As the United States ramps up strikes on Venezuelan boats and threatens a land invasion to fight alleged drug trafficking networks, President Donald Trump has pardoned Honduras’s former President Juan Orlando Hernandez and released him from a 45-year prison sentence in the US for weapons and drug trafficking offences.
Since September, US military strikes on at least 21 Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 80 people. The Trump administration claims these boats were trafficking drugs to the US but has not backed these allegations with any evidence.
Meanwhile, the US itself has a long history of leveraging narcotics smuggling and drug gangs to support its foreign policy goals in various parts of the world, beginning with the 19th-century Opium Wars with China.
Is the US really fighting a drug trafficking crisis in Venezuela?
Cocaine production hit a record 3,708 tonnes globally in 2023, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
However, it found that cocaine originates in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, and most US-bound cocaine routes go through Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, not Venezuela, which serves as only a minor transit corridor.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reported last year that 84 percent of US-seized cocaine comes from Colombia and did not mention Venezuela as a source.
If Trump wants to clamp down on drugs, why did he pardon Hernandez?
US President Donald Trump pardoned the drug conviction of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras and member of the country’s right-wing National Party, on November 28.
On Monday this week, Hernandez was released from his 45-year prison sentence at the high-security facility of USP Hazelton in West Virginia in the US.
Hernandez had been extradited to the US in 2022 and was found guilty of conspiring to import cocaine to the US and of possessing machineguns, in 2024.
Justifying his decision to pardon him, Trump said Hernandez had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” in a social media post on Friday.
However, some observers believe this shows that Trump’s real objective in targeting Venezuela is a desire to unseat the country’s left-wing president, Nicolas Maduro, who is accused by the US of having links to drug cartels and of even overseeing drug trafficking networks. The US recently raised a reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50m.
How has the US been involved in drug trafficking in the past?
The US has been accused of making use of drug trafficking networks to support its own aims at many points throughout history.
We take a look at nearly two centuries of US involvement in drug trafficking.
1800s: The Opium Wars
Trump has accused China of flooding the US with fentanyl in recent years, and has used the threat of trade tariffs to force it to cooperate in preventing the trafficking of this highly addictive opiate drug.
But 200 years ago, Western imperial powers such as the United Kingdom, France and the US were pushing opiates in the other direction in a bid to expand their influence through trade.
The imperial powers were facing a trade imbalance with China due to high demand in the West for Chinese goods such as tea, porcelain and silk.
Desperate to reverse this imbalance, British merchants began to smuggle Indian-grown opium into southern China. Soon, American traders had also turned to opium to boost their own exports to China.
In 1839, Chinese forces attempted to crack down on the inflow of opium, confiscating and destroying it and marking the beginning of the First Opium War. The British and Chinese engaged in naval conflict and the British emerged victorious in 1842. While the US did not militarily engage in the war, American traders were active in China and brought limited amounts of opium from Turkiye and India.
In 1844, the US and China signed the Treaty of Wanghia, their first treaty together. While this treaty ostensibly outlawed the opium trade, in practice, it opened up five ports for Western-Chinese trade in Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, enabling US traders to expand their sales of opium.
The Second Opium War took place 20 years later, from 1856 to 1860. French and British forces fought with diplomatic assistance from Russia and protection from American forces. Under pressure, China was forced to sign a treaty legalising opium, one of Britain’s main demands.
1960s-1970s: In Laos during the Vietnam War
Between 1955 and 1975, the US was engaged in armed conflict in Vietnam and parts of neighbouring Laos and Cambodia in a war between the communist North Vietnam, backed by the Soviet Union and China, and anti-communist South Vietnam, backed by the US.
During this time, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran covert operations in Laos, which is northwest of Vietnam, to counter communist forces in Southeast Asia.
In Laos, CIA officers trained militias from Indigenous tribes such as the Hmong people in the mountainous north, according to a 2003 document published by the CIA, to fight against North Vietnamese forces in Laos, as well as against Laotian communists, the Pathet Lao.
At the time, the Hmong were heavily economically reliant on the cultivation of opium poppies as a cash crop.
According to historian Alfred W McCoy, who wrote the 1972 book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, the CIA covertly operated an airline called Air America to transport opium from remote mountain areas to be sold in Southeast Asia and international markets, including the US. The proceeds were used to support the militias.
McCoy presented the findings of his book during a 1972 congressional testimony before a Senate subcommittee. The CIA has never formally admitted direct involvement in the drug operation.
1980s: During the Soviet-Afghan War
The Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to support a communist government that was facing internal threats. Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet Union fought Afghan rebel fighters, the mujahideen.
Poppy cultivation thrived in mujahideen‑held provinces such as Helmand in southern Afghanistan and Nangarhar in eastern Afghanistan. Historians, including McCoy, allege that CIA-backed mujahideen fighters financed much of their war efforts through opium cultivation and trafficking. Trafficking routes went through Pakistan and Iran, feeding both European and Middle Eastern markets.
The Soviet-Afghan War resulted in one of the sharpest spikes in global heroin supply in the late 1980s. A UNODC report in 2001 found that in 1999, Afghanistan was produ