The Narco-Terrorist Elite
If you’re a little too online, you likely know that Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana. It was later said, when kingpin Mario Tabraue became a main character on the monstrously popular documentary series Tiger King, that the cocaine was actually stuffed into the bodies of vipers and boa constrictors, though an 80-page indictment of the enterprise makes no mention of that, and Tabraue has been known to sue those who accuse him of animal cruelty.
“I dealt to support my animal habit,” Tabraue humbly told the Netflix documentarians about the drug ring that imported and distributed $79 million worth of drugs between 1976 and 1987. It was Rubio’s job, the current secretary of state wrote in his memoir, to clean the cages.
Rubio has sworn he knew nothing about the drugs. He was only 16. (Admittedly, one of Cicilia’s co-defendants had been only 16 when Tabraue had allegedly ordered him to murder his estranged wife to stop her from telling the feds what they’d done with the body of another guy they’d murdered the year earlier.) Not that it matters, of course: What politician doesn’t have a felon relative? But for Rubio in particular, the connection seems too incongruous with his long-cultivated squeaky-cleanness. As a third grader, Rubio convinced his family to convert to Mormonism to better fit in with their wholesome new neighbors during a short stint living in Las Vegas. He spent every spare hour of high school obsessing over football, and his wife attends masses at multiple churches multiple times per week.
When Univision broke the story of his ties to Cicilia’s business in 2011, Team Rubio declared war on the entire network, first dispatching surrogates like Ana Navarro to pressure executives to shelve the story, then convincing a host of other Republican politicians to boycott its debate on the nonsensical premise that the network had attempted to use the information about his brother-in-law as “blackmail” for the purposes of “extorting” an interview out of him.
The following year, Rubio’s memoir cast Cicilia as a paragon of Old World filial piety, a central presence in his fondest childhood memories. The house where Cicilia cut and stored cocaine into emptied cigarette cartons was depicted as a sanctuary that held his far-flung family together during the difficult Vegas years. Most significantly for the football-obsessed young Rubio, Cicilia paid him enough cash to clean animal cages and bathe his seven Samoyed dogs so he could buy tickets to every Dolphins home game of Dan Marino’s 14-2 sophomore season. On the December day in Rubio’s junior year of high school that Cicilia was taken away in handcuffs from the home where he’d briefly lived, his entire family was “stunned.”
Today, Marco Rubio is the Trump administration’s most formidable liar. When Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth or Karoline Leavitt or Stephen Miller refers to an anti-genocide protester or a day laborer or a sandwich hurler or a fisherman clinging to the wreckage of a fishing boat that has just been struck by a Hellfire missile as a “terrorist,” they come off as pathological. But Rubio’s approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he 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, in the name of fighting drug cartels.
In September, Rubio hailed 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.” Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa’s family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022. Rubio has tirelessly promoted the cause of convicted (alas, just-pardoned) drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. In 2018, Rubio personally and publicly commended Hernández, then president of Honduras, for combating drug traffickers (and supporting Israel), just seven months before his brother was indicted for trafficking 158 tons of cocaine in containers stamped “TH,” for Tony Hernández.
Rubio has raved about the crime-fighting efforts of Salvadoran and Argentine junior strongmen Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, in spite of the former’s documented alliance with MS-13 and the various Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that enveloped his libertarian political party last fall, as well as both leaders’ slavish devotion to the drug cartels’ single favorite mode of money laundering. Rubio has been one of the Beltway’s biggest backers of newly elected Chilean president José Antonio Kast, the son of a literal Nazi war criminal who has spent his entire political career lionizing, whitewashing, and promising a restoration of the brutal reign of Augusto Pinochet, who personally ordered the Chilean army to build a cocaine laboratory, consolidated the narcotics trade inside his terrifying secret police, and then allegedly “disappeared” key conspirators like his secret police chemist Eugenio Berríos.
And for at least a decade, Rubio has lauded, strategized with, and viciously condemned the multitude of criminal investigations into former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whom some describe as a kind of Kissingerian figure to the former Florida senator. A 1991 Pentagon analysis described Uribe, whom Rubio depicts as a kind of paradigmatic drug warrior, 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 Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels.”
