EXPOSING THE US "WAR ON DRUGS"

In a heated exchange on Piers Morgan’s program, Max Blumenthal dismantled the narrative driving Washington’s escalating confrontation with Venezuela. As U.S. warships flood the Caribbean and more than 80 Venezuelans are reported killed in a wave of American strikes on fishing boats, Blumenthal argues this moment has nothing to do with “drug trafficking” and everything to do with a familiar pattern of regime-change politics and resource extraction.

He reminds viewers that the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” narrative was shaped by U.S. intelligence itself and exposed decades ago on national television, long before it became today’s justification for military pressure. Blumenthal challenges former officials on the panel, pointing directly to the history of U.S.-backed coups, violent destabilization campaigns, and the long record of U.S. involvement in shaping Venezuela’s political battlefield.

He names the figures central to this struggle, highlighting how opposition leaders like María Corina Machado, Leopoldo López, and Carlos Vecchio have led or supported repeated coup attempts, street violence, and foreign-backed insurrections. He stresses that this opposition has worked closely with U.S. diplomats, Exxon-linked elites, and private contractors who openly sought control over Venezuela’s mineral and oil wealth. These are stories rarely acknowledged in Western media, he argues, yet essential to understanding the country’s turmoil.

Blumenthal closes by returning to the central contradiction: Washington brands Nicolás Maduro a “bad actor” not because of any principled concern for democracy but because he governs the nation with the world’s largest proven oil reserves. According to Max, the military build-up around Venezuela is another chapter in a long Global South history of manufacturing pretexts and punishing nations that refuse to surrender their sovereignty or resources.