Stephen Sefton, October 26th 2025
One way or another, criminal behavior and the abuse of the issue of criminality have been permanent and integral elements of the foreign policies of the Western ruling elites for centuries. On the one hand, their governments have committed terrible crimes against the peoples of the majority world, and on the other, they have taken advantage of their violent world domination to denounce as criminals or terrorists political movements and governments that have resisted them. We see yet another example of this behavior now in the US military and diplomatic aggression against Venezuela and Colombia.
The emphatic rupture of relations between the government of Colombia and the U.S. government marks a moment with consequences difficult to foresee within Colombia and in the region. As evidenced by the brazen intervention of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Colombia's internal affairs in favor of notorious narco-terrorist ex-President Álvaro Uribe. Colombian drug trafficking paramilitaries and their political leaders have always been faithful pawns of the US government. Iany case, for the time being, only Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and some Caribbean nations have actively expressed their rejection of the serious threats against Venezuela.
The Trump administration has accused President Nicolás Maduro and now President Gustavo Petro of being criminals, although both have been among the few leaders active in successfully combating organized crime and drug trafficking in the region. The U.S. government poses as being tough against drug trafficking when it has done as little as possible to curb drug trafficking in its own country, while the U.S. anti-drug and military agencies and U.S. banks are well-known as important accomplices of international drug trafficking. In other regions of the world, the US government pretends to be a neutral arbiter of goodwill acting only to seek peace, when in truth it remains the most important terrorist entity supporting both the Nazi regime in Ukraine and the genocidal Zionist regime in Palestine.
The modern history of this cynical false behavior by the collective West dates back to the founding of the United Nations in 1945. Before 1945 the imperialist powers hardly bothered to conceal their horrendous crimes against the peoples of the majority world. In 1945, the Western courts that condemned the crimes of Nazi Germany and the Japanese empire served as a kind of alibi to American and European criminals. Founding the UN at that time was essentially a master stroke disappearing the centuries of Western genocide and pillage of the majority world. As if by magic, suddenly only the Empire of Japan and the regime of Nazi Germany deserved to pay for their crimes.
In fact, that moment was presented by the Western imperialist criminals as in effect giving them a clean slate. Supposedly from then on, everyone was going to abide by the new UN rules of non-intervention, non-aggression and self-determination of peoples. Of course, for the peoples of Africa and Asia especially, it was a cruel deception. Many Japanese and German unindicted criminals were integrated with the utmost ease into the new anti-communist structures established by the Western powers. Their ruling elites continued their usual genocidal practices around the world while sabotaging the independence of their former colonies and protecting the odious racist regimes in South Africa and Israel.
Little has changed in their behavior now. The collective West has falsely denounced the Russian Federation for the crime of military aggression against Ukraine when it was the NATO governments that financed, trained and armed Ukraine’s Nazi regime to attack its own Russian-speaking population in Donbass from 2014 to the present. In 2022, Russia acted in defense of the civilian population of Donetsk and Luhansk against shelling by Ukrainian forces, approved by and supervised by the Nazis’ US and European allies. Similarly, Western governments and their psychological warfare mass media accuse the resistance movements of Lebanon and Palestine of being terrorists when they act legitimately in accordance with international law to resist the genocidal illegal occupation of Palestine and defend their civilian populations against the massive Zionist aggression made possible by the support of the collective West.
To summarize the countless crimes committed by the Western ruling classes since the end of World War II, a possible starting point could be the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency formally in 1947. The CIA has been a key tool of US foreign policy, acting freely, outside legislative control and from the beginning allied with organized crime. In the postwar period at the end of the 1940s the CIA developed relationships with gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Later, Meyer Lansky was a crucial ally of the CIA in its campaign against the Cuban Revolution. Much serious commentary considers it reasonable suspect that Lansky’s mob organization collaborated with the CIA to assassinate U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
So drug trafficking and organized crime have always been important sources of funds for the CIA in all its campaigns and interventions from Guatemala, Cuba and Vietnam to Iran and Afghanistan to Indonesia or the Congo among numerous others. For seventy years, the CIA has subverted legitimate governments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, including the counterrevolutionary war against Nicaragua of the 1980s and the endless contemporary aggression against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. That the CIA is a terrorist organization is indisputable. Recently, another anniversary passed of the destruction by CIA protected terrrorists of the Cuban flight over Barbados in October 1976 killing 73 people. The US government always protected the perpetrators of that infamous attack and many more terrorist attacks throughout the region.
The same applies, perhaps on a smaller scale, in the case of the historic European colonial powers which have always acted to intervene in different parts of their former territories, especially in Africa. Perhaps the most notorious case, but little reported, was the campaign of terrorism promoted by France against the government of Ivory Coast for ten years until overthrowing the progressive President Laurent Gbagbo in 2011 under the auspices of the UN, at the same time as the destruction of the Libyan Jamahiriya of Muammar al Gaddafi. The case of Laurent Gbagbo is especially instructive in relation to the abuse of the issue of criminality by the false international institutions dominated by the collective West such as the UN Human Rights Council or the International Criminal Court.
