AT THE heart of the illegal assault on Venezuela by the US settler regime is a grab for the profits that come from the oil and drug trafficking industries.

Of course this is about serving the interests of US capitalism. Of course this is about controlling the vast oil reserves of Venezuela. Yes of course this is about US imperialism and the latest installment of class war by the US capitalist elite.

But the Trump regime is also a criminal enterprise dedicated to securing control of the lucrative trade in narcotics.

Trump and his cabal do little that doesn’t add to the increasing fortune they have been accumulating since returning to the US settler regime throne just under a year ago.

The spirits of the mafia leaders of the past must be grinning in admiration.

After the illegal kidnap of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, Don Trump claimed the US was now going to run Venezuela. He made it clear from remarks to reports that he had told US oil executives of his plans before his own country’s lawmakers knew about it.

In the meantime, as US lawmakers plead their relevance, more than $100 billion was added to the market capitalisation of US oil corporations.

The Godfather then turned on Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodriguez, and said if she doesn’t give his accomplices “total access” to “the oil and other things,” she will “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

This could be straight from The Godfather or Goodfellas.

We don’t even need to go into all the mounting evidence of crime and corruption by the head of the crime syndicate. But even that is like a replay of the movie Wag The Dog, starring Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman, where the US president brings in a Hollywood producer to produce a non-existent war against a tiny nation because he has been caught having sex with a young girl in the White House and needs to switch attention.

But if you’re wondering about anyone in the syndicate who might turn evidence against “The Family” you will be looking for a long time. Certainly not to current US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

As a teenager, Rubio made extra cash working for his brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia who imported and sold exotic animals as a front for shifting cocaine and cannabis (in 1989, Cicilia was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was released early in 2000).

According to a 2010 biography of Rubio by Manuel Roig-Franzia it was the far-right wannabe president’s role to build the cages.

Rubio, of course, has sworn he was only 16 at the time and knew nothing about the drugs that were allegedly stuffed inside the animals.

When this and other related stories broke in 2011, Rubio and host allies launched a vicious attack against his accusers in the media in much the same way that his now boss Trump does.

Rubio’s own memoir was used to again rubbish the claims against him. He was, he said, only to clean animal cages and bathe his seven Samoyed dogs so he could buy tickets to every Miami Dolphins home game.

Today, Rubio is the Trump regime’s most formidable liar. Credit where credit is due. This comes ahead of some truly formidable competition and almost appears to have been a qualification for being appointed to what might more precisely be termed as one of the capo regimes of the family.

When Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth or Karoline Leavitt or Stephen Miller refers to an anti-genocide protester or a day labourer or a sandwich hurler or a fisherman clinging to the wreckage of a fishing boat that has just been struck by a US Hellfire missile as a “terrorist,” they reveal themselves as the loyal pathological henchmen and women they were appointed to be.

It is also worth noting that Rubio, despite others being brought in to do his job on issues such as Gaza and Ukraine, has the highest approval ratings in the Republican Party.

This comes even as Rubio is the architect of what is arguably Trump’s single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, including Venezuela, in the bogus claim of fighting drug cartels.

The fact that Venezuela has such vast oil reserves allows Trump and Rubio’s backers, as I said earlier, to wet their beaks, and the “Godfather” gets what he wants, which is billions of dollars added to his personal wealth.

Rubio recently dubbed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an “incredibly willing partner” who “has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration.”

A damning investigation last year revealed that Noboa’s family fruit business was responsible for shipping tons of cocaine into Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022. But this appears to be an essential qualification to gain favour with the Trump regime.

Rubio has lauded the so-called crime-fighting efforts of Salvadoran and Argentine leaders Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, in spite of the former’s documented alliance with MS-13 and other Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that have refused to leave Bukele.

The newly elected far-right leader of Chile, Jose Antonio Kast, the son of a Nazi war criminal, has promised to restore the “good name” of the country’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet is known to have personally ordered the Chilean military to construct a cocaine laboratory and expand the drugs trade through his vicious secret police and then, allegedly, “disappeared” key conspirators who may have revealed his moves, such as his secret police chemist Eugenio Berrios.

Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who some describe as a kind of Kissinger-like figure to Rubio, has also been depicted as a warrior against drugs. But a 1991 Pentagon report described Uribe as one of the 100 most important Colombian narco-terrorists, a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar and a political figure “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin [drug] cartel at high government levels.”

It is pure fantasy that Maduro has anything to do with drug trafficking or has any involvement with the US-invented “Cartel of the Suns.”

But what is crystal clear to anyone that cares to look a bit deeper than easy albeit true claims that what we are witnessing in Venezuela is the latest example of US imperialism is that this is about seizing control of the profits that come from both the oil and drug-trafficking industries.