That brings us to Rubio’s current campaign of state-sponsored terrorism against Venezuela and fisherman emanating from there, on the pretense that Nicolás Maduro runs something called the “Cartel of the Suns,” which has flooded the United States with cheap cocaine. The case that this is anything but a fairy tale is laid out in a 2020 indictment whose insanity I hope to explore soon, but its flimsiness is also underscored by the puny vessels SOCOM has chosen to drone-strike into oblivion.
Last week, Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott wrote a letter to The New York Times disputing the newspaper’s characterization of “a remarkable dissonance” between Trump’s simultaneous massacres of subsistence traffickers and pardoning of a convicted trafficker of more than 400 tons of cocaine. Actually, he pointed out, the “contradiction” was markedly unremarkable: “The ill-conceived and deliberately misnamed ‘War on Drugs’ has been a cover for contradictory CIA involvement with drug-traffickers for decades.” This is especially true in Venezuela, Scott noted. Customs Service investigators probing a 998-pound cocaine seizure in the country in 1990 discovered the Agency had been operating a joint venture with top military generals to traffic cocaine as a purported means of “infiltrating” Colombian cartels. The venture had been nicknamed “Cartel de los Soles,” and the Times itself reported that it had successfully smuggled tons of cocaine into the United States with virtually no accountability until Hugo Chávez imprisoned the general who had spearheaded the cartel and expelled the DEA from Venezuela, at which point it became fashionable to finance industrial sabotage, military coups, and ultimately terror attack projects, under the premise that it was a “narco-state.”
As historian Greg Grandin pointed out in a recent podcast appearance, whereas in many realms the scale and breadth of the Trump administration plunge into mafia rule is truly unprecedented, in Latin America it is more of a continuation of policy that dates back at least a century. “Behind every single horror that Donald Trump represents exists a long train of U.S. presidents that have first put in the policies that make what Trump does today possible,” Grandin said. Few Americans learned this lesson the hard way at so tender an age as Marco Rubio.
THE LABYRINTHINE SCANDAL KNOWN AS “IRAN-CONTRA” began to unravel in 1986 when the Nicaraguan Air Force lobbed a missile at a suspicious Fairchild cargo plane. As the fuselage packed full of grenade launchers, AK-47s and ammunition, two pilots, and a radio crewman plunged to the Earth, a lone white guy from Wisconsin (who died just weeks ago) parachuted down intact and quickly admitted he worked for a CIA project with a guy named “Max Gomez.” Gomez turned out to be Félix Rodríguez, one of Mario Tabraue’s dad Guillermo’s old comrades from the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria, or MRR, the crew of anti-communist revolutionaries led by physician Manuel Artime that carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion and various subsequent terror attacks and sabotage operations in Cuba for years afterward.
The plane turned out to have belonged to Barry Seal, a Special Forces pilot turned prolific cocaine trafficker who had just been murdered by cartel hit men. Following a conviction for smuggling quaaludes, Seal had let the CIA install hidden cameras on the plane and set out on a covert sting operation to “frame” Nicaragua’s Sandinista government for drug trafficking by capturing images of Pablo Escobar stuffing cocaine into duffel bags in Managua alongside a titular top aide to a Sandinista general, which thereupon became the basis for the Reagan administration’s renewed appeal for funds to finance regime change in the Central American country. “I know every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking,” President Reagan said in a 1986 televised speech. “There seems to be no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop.”
But the “Sandinista official” turned out to be a former U.S. embassy staffer, and Seal seemed to be a longtime CIA asset who appears to have participated at the Bay of Pigs and was even photographed in 1963 with the same Félix Rodríguez who would later become his Agency handler. Rodríguez was not known for a soft touch: Three officials involved in the investigation of the gruesome 1985 cartel execution of Kiki Camarena, a Mexico-based DEA agent, have repeatedly claimed Rodríguez ordered the hit after the young agent uncovered evidence revealing the extent of the agency’s collaboration with Mexican cartels, an accusation the Miami stalwart, who currently stars in a series of YouTube shorts and recently hosted former Colombian president Uribe for a Bay of Pigs anniversary event, denies.
