[[link removed]]

THE NARCO-TERRORIST ELITE  
[[link removed]]


 

Maureen Tkacik
December 23, 2025
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again? _

, Photo illustration by The American Prospect. Source: Samuel
Corum/Sipa USA/AP Photo.

 

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.

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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
Miami cocaine trafficking
[[link removed]]
scandals that enveloped
[[link removed]]
his libertarian political party last fall, as well as both leaders’
slavish devotion to the drug cartels’ single favorite mode of money
laundering
[[link removed]].
Rubio has been one of the Beltway’s biggest
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],
consolidated the narcotics trade
[[link removed]] inside
his terrifying secret police, and then allegedly
[[link removed]]
“disappeared” key conspirators like his secret police chemist
Eugenio Berríos
[[link removed]].

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 [[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],
and Seal seemed to be a longtime CIA asset who appears
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]
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 [[link removed]] of YouTube shorts
[[link removed]] and recently hosted
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],
assassinations, and infiltrations
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]],
devastating many small farmers and unleashing an epidemic of murder
and grotesque violence that persists to this day. The scholar Adela
Cedillo argues [[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]].
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 [[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] cult hosted
anti-communist speaking tours with Contra leaders. The Contras sought
out traffickers with legal problems
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
and Brett McGurk
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]] and a collection of
eye doctors including (and likely corralled by) the ophthalmologist
and onetime political fixer Alan Mendelsohn
[[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
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
[[link removed]]
Rubio’s biographer, “He was the anointed golden child, even
then.”

MAUREEN TKACIK is investigations editor at the _Prospect_ and a senior
fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project_._

SUPPORT THE JOURNALISM YOU JUST READ

We'll be direct: we're falling short of our year-end fundraising goal.
But this final week of 2025, there's a powerful opportunity to close
the gap. A generous donor is matching every contribution
dollar-for-dollar, which means your gift goes twice as far.
[[link removed]]

Independent journalism doesn't happen without reader support. No
corporate owners. No hidden agendas. Just accountability reporting
that serves you. If this story mattered to you—if our work has value
in your life—_now_ is the moment to invest in it. 

HELP US FINISH THE YEAR STRONG AND ENTER 2026 READY TO HOLD POWER
ACCOUNTABLE.

Click here to support the Prospect's brand of independent impact
journalism. [[link removed]]

_Read the original article at Prospect.org_
[[link removed]]

DAVID DAYEN_Executive Editor_

* marco rubio
[[link removed]]
* Cocaine
[[link removed]]
* Latin America
[[link removed]]
* Heads of State
[[link removed]]
* Daniel Noboa
[[link removed]]
* Nayib Bukele
[[link removed]]
* Javier Milei
[[link removed]]
* José Antonio Kast
[[link removed]]
* Alvaro Uribe
[[link removed]]
* Nicolas Maduro
[[link removed]]
* CIA
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]