The International Criminal Court was founded at the initiative of the Western powers based on a series of deeply flawed legal precedents such as the international criminal tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The ICC persecuted Laurent Gbagbo obviously for political reasons without ever having enough evidence to indict him. The Court’s senior prosecutor kept him imprisoned for more than ten years looking for a way to fabricate a case in order to convict him. In the end, he had to be released because his unjust prosecution completely failed. Due to the same political selectivity, the ICC has never tried any of the criminal Western leaders responsible for the illegal war against Iraq and only with great reluctance were forced to accuse the genocidal Zionist leaders of Israel, knowing that no Western government will implement the arrest warrants against them.
The ICC's highly politicized and selective action reflects the widespread abuse of Western injustice systems as merely another means to attack the political movements and governments of the majority world that resist the will of the collective West or threaten its power, influence, prestige and control. The freezing in Europe and North America of the assets of countries such as Iran, Venezuela and Russia, among others, has involved a blatant theft of hundreds of billions in value of the resources of the peoples of those countries. The most recent examples of this type of theft include the hijacking of two Venezuelan planes facilitated by the injustice systems of Argentina and the Dominican Republic, which also demonstrate the extraterritorial abuse of the US injustice system.
For thirty years, successive US governments have illegally applied the genocidal Helms-Burton Law against the people of Cuba, which in effect completely illegitimately elevates U.S. national laws to the status of an international norm, to the extreme detriment of the Cuban people. Something similar happens in the case of countries struggling for a fair management of their external debt. Under the government of Cristina Fernández, Argentina was the victim of a grotesque neocolonial intervention by a minor New York district judge who ruled aggressively in favor of the US vulture funds that rejected the legitimate restructuring of Argentina's debt. When he became the Argentine president in 2016, the Yankee pawn Mauricio Macri authorized the payment of almost US$16 billion dollars to US speculators based on that spurious sentence in New York.
The extraterritorial abuse of Western injustice systems also applies to individuals acting in defense of true world justice. The extradition of Venezuela’s Alex Saab from Cape Verde to confront the US system of injustice has been among the most serious abuses of the relevant international law in recent years. Alex Saab was in transit in Cape Verde during a trip to mobilize resources in order to guarantee food and medicine for the Venezuelan people, which under US laws amounts to terrorism. In the most shameful way, the authorities in Cape Verde, via a completely anomalous process, bowed to US orders and handed over Alex Saab.
Similar abuse characterized the kangaroo legal process prepared against Julian Assange for having revealed to the international public US crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. The injustice systems of Sweden and the United Kingdom conspired and collaborated in coordination with the US government to deny Julian Assange his basic rights, hoping thus to engineer his eventual extradition to face the US injustice system. In the end, a court settlement was agreed that finally granted Julian Assange freedom after 15 years of pseudo-legal purgatory in London. The politicization of Western legal systems, both criminal and civil, has been increasingly evident in proportion to the increasing fear of the Western ruling classes of losing their power and control.
All this history and context demonstrates categorical Western bad faith both because of its countries’ own innumerable crimes against the peoples of the majority world and because of their abuse of the issue of criminality to justify their constant aggression. Nicaragua has been a victim of this reality throughout its modern history. The US troops occupying Nicaragua from 1926 to 1934 called General Sandino a "bandit” for defending Nicaragua’s national dignity and sovereignty. As our Co-President Comandante Daniel recently recalled, it was General Sandino who was absolutely right about the criminal nature of the invading Yankees.
Comandante Daniel recalled at the thirteenth Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government of the ALBA-TCP, "Sandino said in those moments of combat: 'Come on then, you swarm of morphine addicts; come and try murdering us in our own country, for I await you steadfastly…’ You can see very well how Sandino noted even in those days how the Yankees were trying to contaminate patriots, Peoples, via drug trafficking, and already at that time the United States was trafficking morphine, they were already trafficking drugs." In fact, Comandante Ortega confirms the general opinion of all honest observers regarding the issue.
President Nicolás Maduro and President Gustavo Petro have stated categorically that the main narcotics traffickers are located in places like Miami, Los Angeles or New York as well as in Europe’s capital cities. Sharing the criteria of his counterparts from Venezuela and Colombia, Comandante Daniel referred to this reality on September 27th when he observed "In the United States, how many thousands of drug traffickers are there well installed, relaxing and enjoying themselves? How many drug traffickers must there be in the institutions of the US government? Because there is no other explanation. How is it possible? They have an immense, sophisticated military apparatus and yet they cannot control the drug traffickers who are selling, distributing the drugs and who then place the money in American banks.”