Dismantle narco-states to restore citizen security and the rule of law

By: Carlos Sánchez Berzaín - 03/05/2026

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Twenty-first-century socialism has supplanted politics and ideology with transnational organized crime. Under the guise of revolution, populism, and anti-imperialism, it has imposed state terrorism as its methodology and the management of crime as its governing plan, consolidating the narco-state of Cuba and creating narco-states in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, and in provinces or states in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere. In this reality, only dismantling these narco-states can restore citizen security and the rule of law.

A narco-state is “an economic and political neologism applied to countries whose political institutions are significantly influenced by the power and wealth of drug trafficking, whose government officials, protected by their powers and influence, are also members of illegal drug trafficking networks, and whose security forces are ineffective in combating drug trafficking. These are countries where illegal organizations that produce, transport, or sell drugs control legitimate institutions through force, bribery, or blackmail.”

Applying this concept, objective reality proves that the dictatorships of 21st-century socialism—Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Ecuador—were structured as narco-states. Similarly, the para-dictatorial governments of Brazil under Lula da Silva with the Comando Vermelho and the Comando da Capital; Mexico under López Obrador and Sheinbaum in Baja California, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nayarit, Zacatecas, Jalisco, San Luis Potosí, Colima, Michoacán, Aguascalientes, Querétaro, Hidalgo, Guanajuato, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Guerrero, Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and more; Colombia under Petro with the ELN and the FARC; and Argentina with provinces like Formosa, Santiago del Estero, Chaco, and Catamarca, established under the Kirchners, have created and coexist with narco-states.

The situation of countries and governments in Latin America has gone from the “narco links” of the 1990s to the “takeover of power by drug traffickers” and its effect the “narco states” (the strategy of the Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar).

In the era of drug trafficking links, such as the case of Samper in Colombia, it was about the financing of political campaigns by drug traffickers, but when 21st-century socialism took power, it moved to the direct control of drug trafficking as a source of financing for terrorism and the sustained attack on democracies, with the Castroist fallacy that "drug trafficking is a weapon of anti-imperialist struggle".

In this context, there are at least three scenarios: 1. Countries under dictatorships, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, which are fully-fledged narco-states; 2. Countries with elected governments but with institutional systems of narco-states, such as Ecuador and Bolivia; 3. Countries with para-dictatorial governments that protect, tolerate, or negotiate directly or covertly with narco-states within their territory, such as Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina.

In all these cases, there is only one alternative: dismantling the narco-states. This means directly combating drug trafficking by decapitating the political infiltration of drug traffickers in national, local, and state governments, national or territorial representatives, senators, representatives, council members, governors, mayors, and any other type of criminal presence in political or partisan spheres. Everyone knows who they are and where they are, but the only thing that needs to be overcome is their economic commitment, fear, and/or complicity.

In the dictatorships, the breaking point was the capture of Nicolás Maduro, now imprisoned, but the continued existence of his apparatus in control of the Venezuelan government has not dismantled the narco-state. In the case of Cuba, the end of the regime will not only eliminate the oldest narco-state in the Americas but also the system's support and transnational criminal protection. In Nicaragua, the regime will fall, brought down by the dismantling of Cuba's criminal leadership. In all three cases, the central issue is not granting impunity to the main figures in the narco-terrorist operation.

The case of Ecuador is emblematic because since the restoration of democracy by President Lenin Moreno, the hard part has been dismantling the narco-state, which President Daniel Noboa is fighting for, perhaps still without effective pressure on the levels that assumed political power in the establishment of the narco-state that persists.

Bolivia remains a narco-state and will continue to be so as long as the plurinational constitution that supplanted the Republic of Bolivia with crimes and massacres remains in place. Restoring the Republic of Bolivia is essential to defeating the crime disguised as politics. There will be no politics or rule of law as long as the simulation of a democracy persists, a democracy that lacks all the essential elements outlined in the Inter-American Democratic Charter.

In the case of the governments of Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and more, it is up to the politicians to take their place and separate themselves from the criminals who are part of the maintenance of internal narco-states, which everyone knows about but pretends to ignore with the argument of "political necessity".

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