“She [the United States] has seen that probably for centuries to come, contests of inveterate power, and emerging right [will persist]…But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy…She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own…she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force… She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”
– speech in 1821 by John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (1825-1829), and the first American Ambassador to Russia in 1809.
We are living in an incredibly tragic time. We have entered into a new phase in this war for American supremacy and it isn’t pretty. Lies have always been there. Propaganda. War Slogans. Prejudice. But something happened in 2025 that has accelerated a process that has been festering in the United States since its founding days. The struggle between whether it would be a true Republic as described and envisioned by Benjamin Franklin or just another decadent Roman Empire.
What has accelerated this process is our lack of grounding with reality and our memory of the past and I believe the upshift in AI that flooded social media in 2025 is not a coincidence to what has laid the ground for what we are now seeing in just the first few months into 2026.
If we cannot tell what is real from what is fake, not only do we lose any ability to actively participate in the world we live in, including our very lives, but we also lose the ability to judge real consequences to actions, to see what is right from what is wrong. We also lose the ability to remember and learn from past actions.
As our increasing perception of reality is being shaped by an AI matrix, where many are dependent on its use after just one year in how to “think” about what is happening in the world or AI boyfriends/girlfriends replacing real human interaction - Huxley’s Brave New World of “soma vacations” doesn’t sound so far-fetched. We have entered into a new phase where Orwell’s slogans do not sound so out of place anymore and AI has played a leading role in accelerating this process.
WAR IS PEACE
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
In the case of Maduro’s kidnapping by U.S. Delta Force on January 3, 2026 who is presently standing trial on criminal charges alleging that the Venezuelan leader, his wife and son and their accomplices engaged in cocaine-trafficking and partnered with cartels designated as terrorist groups – we have a glimpse into this detachment with reality that has truly reached peak levels.
What has justified this kidnapping was the accusation, that began during Trump’s first term as President, that Maduro was the leader of ‘Cartel de los Soles’ (Cartel of the Suns). This is in fact a made-up cartel, it is fake, yet the Trump Administration had been spreading this lie across two terms and used this lie as justification for going into another country and seizing its elected President.
The New York Times writes in their piece titled “Justice Dept. Drops Claim That Venezuela’s ‘Cartel de los Soles’ Is an Actual Group”:
The Justice Department has backed off a dubious claim about President Nicolás Maduro that the Trump administration promoted last year in laying the groundwork to remove him from power in Venezuela: accusing him of leading a drug cartel called Cartel de los Soles.
That claim traces back to a 2020 grand jury indictment of Mr. Maduro drafted by the Justice Department. In July 2025, copying language from it, the Treasury Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization. In November, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and President Trump’s national security adviser, ordered the State Department to do the same.
But experts in Latin American crime and narcotics issues have said it is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money. And on Saturday, after the administration captured Mr. Maduro, the Justice Department released a rewritten indictment that appeared to tacitly concede the point.
Prosecutors still accused Mr. Maduro of participating in a drug trafficking conspiracy but they abandoned the claim that Cartel de los Soles was an actual organization. Instead, the revised indictment states that it refers to a “patronage system” and a “culture of corruption” fueled by drug money.
Where the old indictment refers 32 times to Cartel de los Soles and describes Mr. Maduro as its leader, the new one mentions it twice and says that he, like his predecessor, President Hugo Chávez, participated in, perpetuated and protected this patronage system.
Let us get a few things crystal clear before moving to the implications of this. To be clear, ‘Cartel de los Soles’ (Cartel of the Sun) is not a real drug cartel, it is not an actual group or organisation. Yet, this made-up group was put on a “terrorist” list by the United States. Clearly this was done with zero evidence, because the group DOES NOT EXIST.
Maduro was accused by the Trump Administration of not only being the head of a fake drug cartel, but the Trump Administration also accused this fake drug cartel of being a terrorist group, and thus, that Maduro was the head of a terrorist group in Venezuela.
The fact that this drug cartel is not real has now come to light and has been admitted by the U.S. Department of Justice only weeks into Maduro’s trial. And yet, I am almost certain most people are not aware of this. On top of this, Maduro is being prevented from access to legal fees for his defense in what is looking like a kangaroo court.
The charges against Maduro have now changed, since the admission to the fact that Cartel de los Soles does not exist, to simply connections to cocaine-trafficking. A much less sexy headline. It is clear that the lie of Maduro being the head of a fake terrorist drug cartel was used to justify the U.S. military’s entry into another country and remove its head of state. That the especial link to acts of “terrorism” was key here and within weeks have now been admitted by the DOJ itself to have been backed with ZERO EVIDENCE. If there had been any evidence there would not have been a need to make up a fake drug cartel.