The genesis of the MRR’s conquest of the Latin American underworld dates back at least to 1964, when the CIA reportedly got hold of pornographic photos of Manuel Artime’s lesbian wife, who his bosses learned had been a mistress to both Fulgencio Batista and former Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Around the same time, the MRR accidentally killed three Spanish sailors off the coast of Cuba. To contain the PR fallout, Artime was advised to spend more time in Managua, where the right-wing dictatorship of Luis Somoza could nurture his projects more unreservedly. But Artime was soon in the news for a different scandal: A young Cuban immigrant from New Jersey whose husband had been recruited to one of his Central American training camps had received an anonymous letter advising her that Artime had hired assassins to murder her husband because he “did not approve of the immoral activities in the camps; among them the smuggling of liquor which took place on the boat of Artime, in collusion with an official of the Nicaraguan Government.” Costa Rican customs officials around the same time discovered an abandoned plane full of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of contraband whiskey and women’s clothing in the jungle near what appeared to be an unauthorized guerrilla camp. An FBI informant “advised that different Cuban exile leaders continued to claim that Artime and the MRR were making a living off the cuban revolutionary activities; were engaged in smuggling instead of anticommunist warfare; and were misappropriating funds designed for commando and infiltration activity … it was claimed that Artime’s men returned from Central America very disenchanted, or with large sums of money earned through illegal activity.” Guillermo Tabraue served as the MRR’s “paymaster” during these years, and there would soon be little ambiguity about which camp he fell into.
In 1970, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs carried out a blitzkrieg seven-city drug bust they called the “largest roundup of major drug traffickers” in recorded history, noting in a press conference that none of the 150 men arrested was a “known member of organized crime,” but declining to mention that most—as many as 70 percent, by one estimate—belonged to Artime’s Bay of Pigs veteran organization. Just two years later, the state attorney’s office opened an investigation into Tabraue’s jewelry shop after discovering he’d given cufflinks to a municipal judge who had reduced sentences for two young women convicted of “loitering” and sold various items to the chief of police. The following year, Artime recruited a 23-year-old accounting whiz named Ramon Milian-Rodriguez, who would rise to become the top accountant to the Medellín cartel and a close confidant of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, to begin laundering money into Nicaraguan banks to assist the legal defense funds of four Bay of Pigs alumni who had participated in the Watergate burglary.
In 1972, the CIA offered to detail a team of its own covert operations specialists to assist the Bureau at keeping an eye on its old assets, while ensuring that drug investigations did not conflict with “national security” concerns. The BNDD put together a sophisticated database called the Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network—later renamed DEACON when the Bureau was absorbed into the DEA—and hired Tabraue as its first big recruit to flesh out its intelligence network. The CIA paid Tabraue $1,400 a month during the 1970s for his intel on rival drug traffickers.
The scheme worked exactly as intended: Drug traffickers who were allied with the CIA’s ideological objectives were protected, assisted and/or recruited as assets, while drug traffickers who bribed or cooperated with leftists, crossed the Agency, or outlived their usefulness were set up for prosecution or discarded. Prosecutions were a low priority, and the DEACON team reportedly contributed no admissible evidence whatsoever to DEA drug prosecutions in the 1970s. (As the former DEA official Dennis Dayle lamented in 1986: “In my 30 years of experience with the DEA and related agencies, the main objectives of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be CIA workers.”) In the CIA’s “defense,” those drug revenues financed terrorist attacks, assassinations, and infiltrations that arguably intensified the atmosphere of fear, distrust, and hopelessness that eased the challenge of repressing the left. In 1975, Bay of Pigs veterans were involved in nearly half the terrorist attacks that took place, though they chose their battles wisely. During the Watergate investigation, Artime testified that CIA agent-turned-Nixon operative E. Howard Hunt had recruited him to assassinate Panamanian populist Omar Torrijos because “the Nixon Administration was highly concerned that the flow of narcotics into the United States was being filtered through Panama,” according to a report written by a private investigator confidant of the Cuban exile leader, who died suddenly in the weeks before he was slated to testify before the House Subcommittee on Assassinations.
Twin Operations Condor set the tone of the era: a clandestine continental program officially launched in 1975 by Augusto Pinochet and the Argentine junta (and only revealed two decades later by the discovery of a top secret Paraguayan “terror archive”) to unleash cocaine-financed death squads to disappear left-wing activists, dissidents, whistleblowers, and other inconvenient persons across South America. Some scholars now argue based on more recently discovered documents that Condor’s true genesis was the 1967 operation overseen by the ubiquitous Félix Rodríguez and another MRR veteran to hunt down and execute Che Guevara. “The idea … is that frontiers don’t terminate with the individual geography of each state but that it is necessary to defend Western politics wherever necessary,” explained an Argentine intelligence officer quoted in the aforementioned Berkeley emeritus professor Scott’s canonical survey of the Iran-Contra era. “It is therefore necessary to act against those who could become a second Cuba, and to collaborate with the United States directly and indirectly.”
