The illegal abduction by the Trump administration of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro demonstrates with brutal clarity how the ‘war on drugs’ remains one of the primary mechanisms through which neocolonial power continues to be exercised across the globe. For decades, many on the European left have treated drug policy reform as a niche concern: a matter of personal liberty, public health or countercultural taste, rather than a central question of global power. The issue has been largely ignored by traditional left parties in favour of what they consider ‘bread and butter’ issues like labour rights or housing policy; drugs are seen as kooky concerns of cannabis smoking hippies. Yet this is not a blind spot shared by the left in Latin America who have long understood that to overlook the issue of drugs, and how the drug war has played out, is to overlook how 21st century imperial power still functions.
In his book Open Veins of Latin America, the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano writes that since its ‘discovery’, the continent’s wealth has ‘always been transmuted into European – or later United States – capital’. Galeano’s insight was not only about economic exploitation, but also the erosion of political sovereignty: extraction required domination, and domination required justification.