Whether Maduro is guilty or not of cocaine trafficking, this should be highly concerning to anyone who actually cares about Due Process [1], let alone the fact that the U.S. military thought they were justified in entering another country and removing its head of state over alleged “cocaine trafficking.”
But War Crimes are just another day?
This false accusation was started during Trump’s first term as president, when his then U.S. Attorney General William Barr, former CIA agent, made the claim that Maduro and other top Venezuelan government officials were part of the fake ‘Cartel de los Soles,’ whom Barr also claimed were a terrorist group.
The Trump Administration then released a bounty on Maduro’s head for originally $25 million. When Trump re-entered office in 2025 he increased the bounty to $50 million.
For those Trump apologists out there let’s get another thing straight. It was known by everyone, including western think tanks [2], and the Venezuelan people, that the ‘Cartel de los Soles’ was not a real cartel but a slang term. And remember, this fake entity was put on a terrorist list. There was NO EVIDENCE to back any of this, whether they were or not ignorant of the name being a slang term. The United States has been caught making up lies to justify forcefully removing a head of state. And something is telling me, Maduro is just the first of many more midnight raids of Latin American heads of state to justify the Donroe Doctrine.
Believe it or not, but this cartoon is actually promoting the Donroe Doctrine, not making fun of it. And U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is promoting this. Yeah, nothing concerning about any of this.
By the way you know who made this original pose? It was the heavy-handed British Imperialist of Africa Cecil Rhodes…
To which the Anglophile President Theodore Roosevelt was inspired by in his twisting of the Monroe Doctrine to serve his colonial interests, clearly associating America’s relationship to Latin America as the British Empire’s relationship to colonial Africa….
Notice that the “big stick” is in reference to Teddy Roosevelt’s “big stick” diplomacy. Yes, they were actually equating U.S. diplomacy under Teddy’s presidency as akin to a “big stick” and this was something promoted as a positive not a negative. Notice in the above cartoon with Uncle Sam that on the “big stick” is written “Monroe Doctrine 1824-1905.” Teddy Roosevelt was president, over the dead body of McKinley from 1901-1909.
As we see in the below cartoon in case things need any more clarity on what the Trump Administration is publicly associating itself with as a policy towards Latin America, in the below cartoon we see Teddy Roosevelt as policing all of America with his “big stick” with the text “The New Diplomacy.” This cartoon is not a favorable portrayal but represents what Teddy himself was promoting for himself as a public image. The “big stick” will be used on the subject people of the Americas if they dare to resist the new rule of law that will be policed by the United States.
Here is another critical cartoon of Teddy’s version of “diplomacy” that has inspired President Trump’s approach to Latin America.
You can again see Teddy with a stick with the text “Big Stick” as he is pulling a train of ships that are passing through Mexico, Panama and Venezuela in the cartoon. The ships are listed as “the debt collector,” “the sheriff” and lastly “the receiver.”
President Trump stated in his 2025 inaugural address:
The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.
Trump is proudly modeling his policy towards Latin America as continuing this legacy from Cecil Rhodes to Teddy Roosevelt. An Anglophile policy of colonialism through and through. This should cause people to rethink the clarion call trumpeted by those such as Promethean PAC who are claiming that Trump is fighting the City of London in Latin America and Iran, when he has so clearly associated himself with an Anglophile policy of colonialism, the Rhodesia model. In fact, Promethean PAC should be fully aware of this, having been part of EIR publications for decades where a great deal of research was published on this very subject - Teddy being an Anglophile puppet, as well as the man behind the creation of America’s Secret Police, what would later form the FBI. Perhaps they have found that the money is greener on the other side…
Teddy Roosevelt, the Anglophile who began America’s “Special Relationship” with the British Empire is very openly the direct inspiration for Trump’s Corollary Doctrine. Teddy Roosevelt’s Monroe Doctrine was also referred to as Roosevelt’s Corollary Doctrine. Don’t believe me that Teddy was an Anglophile traitor to his own country? You can read about it in my paper here.
Ironically the slang term ‘Cartel de los Soles’ was first used in 1993 as a journalistic label following a political scandal involving Venezuelan military officials who were implicated in a CIA plot to smuggle cocaine into the United States. Yes you heard right, the slang term ‘Cartel de los Soles’ began with the CIA’s involvement in smuggling cocaine out of Columbia through members of Venezuela’s National Guard onto American streets.