Around the same time and under the same name, an official collaboration of the American DEA, the Mexican army, and the Mexican police eradicated thousands of acres of poppy and marijuana plants, devastating many small farmers and unleashing an epidemic of murder and grotesque violence that persists to this day. The scholar Adela Cedillo argues that the Mexican Operation Condor’s real purpose was to eradicate the populist left by essentially criminalizing small-scale agriculture while reorganizing and centralizing the Mexican military to the benefit of a handful of dominant players; in other words, to serve a hidden agenda near-identical to that of its namesake. When Marco Rubio maligns the efficacy of interdiction and other traditional law enforcement approaches to mitigating narco-trafficking in favor of “military” operations, as he did in a recent speech on Trump’s speedboat bombings, he is contradicting every empirical evaluation of drug war efficacy that exists, yes, but he is also pining for a kind of Cold War–era blanket license to commit dirty war in the name of some bigger goal.
“They’re bringing back Operation Condor,” an emerging market bond investor told me casually in October after the Trump administration pledged $40 billion to stabilize the Argentine peso but warned that the money would vanish if Milei’s party lost its majority in the country’s midterm elections. And perhaps it never ended: Earlier this month, the longtime CIA agent Bob Sensi was indicted for conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism alongside a former high-ranking DEA official for laundering $750,000 and agreeing to procure grenade launchers and commercial drones capable of carrying six kilograms of C-4 for a government informant posing as an agent of a Mexican cartel. The duo advised the informant to “create the perception that they are moving fentanyl operations from Mexico to Colombia to divert attention from Mexico” and toward the center-left government of Gustavo Petro. Perhaps notably, the scheme launched just weeks after the November 2024 election.
A memoir titled America at Night by a CIA acquaintance of Sensi’s named Larry Kolb describes the alleged money launderer as a cunning all-purpose fixer who was personally introduced to him by George H.W. Bush in 1985 and said he reported directly to then CIA director Bill Casey. Sensi was at the time deeply immersed in the Middle Eastern back-channel elements of Iran-Contra, in which shadowy operatives and informal surrogates met clandestinely with officials of Hezbollah and Iran to negotiate secret ransoms for various hostages, but was indicted for skimming funds from a “cover” job at Kuwait Airways—and, according to the book, out for revenge ever since. A former intelligence officer predicted to the Prospect that Sensi’s current legal troubles would not last long, because the Trump administration would find him useful, as previous administrations have most Iran-Contra major players who made it out of the early 1990s alive.
Which brings us back to the Tabraue family, who in the 1970s belonged to a sprawling drug trafficking organization associated with Rolls-Royce-driving hairdresser and MRR veteran José Medardo Alvero Cruz. When Cruz and a whole raft of the Tabraues’ collaborators were busted in 1979, a related group of Bay of Pigs vets got involved with Operation Condor’s first big success story of the 1980s, the “cocaine coup” in Bolivia, in which the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the Israeli-trained Argentine psyop guru-turned-cocaine trafficker Alfredo Mario Mingolla collaborated in the weeks following the election of a left-leaning presidential candidate to install one of the world’s most unabashed narcocracies. As a right-wing military junta raced to release drug traffickers from prison and even open a cocaine factory that the country’s pre-eminent cartel boss claimed was “controlled by the DEA,” the traffickers raced to collaborate with the new regime, in a cycle that repeated itself the following year with the sudden death of Torrijos and installation of the narco-friendly Manuel Noriega in Panama. But Nicaragua, where the Somoza family had been such accommodating hosts to anti-communist mercenaries throughout the Cold War, had been conquered by the Sandinistas in 1979, and the old MRR rank and file took it personally. To fight the Sandinistas, the CIA and the thriving drug traffickers bankrolled a confederation of anti-communist militias known as the “Contras” with bases in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama, who torched oil storage tanks and planted magnetic mines in the ports and bombed the Managua Airport, all with the idea, as verbalized by one State Department official, of turning Nicaragua into “the Albania of Latin America.” Meanwhile, draconian crackdowns on users and subsistence entrepreneurs sent the prison population surging by 250 percent between 1975 and 1990, permanently traumatizing families and communities.
