Cocaine

And it’s destroying the rest of the region.

Marxists smuggling cocaine aren’t exactly showcasing an ideal alternative socialist economic system to free enterprise. The Colombian-Venezuelan drug route is being threatened, not by Colombia which was pressured by Obama into giving in to FARC, but by two groups of Marxist-Leninist coke fiends who are fighting it out over the drug trade like filthy capitalists.

The National Liberation Army (ELN), a Marxist-Leninist terror group set up by the Cubans, has been fighting a FARC splinter group known as the 10th Front or the Eastern Bloc. Both leftist terror groups are Marxist-Leninist in orientation, although ELN has a lot more liberation theology in the mix, and both make their money from drugs and the occasional kidnapping.

ELN and the 10th Front aren’t fighting over ideological differences, but over drugs and money.

A fawning article in Jacobin magazine describes ELN as a “group of students” who were “inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara, and Liberation Theology”. The four page article never mentions cocaine even though that’s what ELN actually does. Last year, Colombia seized $300 million in cocaine from the Marxist-Leninist narcoterrorist organization.

Che would be proud.

After FARC’s implosion as a viable force, Venezuela’s government formed a drug smuggling alliance with ELN. That drew it into a conflict with the 10th Front which is now conducting a guerrilla war against Venezuela. After a long alliance, FARC and Venezuela are fighting each other with the most fearsome Marxist guerrilla force in the region fighting the leading Socialist regime. The same forces that had terrorized Colombia for so long have turned on each other.

Venezuelan soldiers are dying in border clashes, and invading Colombia to terrorize local villagers in the hopes of shutting down the ELN’s Marxist drug rivals. They’re getting blown up, ambushed, and shot up when they’re not being hit with human rights violations complaints.

 It’s socialism at its finest.

The 10th Front is allied with Brazil’s Red Command which was born as a prison pact between Communists and criminals under the slogan, “Peace, Justice and Freedom”. Red Command is involved in Brazil’s drug trafficking at every level from slum dealing to club parties for the children of the elite. The Red Command helps the 10th Front remain in the field even though Cuba is on the side of Venezuela and the ELN narcoterrorists that it had originally set up.

Neither side is even bothering to pretend that this is about any kind of ideological differences.

What’s at stake here is a simple matter of market economics. Americans spend about $25 billion on coke every year. Moving drugs through Central America to the Caribbean provides a piece of not only the American, but the European cocaine market. The rival Marxist drug smugglers are competing to be the exclusive suppliers of Colombian cocaine to that huge market.

Think of it as the cola wars, but with actual cocaine. The glorious Marxist revolution is down to two groups of Marxist-Leninists killing each other to make a killing on cocaine in California.

It’s like Coke vs. Pepsi if both companies were run by Marxist druglord terrorists.

When Obama pushed Colombia to cut a peace deal with FARC and then cut off the flow of Cuban refugees, he also helped restart the flow of cocaine to America from Cuba. The subsequent collapse of Venezuela’s economy and its oil industry has left it few options. Smuggling cocaine takes a lot less skill than refining crude or running a country. And Venezuela’s military makes it the best armed drug cartel in the hemisphere, if not the planet.

Which other drug cartel in the region has its own attack helicopters to deploy in the field?

But Venezuelan soldiers are paid with food and worthless scrip. FARC and ELN recruits are often local peasants who are kidnapped and drafted into the fight. The real money goes to the elites on both sides of a drug war that is now a cocaine civil war between narcosocialists.

Karl Marx claimed that capitalism was destined to destroy itself. Instead, Marxist regimes and movements hold the world record for self-destruction. South of the border the Marxists who once won the hearts of the American Left have become drug dealers shooting it out in the jungle over who gets a cut of the cocaine that ends up in the noses of their Yankee comrades.

Marx had metaphorically called religion the opiate of the masses. Marxism has become the actual cocaine of the masses. Just ask the Marxist-Leninists kidnapping, torturing and killing each other to socialize the cocaine market.