Pino Arlacchi, L’Antidplomatico, 27/8/2025
Translated by Tlaxcala
Pino Arlacchi (Gioia Tauro, 1951) is an Italian sociologist, politician, and civil servant. From 1997 to 2002 he was United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
During my time heading the UNODC, the UN’s anti-drug and anti-crime agency, I spent much of my time in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil—but I was never in Venezuela. Simply put, there was no need. The Venezuelan government’s cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking was among the best in South America, matched only by Cuba’s impeccable record. A fact which, in today’s delirious Trumpian narrative of the “narco-state Venezuela,” sounds like a geopolitically motivated slander.
But the real data, the hard evidence found in the 2025 World Drug Report of the very agency I had the honor to lead, tells a story completely opposite to the one being peddled by the Trump administration. A story that dismantles, piece by piece, the geopolitical fabrication built around the so-called Cartel de los soles—an entity as legendary as the Loch Ness monster, but useful for justifying sanctions, embargoes, and even threats of military intervention against a country which, not coincidentally, sits on one of the largest oil reserves on the planet.
Venezuela According to the UNODC: A Marginal Country on the Drug Trafficking Map
The 2025 UNODC report is crystal clear, and should be an embarrassment for those who crafted the rhetoric of demonizing Venezuela. The report barely mentions Venezuela, stating only that a marginal fraction of Colombian drug production passes through the country en route to the United States and Europe. According to the UN, Venezuela has consolidated its status as a territory free from coca leaf and marijuana cultivation, as well as from the presence of international criminal cartels.
The document merely confirms the 30 previous annual reports, none of which mention Venezuelan drug trafficking—because it doesn’t exist. Only 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela. To put that in perspective: in 2018, while 210 tons of cocaine crossed Venezuelan territory, a staggering 2,370 tons—ten times as much—were produced or traded through Colombia, and another 1,400 tons through Guatemala.
Yes, you read that right: Guatemala is a drug corridor seven times more significant than the supposedly fearsome Bolivarian “narco-state.” Yet no one talks about it because Guatemala is historically bone-dry—it produces just 0.01% of the global supply—of the only “drug” that Trump really cares about: oil.
The Fantastic Cartel of the Suns: Hollywood Fiction
The Cartel de los soles is a creature of Trumpian imagination. Supposedly led by Venezuela’s president, it is not mentioned once in the report of the world’s leading anti-drug body, nor in the documents of any European anti-crime agency, nor in nearly any other international source. Not even a footnote. A deafening silence that should make anyone with a shred of critical sense pause. How can a criminal organization allegedly so powerful that it warrants a $50 million bounty be completely ignored by every actual anti-drug authority?
In other words, what is sold as a Netflix-style super-cartel is in reality a patchwork of small local networks—the sort of petty crime you find in any country, including the United States, where, incidentally, nearly 100,000 people die each year from opioid overdoses. Deaths that have nothing to do with Venezuela and everything to do with USAmerican Big Pharma.
Ecuador: The Real Hub No One Wants to See
While Washington waves the Venezuelan bogeyman, the real drug hubs thrive almost unchallenged. Ecuador, for instance, with 57% of banana containers leaving Guayaquil for Antwerp loaded with cocaine. European authorities seized 13 tons of cocaine in a single Spanish ship that came directly from Ecuadorian ports controlled by companies tied to figures within Ecuador’s government.
The European Union produced a detailed report on the ports of Guayaquil, documenting how “Colombian, Mexican, and Albanian mafias all operate extensively in Ecuador.” The murder rate in Ecuador skyrocketed from 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 to 45.7 in 2023. Yet little is said about Ecuador. Perhaps because Ecuador produces only 0.5% of global oil, and because its government does not make a habit of challenging U.S. hegemony in Latin America.
The Real Drug Routes: Geography vs. Propaganda
During my years at UNODC, one of the most important lessons I learned is that geography does not lie. Drug routes follow precise logics: proximity to production centers, ease of transport, corruption of local authorities, and the presence of established criminal networks. Venezuela meets almost none of these criteria.
Colombia produces over 70% of the world’s cocaine. Peru and Bolivia cover most of the remaining 30%. The logical routes to reach U.S. and European markets go across the Pacific to Asia, through the Eastern Caribbean to Europe, and overland via Central America into the U.S. Venezuela, facing the South Atlantic, is geographically disadvantaged for all three main routes. Criminal logistics make Venezuela a marginal actor in the grand theater of international drug trafficking.
Cuba: The Embarrassing Example
Geography does not lie, true—but politics can override it. Cuba remains today the gold standard of anti-drug cooperation in the Caribbean. An island just off the Florida coast, theoretically a perfect base for smuggling into the U.S., yet in practice absent from drug flows. I repeatedly witnessed DEA and FBI agents express admiration for the Cuban communists’ rigorous anti-drug policies.
Chavista Venezuela has consistently followed the Cuban model, pioneered by Fidel Castro himself: international cooperation, territorial control, repression of criminal activity. Neither Venezuela nor Cuba has ever had large tracts of land cultivated with coca and controlled by organized crime.
The European Union, while having no particular oil interest in Venezuela, does have a concrete interest in fighting the drug trade afflicting its cities. It has produced its own European Drug Report 2025, based on real data rather than geopolitical wishful thinking. That report does not mention Venezuela even once as a corridor for international drug trafficking.
This is the difference between an honest analysis and a false, insulting narrative. Europe needs reliable data to protect its citizens from drugs, so it produces accurate reports. The U.S. needs justifications for its oil policies, so it produces propaganda disguised as intelligence.
According to the European report, cocaine is the second most used drug in the EU 27 countries, but the main sources are clearly identified: Colombia for production, Central America for transit, and various routes through West Africa for distribution. In this picture, Venezuela and Cuba simply do not appear.
Yet Venezuela is systematically demonized against every principle of truth. The explanation was provided by former FBI Director James Comey in his post-resignation memoirs, where he revealed the unspoken motivations behind U.S. policy toward Venezuela: Trump had told him that Maduro’s government was “sitting on a mountain of oil that we need to buy.”
So it is not about drugs, crime, or national security. It is about oil that the U.S. would rather not pay for.
It is Donald Trump, therefore, who deserves an international warrant for a very specific crime: “systematic slander against a sovereign state aimed at appropriating its oil resources.”
