OPINION: Inside Narco-Presidencies and How They Come to an End

Merchants of psychotropic substances, regardless of the jurisdiction of their operations, do not take prisoners. “Obi fere ha azu” as my igbo people would say of deeply evil and heartless people. They are barefoot buccaneers. They are merchants of sorrow, veterans of blood sport, dispensers of death. They usually have no margin for error. They leave nothing to chance – because the price for it would be cost-prohibitive. That includes dying with their own lives. Once you are in you are hardly out. There is no sabbatical. No leave of absence. There is no retirement. As drug dealers they are a merchant of death and destruction, and they behave as they do, because as the Igbo would say ‘’onye na-ebe isi anaghi ekwe ka ewere nma gafe ya na azu’’. The transliteration would be something like this: a person who is into the business of severing heads never allows a person with a sharpened machete behind him.
It is a serious business . Drug business at any level as a lord or baron , or as a courier or scout , or a mole embedded inside government security agencies , or a whistle-blower when law enforcers are planning for a raid . It runs for 24 hours a day and seven days a week . In the chain the baron will not stand any weakness. He doesn’t give a second chance to any operative who’s laid back, no matter how lowly in the hierarchy the faltering operative may be. He is completely unbothered by the sight of blood. It wouldn’t matter if the person being ‘’wasted’’ is a blood relation, a sibling or even parents. The drug baron is a mortal enemy of security agents of the state especially those that cannot be compromised . This is because he operates outside of the law .

This is why normal societies try to avoid any situation that would allow any person with a dubious background to capture political power at any level, certainly not at the highest echelons of statecraft. No state institution would be safe. Not the bureaucracy. Not the magistracy [courts]. Not the courts of law. No, the laws. Not the political system. Not the parties. Not the norms and mores of democracy and the wider spectrum of society. Not the economic. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Power is concentrated. And guarded jealously. Favors are kept and dispensed personally at the pleasure and whim of the drug lord. The economy is set up to service and profit one – the lord of the manor.

The man at the top of the pile plunders and expropriates and privatizes the national treasury for the good of one and those in his good books at any material time. If you disagree, you are never tolerated. Disagreement is treason, and treason is a capital crime punished by public execution or hanging by the neck until the “traitor” is dead. If the use of the instruments of coercion and violence of the state proved inconvenient, the baron could resort to the notorious “Italian solution” where the offender is disappeared, never to be accounted for, or simply shot at point blank range, and killed on the streets like a dog, and the killers would never be found. That was our reality in this country under military dictatorships — killing people in broad daylight in public execution style. And they were meant to send a strong message to would be ‘’traitors’’.

Fear is king in the hearts of citizens ruled by a despot. And despotism in government is not the prerogative of military elements who took political power. All drug barons are dictators. To run an empire successfully on the proceeds of psychotropic substances which are mind benders and wasters of generations, an iron fist is a sine qua non. The baron would soon, but not too soon, become a toast without arousing fear among his subjects. In any empire or even a country run by a drug lord (remember we said earlier that no drug dealer really retires from that business) everyone is a spy on everyone else. Fear is constant in such places. Fear is typically tangible. In such an environment, you do not have to do or say anything wrong to be disappeared. It should be enough to send you to the place of no return, just the suspicion of your loyalty or commitment to the cause. A benevolent drug lord who does not live in this universe would hesitate to visit his survivors with the ‘’crimes’’ of the dead member.

The country is lost if a drug baron gets hold of the highest levers of state power. The moves for state capture are dogged, fast and relentless. No institution in that country would be secure. The judiciary would be compromised, tainted and corrupt. Independent minded judges and sundry officers would be sacked and replaced by loyalists and minions. Mansions would be built for judges who will be presiding over cases involving their benefactors at one point or the other. In such cases the state conqueror and his confederates would not care about perceived or real bias. In these cases it would not be unheard of to see judgments by judges with sentences and paragraphs that seem to have been lifted directly from the partisan political stump speeches of a member of the ruling elite and cabal. It is in such countries also that you see courts of coordinate jurisdictions delivering judgments which contradict each other like confeities. One judge makes a ruling on the conduct of a critical and sensitive state institution, another judge jumps up instantly to make a counter ruling to favour the ruling cabal. If it is a liberal democracy , the power brokers would shamelessly blur or even obliterate any semblance of separation of powers . The baron or his enablers would grab the funds of the judiciary and then go ahead to determine the remunerations of judges and sundry judicial officers, determine their promotions, the domestic and foreign courses that they would be permitted to attend and the size of the estacode, the promotion or the stagnation of their spouses who happen to be working in other government institutions.