The New York Times writes in the above article:
A Central Intelligence Agency anti-drug program in Venezuela shipped a ton of nearly pure cocaine to the United States in 1990, Government official said…No criminal charges have been brought in the matter, which the officials said appeared to have been a serious accident rather than an intentional conspiracy. But officials say the cocaine wound up being sold on the streets in the United States.
One CIA officer has resigned, a second has been disciplined and a Federal grand jury in Miami is investigating.
The agency made aware of a “60 Minutes” investigation of the matter scheduled for broadcast on Sunday, issued a statement today calling the affair “a most regrettable incident”…
The case involves the same program under which the agency created a Haitian intelligence service whose officers became involved in drug trafficking and acts of political terror. Its exposure comes amid growing Congressional skepticism about the role of the CIA in the war on drugs.
Readers should be aware that this is not the first time the CIA has been implicated in drug-trafficking.
Or the U.S. Special Forces for that matter…
The investigative reporting of 60 Minutes had caused a great deal of uproar over the CIA’s role in flooding American streets with cocaine out of Columbia via members of Venezuela’s National Guard. To which they received a Peabody Award for their investigation and exposure of CIA’s direct role in drug-trafficking from Latin America to the United States.
It is rather ironic that it was William Barr as U.S. Attorney General, former CIA agent, who thought up the original lie that Maduro was the head of this slang-term that originated with the CIA’s drug trafficking of Columbian cocaine into the United States. You could almost say that this was done as an “inside joke” amongst the American Establishment. And the joke is not just aimed at Maduro, it is aimed at you, the American people for falling for it over and over and over again….
The funds the CIA made off of these drug sales were in turn used to fund regime changes in favor of puppet right-wing dictators in Latin America, just like in the good ‘ol days of the United Fruit Company.
Again, this was not the first time right-wing groups were caught flooding American streets with drugs.
If fact we would be hard-pressed to find a time when drugs flooding the streets of America were not directly tied to the workings of its own intelligence agencies and the City of London.
If we take a look at the below map, we can see that Venezuela is not even cultivating cocaine. In fact, the countries that are knowingly cultivating cocaine in Latin America are Colombia (by far the leader), Peru, and Bolivia.
It should also be noted that cocaine is responsible for significantly less overdose deaths than synthetic opioids.
In fact, it is the synthetic opioid epidemic that is causing the greatest overdose deaths in the United States, such that the Trump Administration designated it as a “Weapon of Mass Destruction.”
What does this have to do with cocaine or even Venezuela for that matter? Absolutely nothing.
Why is Venezuela being targeted as the first country the U.S. implicates in their crusade against drugs when they are not even a producer of cocaine in Latin America? Not only this but it would appear that there was the intention to conflate the synthetic opioid crisis with Latin American cocaine as part of the Maduro as head of fake drug cartel theatre.
Alex Witkoff is the son of Steve Witkoff, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East, and influential advisor within the Trump Administration. His brother died from an oxycontin overdose, which has absolutely nothing to do, clearly, with cocaine, let alone Maduro.
Yet Alex Witkoff did not seem to have any qualms in not only being a political opportunist by using his brother’s own tragic death but once again promoting a lie that Venezuela has anything to do with America’s Drug Epidemic, that has in truth been fueled by the CIA, U.S. Special Forces and western banking system for several decades.
In fact, Alex Witkoff’s brother’s death has everything to do with American pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma, which flooded the medical system with oxycontin as if it were not the incredibly addictive drug that it was. Purdue Pharma was caught paying doctors to prescribe oxycontin en masse.
Purdue Pharma used to be owned by the incredibly powerful Sackler dynasty. They also founded Mundipharma. In 1996 Purdue Pharma was the company that INTRODUCED oxycontin to the drug market in 1996 and pushed its heavy use for decades to the point that we find ourselves in a crisis where a huge portion of the population is now addicted to oxycontin.
Purdue Pharma, and some members of the family, have faced lawsuits regarding over-prescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs, including OxyContin. Purdue Pharma has been criticized for its central role in the opioid epidemic in the United States. They have been described as the “most evil family in America”, and “the worst drug dealers in history”. [4]
If Trump is so serious about going after the root of the synthetic opioid problem, why is he not going after the criminal Sackler family which pretty much shaped the medical care system’s policy on over-prescribing oxycontin to encourage addiction of its users?
