.” Cato Institute, Foreign Policy Briefing No. 84, 2004.
• Parra Mejía, Daniela A. “New York Times Coverage of the War on Drugs in Colombia and Mexico: From Cold War to War on Terror.” M.A. thesis, University of Alabama, 2019.
• Transnational Institute. The International Drug Control Treaties. New York City Bar Association, 2011. (On treaty structure and reform debates.)
• “Why Does the International Drug-Control System Fail?” All Azimuth 6, no. 2 (2017): 141–164.