Tag: cocaine

Carlos Lehder reveals: Fidel and Raúl Castro facilitated Medellín Cartel drug trafficking from Cuba in the 1980s.

Carlos Lehder, co-founder of the Medellín Cartel and former ally of Pablo Escobar, has dropped a bombshell that the left and progressives don’t want to hear: the Cuban regime, led by Fidel and Raúl Castro, was a key ally in trafficking cocaine to the United States in the 1980s.

This truth, revealed exclusively by Martí Noticias, shatters the image of Cuba as a supposed revolutionary model and exposes the corruption and cynicism of a government that conservatives have always denounced.

While progressives in the U.S. and Europe were busy praising Castro, this regime was helping flood the streets with drugs, lining their pockets and betraying their own people.

Lehder is direct in pointing out the culprits. In his memoirs and interviews, he states:

I met with Raúl Castro and Colonel Antonio de la Guardia to negotiate the logistics of these operations.

He details how Cuba opened its doors to the Medellín Cartel, setting up airstrips in Cayo Largo and charging for every kilo of cocaine that passed through the island. And he leaves no doubt about who was in charge:

Fidel Castro had to know; he was the orchestra conductor.

This isn’t gossip; it’s the testimony of a drug trafficker who lived the business from the inside and now exposes the hypocrisy of the Castros.

For Republicans, this comes as no surprise. We’ve always seen the Cuban regime as a nest of opportunists who crush their people while engaging in dirty business. While the left romanticizes Fidel and Raúl, Lehder reveals the reality:

I was allowed to use facilities in Cayo Largo, where airstrips were set up and a payment was agreed upon for each kilo of cocaine transported.

That drug made its way to the streets, killing young people, all under a government that progressives defended as a «victim» of imperialism. What irony.

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Russian Spokesperson Maria Zakharova Responds to Macron, Merz, and Starmer’s ‘Tissue’ Incident on the Train – And She’s Not Buying It

Maria Zakharova is the current director of Information for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Zakharova has been the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation since 2015.

Earlier today video made the rounds online of an incident that occurred during a train ride of Western leaders traveling from Poland to Ukraine. The video included French President Emanuel Macron with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Rumors quickly began to spread that Macron possessed cocaine after he quickly grabbed a crumpled-up tissue. Others speculated that Merz tried to cover a straw or a spoon. And rumors started circulating online that they were sniffing cocaine.

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President Trump Says “Either Joe or Hunter” Left Cocaine at The White House, “I Think I’ll Look Into That”

President Trump, in his latest sit-down interview with The Spectator’s Ben Domenech, revealed either Joe or Hunter Biden left the cocaine that was discovered inside a bin at the White House’s West Wing.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, a bag of cocaine was discovered at the West Wing of the White House in July 2023.

Investigators had a partial DNA hit at the time.

The Biden Administration ended their investigation without finding the culprit.

The topic of the cocaine at the White House was brought up by Domenech, The Spectator’s editor at large when he asked President Trump, “Who actually left the cocaine in the White House?”

Trump, without any hesitation, responded, “Well, either Joe or Hunter. Could be Joe, too.”

The 47th President added, “OK, so that was such a terrible thing because, you know, those bins are very loaded up with… they’re not clean, and they have hundreds and even thousands of fingerprints.”

Domenech then followed up Trump’s remarks by sharing, “I was briefly a Bush speechwriter. And so I knew exactly what they were talking about. And I was like, ‘Those things are filthy.’ They’re filthy.”

Trump responded, “And there were fingerprints…. Everybody in there would leave a fingerprint when they went in and that thing was wiped out with, with the strongest form of alcohol.”

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Colombian president calls for cocaine to be legalised worldwide and says it’s ‘no worse than whisky’

Colombia’s socialist president has said cocaine ‘is no worse than whisky’ and is only illegal because it comes from Latin America – as he called for the illicit drug to be legalised around the world. 

Colombia is the world’s biggest cocaine producer and exporter, mainly to the United States and Europe, and has spent decades fighting against drug trafficking. 

President Gustavo Petro’s remarks came during a live broadcast of a government meeting on Tuesday, in which he also claimed that cocaine is being scapegoated by American politicians. 

He stated that the illicit drug ‘is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky.’

‘Scientists have analyzed this. Cocaine is no worse than whisky,’ he added, suggesting that the global cocaine industry could be ‘easily dismantled’ if the drug were legalized worldwide.

