TALES FROM THE FENTY KINGDOM.The Government as Cartel and the Cartel as Revolution — Carvajal, Lehder, and the Politics of Narcotic Theater

THE THREE WISEMEN OF DOPE FOR REVOLUTION; HUGO CAHVEZ, NICOLAS MADURO AND CARLOS LEHDER

(Ed Note: THis is a segment in a series being done on revelations about the criminal empire that masqueraded as the Bolivaran Republic of Venezuela)

Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal’s disclosures about Venezuela’s intelligence and military apparatus landed with a particular kind of force because they inverted the old narrative about revolution, drugs, and ideology in Latin America. According to Carvajal, the Venezuelan state did not merely tolerate or turn a blind eye to narcotics flows—the state became the cartel, and the cartel’s logistics became instruments of state power. Revolutionary rhetoric was the curtain dressing; the cocaine trade was the machinery backstage.

This doctrinal inversion matters. In the classic Colombian frame of the 1980s, traffickers like Carlos Lehder flirted with the role of political visionary, combining anti-U.S. nationalism, pop radicalism, and cocaine capitalism. Lehder positioned himself as a revolutionary using the weapons at hand, invoking anti-imperialist narratives to cast extradition and drug enforcement as foreign domination. Yet for all his ideological theatrics, Lehder remained fundamentally what he always was: a trafficker seeking survival, legitimacy, and political insulation. Revolution was the performance, cocaine the business.

Carvajal’s Venezuela presents the mirror image. Here, the ideology precedes the cocaine, and the cocaine finances the ideology. Under Chávez and later Maduro, the Venezuelan government wrapped itself in the Bolivarian flag and exported its supposed revolution through alliances with FARC, ELN, Cuba, Hezbollah affiliates, and other militant actors. Carvajal’s most explosive allegation was not merely that the Venezuelan state trafficked narcotics, but that it did so as a strategic function of governance—a budget line for foreign policy, intelligence operations, sanctions evasion, and influence campaigns. FARC, in this telling, was not a revolutionary partner fighting for class struggle in the Colombian countryside but a logistics subcontractor and ideological mascot employed by a state engaged in narco-realpolitik.

The comparison reveals the precise point of satire embedded in Carvajal’s narrative: both models weaponized the language of revolution, yet neither was revolutionary. Lehder borrowed ideology to protect a criminal enterprise from extradition and law enforcement. Venezuela borrowed criminal enterprise to finance an ideological project whose main purpose was regime survival. In both cases, the rhetoric of liberation concealed the economics of power.

But the contrast reveals something more subtle about historical progression. Lehder represented a world in which the cartel sought to become a quasi-political force. Chávez and Maduro represented a world in which the political force sought to become a cartel. One was a criminal learning the vocabulary of ideology; the other was an ideological project discovering the utility of crime. Their shared fraud is that the revolution never came. In Colombia, the cocaine-fueled anti-imperialist rhetoric died the moment extradition became irreversible. In Venezuela, the Bolivarian experiment collapsed into a command economy of scarcity, repression, and contraband.

Carvajal’s testimony therefore exposes the deeper irony of the Latin American “revolutionary” narcotics narrative: revolution was the cover story, narcotics the continuity. The trafficker used revolution to justify crime, and the state used crime to subsidize revolution. The banner and the bankroll simply changed hands.