Is Maduro's Venezuela cocaine bankrolling the terrorists killing Nigeria's Christians?

 

By Monica Showalter

Today's Wall Street Journal had an important piece about how cocaine from Venezuela's narco-dictatorship is flooding Europe, citing United Nations sources. The shipments intercepted are bigger, purer, and more numerous than ever.

The Journal notes that the intermediary states are in West Africa, where Jihadi terrorists finance themselves through the illegal drug trade, courtesy of their Venezuelan suppliers.

As in -- the Jihadi terrorists kidnapping and killing Africa's Christian communities. But more about that shortly.

The Journal report, by Benoit Faucon, lays out the facts here first:

Venezuela has become a major launchpad for huge volumes of cocaine shipped to West Africa, where jihadists are helping traffic it to Europe in record quantities.

Corrupt military officers and drug gangs smuggle shipments by light aircraft, fishing boats, semi-submersible vessels and freighters heading east, international law-enforcement officials have said publicly. The cocaine flows to West Africa, where an informal network of jihadist-linked smugglers and their allies then move the drug north to feed high and rising demand in Europe.

“Cocaine in the 1980s is not the same as the one we see today,” said Jesus Romero, a retired U.S. military intelligence officer. “There are direct linkages to terrorist organizations to support their cause.”

Unprecedented levels of cocaine production in Colombia in recent years have overwhelmed traditional smuggling routes, leading traffickers to exploit Venezuela’s strategic location, ineffectual security institutions and long coastline, the law-enforcement officials have said. That has led cocaine consumption to rise worldwide in regions that hadn’t been major consumers, from Australia to Eastern Europe, United Nations drug researchers say.

The confluence of drug smugglers, jihadists and corrupt officials is part of a growing global alignment among criminal gangs, militant groups and rogue governments that threatens democratic norms and social stability, with profound potential ramifications.

 

The report didn't go into it much, but the Venezuelan hauls are absolutely huge -- a record ten-ton bust in Dunkirk last March. A 6.5-ton bust in the Canary Islands last October, along with another big bust in Portugal the next month, and many six- and seven -ton interceptions off the West African coast by the French navy. The French and Spanish are known to have very competent, well-equipped, and effective cocaine-gang hunters, and they see Venezuelans with every takedown.

Surging trans-Atlantic drug flows mean that cocaine seizures in Europe now exceed those in North America, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

“The quantities have gone up so much, the problem that traffickers have now is moving them,” says Jeremy McDermott, co-director at InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas.

The Journal, citing its U.N. sources, has some limits in its reporting, casually stating the conventional wisdom that the finished cocaine product is coming from Colombia, and Venezuela is just a trans-shipment point.

But that doesn't stack up well to other reports that Venezuela is the major end-processor of the cocaine product, with at least 24 industrial-scale processing plants run by the Venezuelan military (Cartel of the Suns) scattered around the country, processing the coca paste into cocaine, taking their semi-finished coca paste from Colombia's drug lords and guerrillas, who have a free hand in the country now run by anti-American Gustavo Petro, and turning it into the blow. 

Just to have busts that big indicates that it came from a factory, not a shack in the jungle. There isn't any other way to create the powder bundles for the speedboats now being blown out of the water by President Trump. And only a huge factory process, protected by the state, can produce a product of far better purity, such as is being seen by the lawmen in Europe.

The cocaine is also making its way to the U.S. but more of it is going to Europe, the report said.

But Venezuela's African connection raises questions about the Venezuelan narcoregime's ties to Africa's terrorists, such as Boko Haram, now operating in Nigeria as a killer and kidnapper of Christians. 

The Journal report cites Venezuela's partners in Mali, Niger, and Guinea-Bissau as the traffickers to Europe, but a simple Google search indicates that cocaine, almost certainly coming in from Venezuela, is also going to Boko Haram.

According to Google AI:

Boko Haram has been implicated in cocaine and heroin smuggling across West Africa but there is no direct evidence from the search results of the group trafficking cocaine through Venezuela. 

However, there is extensive information regarding high-ranking Venezuelan officials and government-linked criminal networks, such as the "Cartel of the Suns" (Cartel de los Soles), being heavily involved in international cocaine trafficking. 

Key points regarding these separate trafficking activities:

• Boko Haram's Role: Boko Haram is reportedly involved in controlling trade routes and smuggling cocaine and heroin across the Sahel region and West Africa to accumulate funds for arms and vehicles. These routes serve as transit points for drugs ultimately bound for Europe.

It's hard to think they can so much as get their hands on cocaine without a Venezuelan connection, given the outsized role Venezuela plays in the cocaine trade. I'd bet money they know who the most reliable cocaine supplier is.

Meanwhile, according to the Wilson Center, the Nigerians know the score:

Nigeria faces a complex threat landscape from various terrorist groups, as highlighted in the 2022 National Inherent Risk Assessment on Terrorist Financing. These groups utilize diverse funding methods, complicating counter-terrorism efforts. For example, Boko Haram funds its activities through foreign donations, extortion, ransom, and trade in goods such as dried fish, while the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) exploits a cash economy through kidnapping and illegal levies. Disrupting the financial flows supporting terrorist groups in Nigeria is an essential element of reducing violence and promoting security.

There's a lot of circumstantial evidence that Boko Haram is involved in the coke trade and gets its supply from Venezuela. If that's the case, then Venezuela is enabling the killing of Christians by these monster terrorists. 

President Trump has recently expressed a need for the U.S. to take action against these terrorists. Given that all terrorism is narcoterrorism, as Rachel Ehrenfeld once told me, it may well be that the pressure campaign on Maduro is as much about helping save Africa's Christians as it is about protecting America from these merchants of death.

If so, the knock-on effect will be just what the voters want.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/is_maduro_s_venezuela_cocaine_bankrolling_the_terrorists_killing_nigeria_s_christians.html