Because Congress worked a little differently back then, it passed a series of five laws attempting to prevent the Reagan administration from using tax dollars to fund the Contras. The CIA’s sprawling network of drug traffickers had already done so, but the tightening restrictions led to an intense off-the-books fundraising effort. Tabraue hosted fundraisers for “anti-communist struggle” in Nicaragua at a social club he owned called Club Olympo, and the Unification Church cult hosted anti-communist speaking tours with Contra leaders. The Contras sought out traffickers with legal problems to offer to trade deep-state lobbying services for cash and weapons. Manuel Artime’s old protégé Milian-Rodriguez pitched in just under $10 million on behalf of the Medellín cartel, delivered directly to Félix Rodríguez.
ORLANDO CICILIA EMIGRATED TO MIAMI the year after Marco Rubio was born, started dating Rubio’s sister not long afterward, and featured prominently in the young boy’s childhood; an especially memorable moment of his memoir describes the guilt-stricken terror on Cicilia’s face when a second-grade Marco walked in on him assembling a bicycle that was supposed to be from Santa. About three years after that, when the Rubios were living in Las Vegas, Cicilia began working for the Tabraue family business.
Just one year earlier, the untimely death of Ricardo Morales and the apparent sloppiness of future attorney general Janet Reno had unraveled a cluster of interrelated drug trafficking cases against Mario Tabraue and about five dozen other mostly Miami Cubans. Morales was yet another Bay of Pigs guy and self-confessed terrorist suspected of involvement in the Kennedy assassination, though he always told his son he showed up in Dallas in November 1963 only to find himself “ghosted” by handlers who never ordered him to do anything.
That the Tabraue family was dealing drugs was something of an open secret, according to law enforcement memos from the 1970s and also Guillermo Tabraue’s 1981 registry of a business at the jewelry store address by the name of “Mota Import Corp Inc.” But it was also an open secret that Tabraue was essentially untouchable: Dozens of Miami and Florida Keys law enforcement officers spent time on his payroll during the 1980s. But Morales and other informants told the feds that greed and infighting had sent the enterprise spiraling out of control and left a trail of bodies, among them Tabraue’s estranged wife and an ATF informant named Larry Nash. By 1981, prosecutors had put together an indictment. A raid of Tabraue’s residence and safe houses alone had yielded 12,000 pounds of weed and more than 150 assault rifles and submachine guns.
But all the cases began to collapse when defense attorneys began homing in on the wiretaps. They argued that Morales had no credibility, not only because he was a career criminal himself but because he was associated with a rogue cadre of CIA agents who had gone to work for Muammar Gaddafi, then also schemed to assassinate the Libyan leader. And they found a section of surveillance tape in which detectives assumed a conversation about an ailing toucan was code for narcotics, when actually the body of the late toucan in question could “prove” Tabraue and his lawyer had been talking literally.
Then Morales was shot dead by an off-duty police officer during a bar fight in the Florida Keys in what authorities concluded was justifiable homicide for which no one should be charged. “If you believe that, I’ve got a piece of expressway I’ll sell you cheap,” said one of Morales’s attorneys, John Komorowski. “Somebody needed Mоrales dead and just executed him … Who? God only knows. It could have been the Cubans, the anti-Castro Cubans, the druggers, the CIA, anybody.” (Morales was hardly the intelligence community’s only victim of this brutal calculus: Just months earlier, a Mexico-based DEA agent had been elaborately tortured and executed in a crime three government investigators claimed to have been orchestrated by none other than Félix Rodríguez, who has claimed he was not involved.) Incredibly, a splashy Miami Herald feature on the crime wave’s impact on Little Havana published in the months between the raid and his case’s dismissal featured as its lead protagonist none other than … Guillermo Tabraue, lamenting the toll exacted upon his store by the “bad guys” who had migrated to Florida from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift.
The year Cicilia joined the Tabraue pet shop, another Tabraue named Jorge, who was also a business partner of Guillermo’s, was indicted in Detroit along with a Dade County detective the ring had hired for trafficking “much of the [marijuana] sold in Michigan over the past five years” through a network of RVs and mobile homes; an informant in that case said the crew had unloaded its weed in Louisiana in full view of Coast Guard officials who had been paid off. Then in 1985, a third Tabraue named Lazaro was indicted alongside Alberto Rodriguez, a newspaper publisher who was (yet) another pillar of the Cuban exile community, for selling $90,000 worth of cocaine to an undercover cop near the jewelry store parking lot. And in 1987, the whole racket finally went down in a multi-agency sting dubbed “Operation Cobra,” in which Guillermo Tabraue was described as the “patriarch” of the operation, his son Mario as “chairman of the board,” and Orlando Cicilia the “front man” and “number two.”
