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**DECEMBER 23, 2025**
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Earlier this month, in the space of four or five days, the Trump administration launched its 22nd “lethal kinetic strike” on a random alleged drug boat off the coast of South America; issued a full pardon to an oligarch former head of state convicted of trafficking more than 400 metric tons of cocaine; and indicted a former DEA official-CIA agent duo for conspiring to help a Mexican drug cartel procure grenade launchers and launder $12 million. I had read that Marco Rubio spent his formative years idolizing a big-time drug trafficker and wondered if that experience might illuminate anything about the staggering hypocrisy of the Trump 2.0 “drug” war on Venezuela. Spoiler alert: It sure does [link removed]!
**–Maureen Tkacik, senior investigations editor**
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Samuel Corum/Sipa USA/AP Photo
The Narco-Terrorist Elite [link removed]
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 [link removed] of the enterprise makes no mention of that, and Tabraue has been known to sue [link removed] 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.
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.
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