America's Top Four Narco States

There are narco states in addition to the ones I'm going to list.
I'm just listing the biggest U.S. taxpayer supported narco states.

Afghanistan

Any discussion of narco states that doesn't include the biggest narco state in all of history - Afghanistan - is not a real discussion. This was six years ago.

With a record 224,000 hectares under cultivation this year, the country produced an estimated 6,400 tons of opium, or around 90 percent of the world’s supply. The drug is entwined with the highest levels of the Afghan government and the economy in a way that makes the cocaine business in Escobar-era Colombia look like a sideshow. The share of cocaine trafficking and production in Colombia’s GDP peaked at six percent in the late 1980s; in Afghanistan today, according to U.N. estimates, the opium industry accounts for 15 percent of the economy, a figure that is set to rise as the West withdraws. “Whatever the term narco state means, if there is a country to which it applies, it is Afghanistan,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies illicit economies in conflict zones. “It is unprecedented in history.”

Opium production in Afghanistan has gone up almost every year since the U.S. invaded. the involvement of senior government officials in drug trafficking is more serious than the Taliban’s own connections.

Kosovo

Kosovo is not normally what you think of when you think of narco state, but it should be, because it's been a narco state since the U.S. created it.
In just the six months after Washington enthroned the Kosovo Liberation Army in that Yugoslav province, Mother Jones called them Heroin Heroes.
Ten years later the Atlantic had the colorful headline, Kosovo's New Prime Minister Into Drug, Arms, and Human Organ Trafficking.
There's been no real improvement since. Kosovo is now the biggest ISIS recruitment center in Europe.

Honduras

Just weeks ago the Tuscon Star had the headline, US supports Honduran government that forces many to migrate as it protects drug trafficking.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan revealed that in court filings against the president’s brother, Tony Hernandez, in August 2019, and witnesses testified to it in Tony Hernandez’s October 2019 trial. The president’s brother was found guilty of four crimes, including conspiring to import about 220 tons of cocaine to the United States.

Honduras had plenty of problems before Hernandez first took power in 2014, of course. But some Honduran migrants say the destruction of social protections that drove them out occurred under his watch, even as the Obama administration aided him and Trump tightened the American embrace.

Not surprisingly, a country run by organized crime became consumed by it from top to bottom. What has been surprising is the U.S. role in supporting the same government that, according to many Honduran migrants and experts, caused them to flee to the United States.

Border Patrol apprehensions of Hondurans surged by 430%.
Honduras is the biggest narco state in the western hemisphere.
Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras is a key hub of U.S. military operations in Central America.

Colombia

For 50 years we've been sending money and troops to Colombia to fight cocaine.
Colombia remains the world’s largest producer of cocaine.
As you've figured out, we aren't winning.

This is complicated by the fact President Ivan Duque was elected with the help of the drug trafficking organization of Marquitos Figueroa and the boss of Duque’s party, former President Alvaro Uribe, is a former Medellin Cartel associate.

Both Duque and Uribe are being investigated because they allegedly believed they could get away with US counternarcotics funds to fight political opposition instead of narcos, which is causing discord.

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Lookout's picture

the CIA slush fund somehow. Beside we can accuse Maduro of being the drug runner to justify our coup against Venezuela, war in Afghan and so on.

During the tenure of Richard Helms as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, decisions were made by the director, with implied approval of the Oval Office, to draft a blue-print and put into motion a plan by which the CIA could have as much funds as, and when, needed, without knowledge of Congress. This would accomplish the dual purpose of carrying out clandestine and covert operations without the “clearance” of the Congress, as well as avoid the necessity of having to request any extra funds, and thus, divulging the workings of any covert operations in progress or planned. Director Helms wrote a memo to the Oval Office (we Intercepted) in which he stated, in part, “……If Congress, or any other uninformed “do-gooders” ever become aware of this operation, this agency and Its director will Invoke the 1949 Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempts the CIA from all laws requiring the disclosure of…..”functions”, names, official titles, salaries, and numbers of personnel employed by the agency

https://cloverchronicle.com/2018/12/08/george-h-w-bushs-top-secret-cia-d...

more here
http://impiousdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/eagle-ii.pdf

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

@Lookout
Isn't there something about only Congress having the power of the purse?
Shouldn't there be prosecutions?
Shouldn't people be put into Gitmo? (Oh, the irony!)

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@Lookout
operation of the sea-eye-yay in the Vietnam era can be found in TDY by Douglas Valentine. Though a fictional work “based on a true story” it dovetails neatly with the later iterations described in the link you provided. It’s a powerful read about power and the people who abuse it without regard to the lives of others; part of our shameful history.

The rot runs deep in the intelligence community beginning with the seminal Dulles brothers post WWII US of A. Kennedy was the last chief executive to attempt to rein in the unaccountable actions of the IC, and his end was a stark warning to those who followed him into the Oval Office. It’s been a very long time since our presidents actually ran the show.

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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes