U.S. Hostility Reloaded: Another Assault on the People of Venezuela

By Abdo Fayed

Before announcing the war, the United States decided to close Venezuela’s airspace — an unprecedented level of thuggery. And the pretext? Of course: combating drug trafficking. But if recent history were to tell only one story, it would be this: the United States itself was one of the biggest partners of Latin American drug cartels.

Where do we begin the story? With a figure you’ve probably seen in Tom Cruise’s famous movie American Made. The film is based on the true story of an American pilot named Barry Seal. He was an ordinary pilot working for a local U.S. company before American intelligence discovered him and decided to recruit him. They bought him a massive plot of land spanning hundreds of acres, gave him a fleet of cargo planes, and handed him secret maps showing the locations of all U.S. law-enforcement agencies monitoring drug, arms, and tobacco smuggling across the ocean. With ease, he could avoid them, leave and re-enter the U.S. without anyone knowing except his handlers — American intelligence.

And the price was very simple: Barry Seal would smuggle weapons into conflict zones in Central America and the Caribbean — missions the federal government could not carry out openly for fear of Congress — in exchange for full freedom to move tons of drugs for Colombian gangs into the United States.

The story, as well known: Seal served his country transporting weapons to Nicaragua. He amassed a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, so large he couldn’t even hide it in banks. Until U.S. policy shifted — and naturally they abandoned him. He was shot and killed in the street. End of story.

The America that is now so zealously “fighting drugs” is the same America that built Pablo Escobar’s empire inside the U.S. itself, providing taxpayer-funded planes to transport cocaine to American consumers.

Does the story end here? No — this is actually the bright side of the story. Truly the bright side — because the worse part came long before.

America defeated the man with the short mustache in World War II? Of course. America held the Nuremberg Trials for top German leaders and executed them? Certainly. And after that, America helped senior German military criminals who served that man with the short mustache? No — you must be joking. Except that is exactly what happened.

This was the alliance of absolute evil between America, the Catholic Church, and remnants of Hitler’s Germany. And its central figure was a man named Klaus Barbie. He was a German officer in Lyon, France, who arrested and executed hundreds, earning the nickname “The Butcher of Lyon.” When Berlin fell, he fled from place to place until settling in Munich under American control. There, U.S. counterintelligence recruited him, moved him to Kassel, then hid him under American protection.

Protected from whom? From the French, who learned he was in the American-occupied zones of Germany and demanded his extradition. America denied it: We don’t know where he is. But the lie was bound to be exposed. A quick solution was needed.

Klaus Barbie had been America’s man in Munich. He identified German communist elements for them and earned the right to protection. But now his cover was blown, and he remained a highly valuable asset. So he needed to be relocated somewhere else — somewhere with communists. Where? Latin America.

Here the Catholic Church intervened, having extensive experience smuggling wanted priests and clergy who had helped fascist regimes massacre thousands during WWII.

If there is one name that must be mentioned, it is Father Krunoslav Draganović. A mild-mannered Catholic priest — except for one mental fixation: the Protestants and Orthodox Christians he had grown up alongside in his homeland, Croatia. Suddenly luck smiled upon him: one of his closest friends, famed for religious fanaticism, became Croatia’s ruler — dictator Ante Pavelić.

Draganović returned from the Vatican to Croatia and began offering “spiritual guidance” to Catholic Croatian soldiers. These lessons helped them, in the 1940s, wipe out between 50,000 and 300,000 Serbian Orthodox Christians — a number historians still debate.

When the man with the mustache fell, along with all his allies including Pavelić, Draganović fled back to the Vatican — terrified of being pursued. His salvation came from the Americans, who learned he was running a network smuggling wanted Germans to Latin America. They decided to use him.

We want you to smuggle someone for us. Who? Klaus Barbie.

For the price of $1,400.

Draganović handled everything: transported Barbie to Austria, taught him Spanish, created a fake identity — occupation: mechanic instead of officer; name: Klaus Altmann instead of Klaus Barbie. On April 23, 1951, the war criminal arrived in Bolivia under his new identity.

To everyone’s astonishment, the first to help him was another fugitive criminal priest, Osvaldo Toth, who secured him a job in a wood-cutting workshop in Santa Cruz.

What came next was epic.

Barbie began his fake life in Bolivia as a carpenter. Within years he became close to the Bolivian president himself, Víctor Paz Estenssoro, through German officer-turned-investigator Heinz Wolf, another fugitive in Bolivia.

Barbie seized the opportunity: he became the eyes of the United States inside the Bolivian government. When Estenssoro later leaned left, Barbie orchestrated a hellish coup against him with U.S. Colonel Edward Fox. America’s demonic seed had begun to sprout — and the first harvest was a manufactured coup.

Washington then deepened Barbie’s influence in Bolivian politics. When the new U.S.-backed puppet president, René Barrientos Ortuño, took power, he rewarded Washington by appointing Klaus Barbie as Director of Internal Security. The fugitive German butcher from Munich had become Bolivia’s number-one security official.

And the favors continued.

U.S. company Gulf Oil took control of Bolivia’s oil industry after Barbie eliminated hundreds of striking workers who opposed selling national assets to Americans.

Then Barbie expanded. He traveled to Bonn, Switzerland, and with Mussolini’s former general Otto Skorzeny, founded a company called Merex — its official business was coffee, but its real purpose was exporting European-made weapons to Bolivia, then distributing them to pro-U.S. rebels in Panama, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

The heavy news still wasn’t over.

Klaus Barbie helped U.S. intelligence eliminate its biggest enemy in Latin America: Che Guevara. Washington had mistakenly believed Fidel Castro had disposed of Guevara. Until CIA Director Richard Helms received a call from his friend Barbie, informing him that Guevara was in Congo training leftist rebels. That crucial intel helped track and assassinate him.

And the price? Of course — drugs.

Klaus Barbie turned Bolivia into a gigantic cocaine factory. 80% of the coca used by Colombia’s Medellín cartel originally came from Bolivia. Bolivian cocaine production skyrocketed under Barbie to 60,000 tons within five years. Some 70,000 Bolivian families worked in coca farming and cocaine production. The entire country’s economy was destroyed for the sake of $3 billion in cocaine exports — profits flowing into Barbie’s pockets and those of his men.

And by extension, Barbie turned Americans into addicts.

The U.S., after 40 years of benefiting from his services, finally allowed France to arrest him in 1983 and extradite him to Lyon — where he was imprisoned in the same Montluc prison where he had tortured the French Resistance hero Jean Moulin.

Imagine: the same America that now claims it is “combating drug cartels” in Venezuela is the same America that built the Colombian cocaine empire through Barry Seal, and the same America that enabled a German war criminal to transform Bolivia into an international cocaine corporation — all to smuggle weapons to destabilize leftist governments in Latin America.

And yes, I forgot to mention: the 1980s were the decade of American exposure — ending with another scandal involving the Vatican. The famous Vatican Bank, Banco Ambrosiano, had been laundering Colombian cartel money under its director Roberto Calvi, found hanging beneath a bridge in Rome in 1982.

The 1980s were, without doubt, the decade of scandals.

After Bolivia came the rise of three major cartels: Two in Colombia — Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel and the Cali cartel led by Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela. The U.S. eventually dismantled both after many years. Not once did Washington close Colombia’s airspace, violate its sovereignty, or target its ships with F-35s as it is doing to Venezuela. Not once. Because no one fights drugs with armies and the world’s largest aircraft carrier.

And when Colombia’s dominance faded and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel under El Chapo emerged — which built a $50-billion drug empire — the U.S. captured him without waging war on Mexico.

So the Venezuelan story is not about drugs — which America has trafficked in and fought against at different times without ever imposing a naval and air blockade on any country.