On the tenth week of Guillermo Tabraue’s 1989 criminal trial, a man named Gary Mattocks showed up at the courthouse and testified that he’d been Guillermo Tabraue’s handler for four years at the CIA’s DEACON project inside the DEA. Mattocks had previously been the liaison of Sandinista defector Edén Pastora, a prolific Contra trafficker based in Costa Rica; both had been present during Barry Seal’s sting operation. It was rumored George Bush himself had personally ordered Mattocks to disrupt the proceeding.
The revelation that Tabraue was a spook was at once the least surprising revelation of all time and a “jaw-dropping surprise,” in the characterization of Mario Tabraue’s lawyer. Prosecutors accused the defense team of purposely withholding their “bombshell” until the moment of maximum impact; the judge accused the government of “not knowing what the left hand was doing.” It turned out Tabraue had operated under the pseudonym “Abraham Diaz” during his years as a DEACON informant, though his status as a federal informant had been reported in news stories on the first big Tabraue bust in 1981. The patriarch, by then 65 years old, was ultimately released in March 1990 after just a few months in a minimum security prison camp on the Maxwell Air Force Base.
By that point, the Tabraue gang’s prosecutor Dexter Lehtinen had moved on to bigger fish: Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, whose refusal to self-extradite himself on narcotics trafficking and money laundering charges the Bush administration had just used as a pretext to literally invade the country. His star witness was Ramon Milian-Rodriguez, the Medellín cartel accountant who had been Manuel Artime’s protégé back in the 1970s and said he’d paid Noriega between $320 million and $350 million to protect shipments of drug cash into Central American banks.
There were some hiccups when Milian-Rodriguez testified that he had also sent some $10 million to the Nicaraguan Contras, care of Félix Rodríguez, in hopes of currying favor with the CIA. Later, Noriega claimed the CIA had paid him tens of millions of dollars for his participation in their dirty drug war—the Agency could only find records it had paid him $330,000. But in general, the campaign to invade a titularly sovereign country so as to throw an erstwhile CIA puppet under the bus for the sins of the CIA, known as Operation Just Cause, was such a smashing success that such giants of Trump’s foreign-policy brain trust as Elliott Abrams and Brett McGurk have publicly pleaded with war-weary Americans to understand that it is Panama, not Iraq or Libya, that is their blueprint for regime change in Venezuela.
The summer after the invasion, Marcio Rubio scored an internship with Lehtinen’s wife Ileana, the daughter of yet another CIA-affiliated anti-communist Cuban exile who had just been elected the first Cuban American member of Congress. That fall, he briefly departed Florida for a “football scholarship” in Missouri but transferred to a community college soon afterward amid revelations that the college itself was a “front” for an elaborate diploma mill scheme to scam the student loan program.
Rubio returned to Miami and never left, any misgivings about his ties to a scary narcotics gang apparently negated by his conspicuous political talent. By the time he ran for city commissioner in the late ’90s, Jeb Bush was donating to his campaign, as were a number of executives of the Fanjul sugar empire and a collection of eye doctors including (and likely corralled by) the ophthalmologist and onetime political fixer Alan Mendelsohn, who would later host the first fundraiser for Rubio’s first presidential campaign exploratory committee. In one of the more “only in Miami” episodes of recent history, a midsized ship seized by the Coast Guard in the Pacific Ocean in 2001 turned out to have 12 tons of cocaine concealed inside its fuel tank, along with a cursory paper trail that led investigators to a Miami-based Ponzi scheme that was laundering drug cartel proceeds, whose ringleader had in turn funneled millions into Mendelsohn’s various foundations and political action committees in a vain attempt to “fix” his legal problems. But where that scandal took down Rubio’s close friend and sometime roommate David Rivera, who was elected to Congress in the 2010 election that sent Liddle Marco to the Senate, he emerged untainted. As one local political consultant told Rubio’s biographer, “He was the anointed golden child, even then.”
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