Like would-be dictators and dictators in so-called democracies, drug barons seek immortality in many forms. Take North Korea for example. Every nook and cranny of that country is filled with giant and life-size statues of the succession of dictators there. North Koreans are constantly reminded who’s in charge. The original ruler’s grandson is the present ruler. Kim Jong Un is accused of killing his own brother to consolidate power . It is said that he is grooming his daughter to be his successor. Donald Trump is president of the United States of America and another wannabe dictator. His banner is in front of the offices of the Department of Justice, which by American convention is generally autonomous and independent of the president. Not under Trump, who just turned 80 last Sunday. America will be 250 on July 4th. Trump has gone to great lengths to blur the line, and to submerge America’s independence anniversary in the celebration of his own birthday. He is working furiously with his Treasury Secretary who is said to be a man married to another man to make a $250 bill with his image embossed on it. It is to be a legal tender commemorative. It is a fact that the American Constitution prohibits the appearance of the image of a living person on American currency (coins or notes), but this does not deter Trump and his sycophantic collaborators. He is facing headwinds from parts of Congress, some Americans and the judiciary. Few countries under the spell of would-be dictators are so fortunate.

Another strongman in search of eternity is Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation. That’s what dictators do. Putin is Russia. Russia is Putin. He makes oligarchs. He kills the oligarchs. His enemies keep dying by falling out of the windows of 15-storey apartment blocks or hotel rooms. His critics, including those living in exile, are hunted down and poisoned with deadly chemicals. He has imperial ambitions. That’s why he’s been at war with Ukraine since 2022. The Russian Duma [parliament] has many things in common with Nigeria’s national assembly, the most important being their lapdog roles for the executive arm of government and the imperial presidencies. It is important to mention that neither Trump nor Putin have been accused of any drug dealings.

Perhaps the most notorious person who was dealing drugs while he was the president of Panama is Manuel Noriega. In 1983 Noriega, Panama’s army general, took political control of the country. But a year earlier, he had been chief of military intelligence in that country and had struck a deal with Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Drug Cartel which allowed Colombian cocaine shipments to pass through Panama’s airport with impunity. He was paid $200,000 for each planeload that passed through the country on its way to the US and other places. The cartel also paid him commission of as much as $4 million a month. By 1989 Noriega was said to be worth about $400million from the drug business. America was aware of his dealings but turned a blind eye as Noriega was a CIA agent and had been on their payroll since the late 1950s. America knows how to deal with assets that they consider no longer useful or whose cover has been blown. So an American asset is a two-edged sword. It has an expiry date and the end can be devastating.

By 1985 Noriega had murdered and beheaded a political opponent, Hugo Spadafora, and had become a liability to the United States. A grand jury in Miami and Tampa indicted him three years later on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling and money laundering. US forces invaded Panama on December 20, 1989 to arrest him, but Noriega fled and sought refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City. That year, Noriega had overturned the results of the country’s democratic elections. The US encircled the Vatican embassy and blasted deafening rock music around the clock as a form of psychological warfare. Noriega left the embassy and gave up his weapons on January 3, 1990. He was tried in America, convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He served 17 years before being released on good behaviour. He was sent from a U.S. prison to France, where he was tried and convicted of laundering money through French banks. Noriega died in prison in Panama in 2017 where he was serving his prison terms including for murdering his political rivals.

Similarly, a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, was found guilty of links to drug trafficking. In 2024 a US federal jury convicted him of conspiring to import into America more than 400 tons of cocaine from 2004 to 2022, and sentenced him to 45 years in prison. He was pardoned and freed by Trump in December last year. Earlier this year, American troops stormed into Caracas and took away the previous president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife. The couple is being held in a US prison awaiting trial on charges of conspiring to traffic cocaine and partnering with drug cartels. Maduro has pleaded not guilty. He branded the charges against him as a way to further “imperial” ambitions by Americans to tap his country’s huge crude oil reserves. He called himself a ‘’kidnapped president’’ and a ‘’prisoner of war’’. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro [Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego] is now in the US’s crosshairs over concerns with drugs. Since taking office he has been sanctioned only by the American Treasury Department for allowing the explosion of cocaine production in his country. The ousted president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, was also said to have provided the presidential palace as a safe haven for the drug business of his brother. He was reported to have profited from the drug business as sanctions took their toll on the country’s revenues.

The lesson is: Those who use presidencies of nations as a shield to deal on drugs, those who had ties with drug cartels before assuming political power, do not usually end well. It’s worse for those who were and still are agents of the CIA and assets of the United States. When they fall out of favour, or become a liability to that foreign power, their falls are cataclysmic. Let those who have ears listen. And buckle up. Because the end will come for sure. And it might be uncomfortable.