Is Venezuela's fate a warning to Canada?

[Originally posted at I-System TrendCompass] I know, that may sound bizarre, but that was the title of the Globe and Mail Sunday Editorial four days ago. It literally read, “Venezuela’s fate is a warning for Canada.” The article is behind a paywall, but even its title raises a serious question: how much paranoid imagination would it take to think that Trump’s kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro was a warning to Canada? As it turns out, not very much and some people in Canada are rightly feeling very nervous about this.

In the immediate aftermath of Nicolas Maduro’s abduction, State Secretary Rubio said that, “we’re at war with drugs trafficking organizations,” and oligarchs. Trump, in his signature style, said very little of any substance, but did mention that the U.S. is losing 300,000 people a year to drug overdose deaths (in his opinion; the official figure is closer to 100,000) and that “a lot of it is coming from Canada.”

Targeting the drugs smuggling networks

On Tuesday, Promethean Action’s Susan ​Kokinda issued a report titled, “While you watched Venezuela, Trump quietly put Canada on notice.” The report is 16-min. long and well worth a careful listen, but it doesn’t really explain how, or why Trump put Canada on notice or what Maduro’s abduction might have to do with Canada. What she does explain, quite compellingly, is the case that Trump is targeting the drugs and people smuggling networks and the money laundering banks that enable their illegal activities. Maduro’s government may have been an accomplice in those networks:

“If this is a war on drug trafficking organizations and oligarchs, as Rubio says, then it is automatically a war on the global banking system because you can’t separate the two. The target isn’t just jungle labs and drug boats. It’s the City of London. …

The Caribbean area is the home of the infamous system of offshore banking established directly by the British. Back in 1960, the largest banking houses in London, working in partnership with the government and the exchequer established 14 completely secretive jurisdictions. These are the banking centers that now hold between $50 and $75 trillion dollars with all 50 of the world’s largest banks operating within them.

These offshore centers exist outside of the control of sovereign governments. They’re secret, they’re unregulated and they facilitate illegal activity. There, legitimate banking has been transformed to criminal enterprise.”

Ms. Kokinda also pointed out that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently commented that 50% of his job involves issues of national security and also that the Russians have set their sights on these offshore centers. In a 2014 speech, Viktor Ivanov, then Russia’s top drugs enforcement official laid it out clearly in the “Alternative Development for Drug-Producing Regions” conference on 25 March 2014:

“And this allows us to confidently assert that narcomoney is the foundation of the modern financial system. it is not surprising that during the first peak of the financial crisis of 2008-9, Antonio Costa (UN Drug Enforcement official) announced that the top banks in the world dumped in around $352 billion of narco-dollars to use for interbank borrowing, to address the critical shortage of liquidity. ... The very existence of the global financial bubble... is based on precisely this opportunity for banks to attract liquid narco-money. In fact, this garbage fertilizes the present economic system.”

The Canadian job

So far so good, but why would the Globe and Mail’s editorial board feel that Trump’s Venezuelan rumble in the jungle was a warning to Canada? It’s because they know things that our trusty mainstream media doesn’t discuss. The fact is that Canada plays a major role in drugs trafficking into the United States - this time Trump wasn’t just talking nonsense.

Back in March of this year, “The Bureau” published an extetnsive and revealing interview with David Asher, a former senior U.S. State Department official “with close ties to the Trump administration’s financial and national security apparatus,” who issued a stark warning about “the looming legal consequences for Canadian banks as the Trump administration ramps up hemispheric defense and moves to dismantle… the command-and-control structures of Mexican cartels… operating through Canadian financial institutions.”

Asher said that, “The flow of narcotics south and criminal proceeds north continues largely unabated, with superlabs in British Columbia and other areas of Canada producing meth, ecstasy, and fentanyl,” and explains at length the frustration of U.S. law enforcement officials over their inability to pursue the Canadian operations of the drug cartels:

“Something like probably 80% of the money laundering networks in the U.S. … are in direct contact with numbers in Canada. And we don’t know who those subscribers are. We’re not allowed to spy on Canada. … the money comes back to be laundered where command is. … The drugs go south, the cash is collected and it’s laundered back up through Canadian banks.”

In other words, the money returns to the operation’s owners and a good chunk of it goes to Canada. In 2022, the Cullen Commission produced a major investigative report titled, “Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering in British Columbia.” The report was published, but there was no law enforcement follow up and it didn’t lead to the dismantling of the smuggling operations. Asher:

“So what’s going on in British Columbia, which your Cullen Commission reporting detailed in mind-altering detail. What has Canada done to follow up on that? Nothing. … Why isn’t the Canadian government looking into them? [TD Bank] is the largest money laundering bank in the history of the United States of America. It’s Canadian. … the Canadian money laundering command and control remains a huge issue for drug trafficking of all sorts across the United States of America… that’s just the bottom line.”

Not only did the Canadian government show next to no interest in stomping out the drugs trafficking and money laundering operations on its territory, they positively provided protection to them:

“…every time we want to target someone, they end up getting told that they’re being targeted. I mean, you can’t build an undercover criminal investigation if the cover gets blown after 90 days because of some Canadian law or rule. … Canada would need to start to make cases on your own to identify, prosecute, and disable and dismantle these networks.

Your government knows where these networks exist. It just acts like it’s powerless to do anything. … So it baffled us why the criminals were being told that they were being targeted or how they found out. Whether it was through Stinchcombe or leaks or whatever. … when’s the last time we did a major case together between U.S. and Canada to take down a network? Seriously? Can you name one?”

Asher’s interviewer, Sam Cooper replied only, “I can’t. No.” Asher confirms: “Exactly. So there’s none, basically…” In this, David Asher probably articulated a major problem the Trump Administration is facing: on both the north and south, it’s surrounded by organized criminal cartels who are flooding their Nation with marijuana, “massive amounts of methamphetamine produced in Canada,” MDMA, fentanyl, ketamine, fake Xanax, “incredible weapons caches…” Some of the same cartels also facilitate logistics and border crossings for millions of illegal immigrants into the United States.

It’s the Opium Wars all over again

U.S. has been the target of 21st century Opium War

In this, the cartels are enabled through money laundering services provided by major Western banks. Most importantly, the U.S. authorities have been unable to defend against this 21st century Opium War through legal means. The British Empire has used Opium Wars to bring down China, subjecting it subsequently to a century of humiliation.

Recall, at the time, China was the global economic superpower and a 6,000-year civilization. As the longtime subscribers to this newsletter will appreciate, I believe that the British Empire is still alive and kicking and Opium Wars remain available to them as a tool of foreign policy.

We have the privilege of witnessing this kicking and its tragic consequences in real time and it is as dirty as it ever was. Of course, this is almost never reported on in the mainstream media so the public is being kept in the dark. The drugs epidemic is being blamed on its victims. Rather, this the work of the empire’s secret financial networks and deep state structures that have for two centuries perfected the arts of evading law enforcement, concealing their hand and paralyzing their victims.

With that in mind, it is entirely possible that they’ve also infiltrated Venezuela and its own government structures. If this is indeed what the Trump administration is targeting, the abduction of Nicolas Maduro may have been the opening salvo in meeting the dirty war with a dirty response.

It’s all consistent with the new U.S. National Security Strategy

This could be the proper meaning of the passage in the National Security Strategy (NSS25) that reads, “... they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.” ​Some circles in Canada may know to identify with that designation - is likely about them.

The NSS25 also says, “we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations…” It may be that we’re watching this aspect of U.S. Security Strategy being put into operation.

Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass investor reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge, no jumping through hoops to cancel. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at TrendCompass@ISystem-TF.com, or:

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