USA: #1 NARCO-TERRORIST

Washington is menacing Venezuela with a fleet of warships and 4000 Marines. It's offering a $50 million bounty for elected president Nicolás Maduro, claiming he leads a drug cartel called "Cartel de los Soles." It has already murdered 21 alleged members of another gang called "Tren de Aragua."

There's just one problem: there's no evidence that either of these Trump-designated "foreign terrorist organisations" even exists. And the Drug Enforcement Administration itself admits that Venezuela plays an absolutely negligible role in the drug trade.

The bigger problem is that when you look at the history of 20th and 21st-century drug trafficking, some very real entities show up again and again: the CIA and the US military.

In the name of anticommunism, they've done business with Corsican mobsters, KMT revanchists, Contra death squads, and pedophilic Afghan warlords. From the "French Connection" to the jungles of Central America, from the Golden Triangle to the Golden Crescent, every major centre of opium and cocaine production has had US fingerprints all over it.

For decades, journalists such as Alfred McCoy, Gary Webb, and Seth Harp have worked to expose this planetary narco-trafficking network. As its ringleaders enter terminal imperial decline and subject their own people to a ruinous opioid epidemic, it's no wonder they'd rather point the finger - and the gun - at just about anyone else.