The Narco-Trafficking Elite Set to Run Venezuela (w/ Maureen Tkacik) | The Chris Hedges Report
2026-01-08 · 54 min · episode 78 · 9 entities
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The Narco-Trafficking Elite Set to Run Venezuela (w/ Maureen Tkacik) | The Chris Hedges Report
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The Narco-Trafficking Elite Set to Run Venezuela (w/ Maureen Tkacik) | The Chris Hedges Report
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The Narco-Trafficking Elite Set to Run Venezuela (w/ Maureen Tkacik) | The Chris Hedges Report
Episode description as stored
History, as it’s understood in most Western countries, often misses important chapters that leave critical gaps in the story of how modern countries came to be. In Latin America in the 20th century, episodes of guerilla warfare and juntas are acknowledged, along with portrayals of a drug war, usually depicted through popular culture.
What is left out, however, is the clandestine involvement of American intelligence agencies, including the CIA and DEA, and how their drug operations were intimately tied to the Latin American anticommunist brigades funded by Western capital throughout the Cold War, and the brutal liquidation of the Left these narco-terrorists often carried out.
Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor at The American Prospect, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, to chronicle some of these missing chapters, including ones connected to the current Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio.
In her article “ The Narco-Terrorist Elite, ” Tkacik dives into Rubio’s personal ties to the drug trafficking racket in the 20th century as well as how this history informs his own policy, one that attempts to cynically use drug trafficking as a means to achieving the Trump administration’s extrajudicial goals.
“When Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco trafficking in favor of military operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump’s speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists,” Hedges says.