The story is simply about Venezuela’s 300 billion barrels of oil.

But of course, as always, the Americans must invent a moral justification, just as they did in Iraq when they fabricated evidence about Saddam’s nuclear programs and brought forth the most contemptible Iraqi of modern times — Rafid Ahmed Alwan Al-Janabi, “Curveball.” He defected to Germany in 1997, claimed to have worked in nuclear weapons development, and even though German and U.S. intelligence both knew he was lying, Washington embraced him. Colin Powell stood before the UN in April 2002, declaring he had irrefutable proof of Saddam’s atomic weapons.

We all know the rest — lies. Just as the lies now being told about Venezuela and the so-called “Cartel of the Sun” smuggling drugs through the Caribbean.

A naval and air blockade can only be authorized by the UN Security Council. Yet the U.S. is doing it alone against a sovereign state — Venezuela. The entire world is watching live, for the second time, preparations for an American attack on an oil-rich nation. And no one moves. In fact, the “great democratic world” is complicit: the Nobel Prize was openly awarded to a deranged Venezuelan who calls for her country to be invaded. What lovely democracy, what beautiful prizes — prizes of peace awarded to people begging for foreign occupation.

The world remains silent — and will continue to — because this is a simple bargain: America will leave Ukraine to Russia, in exchange for taking Venezuela’s oil. The justification is always the same: the “backyard.” The U.S. is reviving the Monroe Doctrine, which forbids global powers from intervening in Latin America because it is America’s backyard. Meanwhile the Russians slowly rebuild their classic sphere of influence in Ukraine through brute force, and in Central Asia through language and ideology. America exits Ukraine; Russia exits Venezuela. You get Venezuela’s oil; I get Ukraine’s minerals worth hundreds of billions.

Between the American–Russian pincers stand the Europeans, afraid to oppose Trump’s plan in Venezuela lest their situation worsen further in Ukraine. Silence — the silence born of major powers dividing the world without any regard for national will or independent decision-making.

What matters are resources.

This will not pass quietly. Weak and medium powers will pay dearly. Venezuela stands at the brink of war. Everything points to a looming catastrophe: either a sweeping regime change through airstrikes, or a painful concession by President Maduro — allowing U.S. agents into the oil sector in exchange for leaving office with some dignity in a deal with Trump.

America is the world’s primary devil. We must always remember this well. Whenever they invent a pretext for plundering nations, we open their dark archives in response.

But after remembering — what then?

Unfortunately, the Arabs understand nothing of their own situation. A new era is coming — an era of raids, plunder, annexation. An era led by America alone, redistributing spoils among wounded great powers to secure their silence during upcoming imperial campaigns in Latin America and later China. An era that will eventually rebound upon the Arabs. Gaza, with all its tragedy, is merely a laboratory experiment — a prelude to the strikes Washington will launch in coming years against the few remaining stable Arab states.

At least Europe resists, maneuvers, and refuses complete submission to Washington.

But what about the Arabs — who have become addicted to kneeling and kissing America’s feet, accepting anything in exchange for temporary relief that will soon solidify into a regional order targeting their own states?

What about their vision for the future? Nothing. Defense contracts with America, protection pacts with America.

The tragic irony is that Arabs are the only people who built a system of self-colonization — begging America to rob them, rule them, and herd them. Other peoples at least struggle, with everything they have.

It is both sad and absurd.

And the truly heartbreaking part is that Arabs believe they have “redeemed” themselves with Gaza’s suffering, thinking the world will face its wars while they remain safe behind their borders — unaware that the shockwaves are coming for them too.

From Eastern Europe to South America, a new world is emerging — built on expansion and partition, built on the need for spheres of influence. A perpetual battlefield America requires every twenty years to renew its vigor. And the Arab world will be the ready stage — especially after the Israeli wave of terror — and this storm will not end until what some thought was indivisible is finally broken apart: their nation-states.

And America will always find the excuse.

Trust that.