Since the beginning of this century, we’ve argued—in conferences and in print—that the most reasonable way to reduce the drug business in a capitalist system is by heeding the law of supply and demand. No mafia can sell something illegal that no one wants to buy. Since Nixon, over a trillion dollars spent by Washington on a war that only multiplied deaths south of the border never solved the problem. The law of supply and demand is simple: if consumption is reduced in the United States, the cartels are defunded.

How? By investing in public health, education, culture (not consumer culture), housing for the homeless, and restoring social programs dismantled by neoliberalism in the 1990s. This would reduce trafficking radically, without firing a shot. Why isn’t this rational approach pursued? Perhaps because eliminating drug trafficking was never the intention.

The U.S. illegal drug market generates up to $600 billion annually—about the combined economies of Chile and Iran. To move that much cash to Latin American cartels would take 5,000 armored trucks and 60,000 boats like the one you ordered sunk in the Caribbean, killing eleven people. And yet, with the most powerful police, the most advanced technology, and the most expensive military in human history, none of these trucks or boats are ever intercepted. Meanwhile, illegal arms flow daily across the border into Mexico.

Could it be that the money doesn’t return in cash, but is laundered through banks? Why can’t the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies, which claim to know our personal habits and preferences, discover which banks are laundering $500 or $600 billion?

The CIA and other agencies have long been implicated in drug trafficking—the same ones that, according to the official story, were blindsided by a handful of students on September 11, 2001, or, as George Bush later admitted, “mistaken” about Saddam Hussein. They’re either incompetent or pretending, well-paid either way. Detecting one truck, one boat, or one bank cannot be Mission Impossible. Why then do agencies siphon off $70 billion in taxes while preoccupying themselves with dissidents’ private lives or organizing plots abroad, yet remain clueless when truly needed?

Marco, why do you know so well how drugs enter the United States, but have no idea how the dollars to pay for them leave? Why are no traffickers detained by ICE? Why are the American distributors of illegal drugs across the country almost never caught? Or are we to believe drugs fall like rain and dollars evaporate?

Meanwhile, we’ve seen masked men kidnapping people even for publishing an article. Poor workers of non-Caucasian appearance are treated as the greatest criminals, while now immigrants are even offered visas to persecute immigrants. Billions are spent repressing production, yet undocumented Europeans, Canadians, and Australians—over half a million—are not arrested, beaten, or thrown to the ground.

Why blame gun users for violence but never the producers? Why blame drug producers for addiction but not the users? Why murder eleven people in the Caribbean without knowing who they were, without due process to bring them to justice?

You repeat your boss’s words, that killing some with a missile will deter others—just as lynching a free Black person once warned Black slaves against disobedience. A practice that continues, with other justifications. For decades, Miami Cubans spread terror across the U.S. and the Caribbean with bombs and assassinations, protected by the CIA. Posada Carriles, Bosh, Morales, Ross Díaz, Arocena, Novo Sampol, Battle, Suárez, Masferrer—they killed with impunity because “a bomb always makes headlines.”

Following this old example, why didn’t U.S. police throw a grenade into a New York apartment where traffickers were supposedly hiding? Why didn’t they launch a missile at Epstein’s Lolita Express? Would that have been too cruel? Yet Cuban terrorists in Miami did exactly that with Cubana 455, killing 73 people—mostly young athletes—49 years ago. No one went to jail. How many child rapes and wars might have been prevented by a missile on Epstein’s plane?

Colombia produces a quarter of the cocaine entering the U.S., yet despite a leftist government still hosts six to ten U.S. military bases. Venezuela, with the world’s largest oil reserves, has none. Ninety-eight percent of fentanyl comes from China—why not shoot down a Chinese ship? In Ecuador, trafficking multiplied under Noboa, an American born in Miami. Why can’t they stop methamphetamine, LSD, and other synthetics produced on U.S. farms? Why not bomb planes from Canada, Belgium, or the Netherlands to stop ecstasy? Are those traffickers too white or too rich to mistreat?

After the last terrorist act in the Caribbean—a return to 19th-century gunboat diplomacy—you said: “I don’t care what the United Nations says.” Cuban exiles once said the same. On Miami television in 1981, Ricardo “El Mono” Morales admitted to bombing Cubana 455: “I don’t regret anything. If I had to kill 273 instead of 73, I would do it again.”

But when has Washington ever cared what the world thinks? On Cuba, Iraq, Palestine—the U.N. vote is always overridden by the U.S. veto. Why even bother to announce indifference, when the record is so clear?

In fewer words, Marco: if Washington decides who lives and dies, what use is the rest of the planet? Still, don’t believe that humanity and its colonies will remain docile and stupid forever.

Jorge Majfud, september 2025.

Ideology and Intervention: A Critical Review of Jorge Majfud’s The Wild Frontier