‘If you want peace, you have to dismantle the business (of drug trafficking),’ he said.

‘It could easily be dismantled if they legalize cocaine in the world. It would be sold like wine.’

Petro also pointed out that fentanyl ‘is killing Americans and it is not made in Colombia’, referring to the opioid responsible for around 75,000 deaths in the United States a year, according to official data.

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Cocaine Outpaces Oil As Colombia’s Most Valuable Export

In a shocking development, Colombia’s cocaine production, for the 10th year straight, soared to a new record high. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the year’s annual output grew 52% year over year to a startling 2,664 metric tons, the largest amount ever produced. Despite the government in the capital Bogota, with U.S. backing, committing substantial resources to disrupt what is now an economically crucial illicit industry in rural Colombia coca cultivation and cocaine manufacturing keeps spiraling higher. The booming cocaine trade drives heightened insecurity and corruption which are damaging key economic sectors, notably the fiscally vital petroleum industry with oil Colombia’s most valuable export.

Since the 1990s, except for a brief period from 2011 to 2012, Colombia has consistently been the world’s leading cultivator of the coca plant. The bushy shrub’s alkaloid-rich leaves, long chewed by Indigenous South Americans to boost energy and ward off altitude sickness, are the vital precursor needed to manufacture the popular recreational narcotic cocaine hydrochloride which is widely consumed in developed nations around the world. The volume of cocaine produced is spiraling ever higher despite Colombia, since the 1980s, waging a multi-billion-dollar U.S.-backed war on drugs, 

This conflict not only failed to stem the flow of cocaine but prolonged Colombia’s civil war and cost hundreds of thousands of Colombians (Spanish), mostly civilians, their lives. There are multiple reasons for this, but the key is the weakness of the Colombian state which is exacerbated by Bogota being caught in a protracted country-wide multiparty asymmetric conflict rooted in inequality, Cold War politics and foreign interference. Colombia’s widespread poverty and lawlessness create favorable conditions for the growth of illicit economies, such as smuggling, thereby allowing the cocaine trade to take root.

While the cocaine business has existed since the early 1970s in Colombia, it was the formation of the Medellin and Cali Cartels toward the end of that decade that put the Andean country firmly on the global map as a leading cocaine exporter. The vast profits cocaine generates caught the attention of a multitude of illegal armed groups across Latin America including those waging a vicious decades-long civil war in Colombia. This led to a significant escalation in the conflict among cartels, leftist guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries, all vying for control of the lucrative billion-dollar illicit industry. These events sparked a vicious cycle of escalating violence, which fueled further lawlessness thereby perpetuating the conditions that allowed the cocaine trade to thrive.

Surprisingly, large-scale cultivation of the coca plant did not occur in Colombia when the Medellin Cartel was at the peak of its power during the 1980s. Estimates put the amount of coca being cultivated during the mid-1980s at a mere 32,000 acres or 13,000 hectares, roughly a twentieth of what it is today. Both the Medellin and Cali Cartels, at the time the world’s largest suppliers of the drug, relied upon coca paste imported from Bolivia and Peru to manufacture the cocaine they were shipping to the U.S. and Europe. This changed as other illegal armed groups, particularly rightwing paramilitary death squads and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC – Spanish initials) entered the fray. 

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Former Secret Service Chief Wanted To Destroy Cocaine Evidence

Former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and others in top agency leadership positions wanted to destroy the cocaine discovered in the White House last summer, but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.

Multiple heated confrontations and disagreements over how best to handle the cocaine ensued after a Secret Services Uniformed Division officer found the bag on July 2, 2023, a quiet Sunday while President Biden and his family were at Camp David in Maryland, the sources said.

At least one Uniformed Division officer was initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident. But after he told his supervisors, including Cheatle and Acting Secret Service Director Ron Rowe, who was deputy director at the time, that he wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol, he was taken off the case, according to a source within the Secret Service community familiar with the circumstances of his removal.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi did not immediately return RCP’s request for comment.

The discovery of the bag of cocaine posed an unusual problem for Cheatle, who resigned in the face of bipartisan pressure after the July 13 assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

Hunter Biden had a well-documented addiction to cocaine, crack cocaine, and other substances for many years but repeatedly claimed to be sober since 2021, an assertion that has prompted President Biden to often proclaim how “proud” he is of his son. While neither Joe nor Hunter Biden were at the executive mansion when the cocaine was found, it was discovered after a period when Hunter had been staying there.