But something tells me he won’t be holding the Sackler family responsible for the opioid crisis. Meanwhile, Maduro is facing a serious prison sentence, while the Sackler family continue to live their fabulous billionaire lives within the United States. Are you not noticing a pattern here? The Trump Administration, like the presidencies preceding, have always been promoting the drug trade.
Just look at Marco Rubio….
Alvaro Uribe was a right-wing president of Colombia and obedient U.S. ally from 2002-2010. He was also officially recognised by U.S. intelligence as among the most “important Colombian narco-traffickers” in 1991. Recall, Colombia is the lead producer of cocaine in Latin America.
Washington, D.C., 1 August 2004 - Then-Senator and now President Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia was a “close personal friend of Pablo Escobar” who was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels,” according to a 1991 intelligence report from U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials in Colombia. The document was posted today on the website of the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research group based at George Washington University.
Thus, the United States has known ever since the 1990s about Uribe’s very high-level connection with cocaine trafficking and supported him nonetheless. Marco Rubio has been especially supportive of Uribe’s political career.
In 2025, Marco Rubio, serving as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, publicly praised Uribe. [5]
Marco Rubio, a neocon, is the second most powerful person in the U.S. government after Trump himself. Rubio is among just two people in U.S. history who have simultaneously served as both the head of foreign policy as the secretary of state and the head of national security policy as the national security advisor. The only other person in U.S. history that held both positions at the same time was Henry Kissinger under Richard Nixon. Ironically, Nixon too had a fake “War on Drugs.”
Looks like Rubio is not so concerned with cocaine drug-trafficking after all. Just ask his other right-wing friend the President of Ecuador Daniel Noboa.
Daniel Noboa is the son of the richest billionaire in the country and is from a dynasty that has had multiple members of their family govern Ecuador over the decades. According to Ecuadorian police documents the Noboa family was trafficking cocaine in banana crates from their private ports.
Once again, Rubio does not seem to have issues with the Noboa family’s direct connection to cocaine trafficking. Could it be because he is aligned with their right-wing politics?
I was debating sharing this or not and decided I couldn’t pass it up…
As a teenager Rubio lived with his brother-in-law who was a prolific cocaine trafficker. While Senator of Florida (from 2011- Jan. 2025) he lobbied for his brother-in-law to get a Real Estate License, raising questions of his misusing his power for personal reasons.
Normally I would be more sympathetic to such a story, in the sense that the American system towards ex-convicts is pretty brutal in terms of finding decent employment after prison, which of course just encourages them to return to a life of crime. But Rubio is just so aggressively hawkish in his anti-drug crusade, that one cannot help but see the stinking hypocrisy in this whole affair.
It was never about the drugs - the U.S. government, its intelligence agencies and military are all implicated in the drug trade. Rather it is about the politics. And drugs have always been used as a form of warfare in Latin America to support right-wing regime change.
And to make the stinking hypocrisy even worse if you can believe it, weeks before Trump invaded Venezuela to kidnap Maduro, he had pardoned and released from prison one of the worse drug-traffickers, right-wing former dictator of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez.
But the real elephant in the room this entire time has been Afghanistan’s role in sparking the opium epidemic, what heroin and opioids stem from. Where U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan were told to guard vast opium fields with their lives. This spike in opium to the global market directly contributed to the opioid crisis that hit the United States and Europe. You could say it would not have been possible without U.S. cultivating massive quantities of poppy in Afghanistan for over two decades.
Rather strikingly we see in the below graph how opium production coming out of Afghanistan totally plummets right after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.
Seth Harp the author to the important and timely published book The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces had this to say of the Maduro kidnapping:
It is time the American people wake up.
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.
Watch our other RTF and CP films and documentaries here.
Footnotes:
[1] Due process is the constitutional guarantee that the government must follow fair procedures and respect fundamental rights before depriving a person of life, liberty, or property.
[2] The article writes: “There is no such thing, so Maduro can hardly be its boss,” Phil Gunson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, told AFP of the so-called ‘Cartel de los Soles’.”
[3] Thanks to Geopolitical Economy Report.
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
[5] Thanks to Geopolitical Economy Report
Great piece as usual Ms. Chung. Keep up the good work. Just shared it.
Thank you Cynthia. I wasn’t aware of the amended indictment for Maduro. It has been frustrating to say the least to watch the cult followers parrot every taking point this administration uses to justify its own criminal activities. Who will seek justice for the people on those Venezuelan speed boats who were summarily executed without proof of wrongdoing and without a trial? They were just a prop in the administration’s psyop to get Americans calling for more blood. Seems to have worked.