If you’re a little too online, you likely know that Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana.
» What politician doesn't have a felon relative? «
Marco Rubio, south of the US border commonly known as "El Gusano" and "Narco Rubio."
» Too incongruous with his long-cultivated squeaky-cleanness. «
But Rubio's approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump’s single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, in the name of fighting drug cartels.
In September, Rubio hailed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an "incredibly willing partner" who "has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration." Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa’s family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022.
In September, Rubio hailed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an "incredibly willing partner" who "has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration." Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa’s family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022.
Rubio has tirelessly promoted the cause of convicted (alas, just-pardoned) drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. In 2018, Rubio personally and publicly commended Hernández, then president of Honduras, for combating drug traffickers (and supporting Israel), just seven months before his brother was indicted for trafficking 158 tons of cocaine in containers stamped "TH," for Tony Hernández.
Rubio has raved about the crime-fighting efforts of Salvadoran and Argentine junior strongmen Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, in spite of the former’s documented alliance with MS-13 and the various Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that enveloped his libertarian political party last fall, as well as both leaders’ slavish devotion to the drug cartels' single favorite mode of money laundering.
» Marco Rubio is the Trump administration's most formidable liar. «
Rubio has been one of the Beltway’s biggest backers of newly elected Chilean president José Antonio Kast, the son of a literal Nazi war criminal who has spent his entire political career lionizing, whitewashing, and promising a restoration of the brutal reign of Augusto Pinochet, who personally ordered the Chilean army to build a cocaine laboratory, consolidated the narcotics trade inside his terrifying secret police, and then allegedly "disappeared" key conspirators like his secret police chemist Eugenio Berríos.
And for at least a decade, Rubio has lauded, strategized with, and viciously condemned the multitude of criminal investigations into former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, whom some describe as a kind of Kissingerian figure to the former Florida senator.
And for at least a decade, Rubio has lauded, strategized with, and viciously condemned the multitude of criminal investigations into former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, whom some describe as a kind of Kissingerian figure to the former Florida senator.
A 1991 Pentagon analysis described Uribe, whom Rubio depicts as a kind of paradigmatic drug warrior, as one of the 100 most important Colombian narco-terrorists, a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar and a political figure "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels."
» Álvaro Uribe [on the left, next to Pablo Escobar], whom some describe
as a kind of Kissingerian figure to the former Florida senator. «
Last week, Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott wrote a letter to The New York Times disputing the newspaper's characterization of "a remarkable dissonance" between Trump's simultaneous massacres of subsistence traffickers and pardoning of a convicted trafficker of more than 400 tons of cocaine. Actually, he pointed out, the "contradiction" was markedly unremarkable: "The ill-conceived and deliberately misnamed 'War on Drugs' has been a cover for contradictory CIA involvement with drug-traffickers for decades."
This is especially true in Venezuela, Scott noted. Customs Service investigators probing a 998-pound cocaine seizure in the country in 1990 discovered the Agency had been operating a joint venture with top military generals to traffic cocaine as a purported means of "infiltrating" Colombian cartels. The venture had been nicknamed "Cartel de los Soles," and the Times itself reported that it had successfully smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States with virtually no accountability until Hugo Chávez imprisoned the general who had spearheaded the cartel and expelled the DEA from Venezuela, at which point it became fashionable to finance industrial sabotage, military coups, and ultimately terror attack projects, under the premise that it was a "narco-state."
US officials said was at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.
[...] Rubio returned to Miami and never left, any misgivings about his ties to a scary narcotics gang apparently negated by his conspicuous political talent. By the time he ran for city commissioner in the late '90s, Jeb Bush was donating to his campaign, as were a number of executives of the Fanjul sugar empire and a collection of eye doctors including (and likely corralled by) the ophthalmologist and onetime political fixer Alan Mendelsohn, who would later host the first fundraiser for Rubio's first presidential campaign exploratory committee.
In one of the more "only in Miami" episodes of recent history, a midsized ship seized by the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean in 2001 turned out to have 12 tons of cocaine concealed inside its fuel tank, along with a cursory paper trail that led investigators to a Miami-based Ponzi scheme that was laundering drug cartel proceeds, whose ringleader had in turn funneled millions into Mendelsohn's various foundations and political action committees in a vain attempt to "fix" his legal problems.
But where that scandal took down Rubio's close friend and sometime roommate David Rivera, who was elected to Congress in the 2010 election that sent Liddle Marco to the Senate, he emerged untainted. As one local political consultant told Rubio's biographer, "He was the anointed golden child, even then."
» The cartels are running Mexico. We have to do something. «
» Colombia is run by a sick man. He's not going to be doing it for very long, it will be an operation by the US. «
» Now I hear that Iran is trying to build up again, and if they are, we're going to have
to knock them down. We'll knock them down. We'll knock the hell out of them. «
» We need Greenland. For defence reasons. «
to knock them down. We'll knock them down. We'll knock the hell out of them. «
» We need Greenland. For defence reasons. «
Genocide Ziocon MIGA Don, January 3-4, 2026.
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