Cheatle became close to the Biden family while serving on Vice President Joe Biden’s protective detail – so close that Biden tapped Cheatle for the director job in 2022, in part because of her close relationship to first lady Jill Biden.

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Senator Tom Cotton Demands Secret Service Release ALL Info Related to Cocaine Found in White House

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is demanding that the Secret Service turn over all information regarding the cocaine recently discovered in the White House.

The story about where the drugs were found keeps changing and Tom Cotton rightly calls this a national security issue. If someone can sneak illegal drugs into the White House, what is to stop someone from sneaking a much more dangerous substance into the building?

The media is preparing to drop the story and move on because they want to protect Biden. Cotton is not letting it go away.

The Daily Mail reports:

Top Republican Senator demands Secret Service release ALL information on White House cocaine – including lists of guests who avoided screenings – to determine if President’s home is secure

Sen. Tom Cotton wants more clarity after the Secret Service found cocaine inside the White House over the weekend – and is demanding Americans and Congress receive their well-deserved answers.

Cotton, the top Republican on the Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism Subcommittee, wrote a letter to U.S. Secret Service (USSS) Director Kimberly Cheatle on Wednesday with six questions he wants answered.

He demanded that Cheatle schedule a briefing with his staff.

‘Congress and the American people deserve to know how cocaine got into the White House,’ he said in a tweet along with an image of the letter…

‘According to public reports, the Secret Service has not yet confirmed where in the West Wing the cocaine was found,’ Cotton wrote in his Wednesday letter. ‘I urge you to release that information quickly, as the American people deserve to know whether illicit drugs were found in an area where confidential information is exchanged.’

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Cocaine use doubles in NZ: ‘A big change in a short space of time’

Cocaine consumption in New Zealand has almost doubled – although use is still very low – a new report has found.

The Drug Foundation’s latest study uses wastewater testing, as well as the national health and drug trends surveys, to paint a picture of illicit drug use in New Zealand.

Executive director Sarah Helm said 56,000 people (1.3 percent) used cocaine in the 2022/2023 year, which is a 93 percent increase on the previous three years’ average.

But she said that number was relatively small compared to other countries.

“We have a very low base and compared to international cocaine use it’s very, very low. However, that is a big change in a relatively short space of time.”

Helm said drug use in New Zealand reflected what was available and a bump in cocaine use could signal an influx from overseas.

“We know from international information from the UN and others that the international production of cocaine has significantly increased. They’re looking for new markets and trying to break into markets where there hasn’t been a lot of cocaine consumption previously.”

She said there have been a number of recent record cocaine busts by police and NZ Customs, but that had not eliminated supply.

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Prosecutors Urge Judge Not to Dismiss Gun Charges Against Hunter Biden After FBI Found Cocaine Residue on His Gun Pouch

The gun charges against Hunter Biden have taken a new turn as federal prosecutors are urging a judge to reject his efforts to dismiss these charges.

The prosecutors have revealed that the brown leather gun pouch used by Hunter Biden tested positive for cocaine residue.

The case delves back to 2018 when an investigation into Hunter Biden led to the discovery of the questionable substance on his gun pouch. The analysis, carried out by an FBI chemist, authenticated that the residue found was indeed cocaine. This alarming find was part of a broader court filing that was intended to bolster the case against Hunter Biden.

Last year, Hunter Biden was indicted on federal gun charges. He faced indictment in a Delaware court on three counts relating to his possession of a firearm while using drugs.

These charges include one count of making a false statement in the purchase of a firearm, one count of making a false statement related to information required to be kept by a federal firearms licensed dealer, and one count of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance.

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It’ll be a white Christmas regardless of the weather! UK has the second highest rate of cocaine use in the world, figures show

Many Britons are likely to celebrate a white Christmas regardless of the weather — as figures show the UK has the second highest rates of cocaine use in the world.

One in 40 adults in the UK take the class A drug, which is more than any other country in Europe and behind only Australia globally.

Experts say high use of the powder — known by its nickname ‘snow’ — is fuelled by the UK’s binge drinking culture, with many taking the stimulant to counteract the sedative effects of alcohol.

Once the preserve of high society, it is now widely used across all social classes, as its price has fallen in real terms over the past decade and it can be delivered ‘as quickly as a pizza’.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) compiled a global league table of cocaine use based on latest data from 36 countries.

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