Éste es el arranque de La élite narcoterrorista. ¿Por qué Marco Rubio está tan empeñado en repetir el caso Irán-Contra?, el artículo de Tkacik:
The Narco-Terrorist Elite
Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again?
by Maureen Tkacik – The American Prospect (Ideas, Politics & Power), December 23, 2025
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, according to Manuel Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of the then-senator, to build 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.
SEGUIR LEYENDO
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Max Blumenthal sobre las auténticas raíces de la agresión a Venezuela, 16.12.2025.
Naomi Feinstein, A Reminder That Marco Rubio’s Brother-in-Law Was a Prolific Cocaine Trafficker. While Trump deports immigrants for old drug charges, Rubio's brother-in-law was the frontman of a drug trafficking operation, Miami New Times, 29.12.2025.Almost 40 years ago, a Cuban immigrant was arrested and convicted of distributing $15 million worth of cocaine as part of a major drug ring operating out of South Florida. The man stored kilos of cocaine in a spare bedroom inside his West Kendall home to later smuggle around the United States in cigarette cases.
During Miami’s Cocaine Cowboy era of the 1970s and ’80s, Orlando Cicilia played a major role in an international drug ring, using an exotic animal business as cover. Mario Tabraue, who would later allow spotted leopards to roam free inside his Coconut Grove estate, was the boss of the operation, but Cicilia was the frontman. In 1989, Cicilia was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was released early in 2000.
Decades-old drug offenses, often much less serious than Cicilia’s charges, have come back to haunt immigrants living in South Florida as President Donald Trump unleashes his hard-line immigration agenda. Juan Erles González, a 56-year-old Cuban immigrant who served 18 months in prison for conspiracy to possess with the intent of distributing cocaine nearly two decades ago, now faces deportation. Back in July, 75-year-old Isidro Pérez died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after immigration officers picked him up at a community center and charged him with “inadmissibility pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.” In the 1980s, he was convicted of marijuana possession and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
In July, 75-year-old Isidro Pérez died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after immigration officers picked him up at a community center and charged him with “inadmissibility pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.” In the 1980s, he was convicted of marijuana possession and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
While the Trump administration is busy deporting immigrants with previous petty drug offenses, a member of the president’s cabinet, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has a brother-in-law who served over a decade in prison on federal drug charges after emigrating to the U.S. from Cuba. His name? Orlando Cicilia. (...)
Inserto a continuación la charla de Chris Hedges con Maureen Tkacik, emitida el 8.01.2026.
Hedges explica en su introducción oral que el artículo de Tkacik analiza los estrechos vínculos que los cubanos anticomunistas de Miami (la "gusanera"), incluyendo al círculo íntimo de Rubio, tienen con el narcotráfico y su apoyo incondicional a los dirigentes proestadounidenses de la América hispana que, como el presidente ecuatoriano Daniel Noboa, cuyo negocio familiar de frutas está acusado de haber traficado 700 kilos de cocaína, se dedican al narcotráfico. Hedges añade que va a abordar con su invitada este amplio nexo del narcotráfico en Iberoamerica con el movimiento anticomunista cubano, así como con la CIA y la DEA.
Diego Ramos concreta esa idea en su introducción escrita, en Substack, donde recuerda que cuando se cuenta la historia de los países no anglosajones de América se omite la participación clandestina de las agencias de inteligencia estadounidenses, como la CIA y la DEA, y cómo sus operaciones antidrogas han estado siempre íntimamente ligadas a las brigadas anticomunistas de los países de la región, financiadas por capital occidental durante la Guerra Fría, así como a la brutal liquidación de la izquierda que estos narcoterroristas llevaron a cabo en tantas ocasiones.
The Narco-Trafficking Elite Set to Run Venezuela
(w/ Maureen Tkacik) | The Chris Hedges Report
Marco Rubio’s personal ties to drug trafficking underscore a deep irony in the Trump administration’s attempts to use the drug war as a means of achieving their imperialist goals in Latin America.
PRESENTACIÓN DE CHRIS HEDGES:
Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro is being held in a Brooklyn jail charged with smuggling cocaine into the United States. But even the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that less than 10% of cocaine shipments to the United States come through Venezuela. The vast majority of cocaine shipments originate in Colombia and move through the Pacific route and Mexico. Added to this, most overdose deaths in the US come from fentanyl, and fentanyl does not originate from Venezuela.
There are no shortages of Latin American leaders and military chiefs who are heavily involved in drug trafficking, but who are considered close allies of the United States. One of them, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, was pardoned by Donald Trump last month after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the US, a conviction that was justified with far greater evidence than that which supports the charges levied against Maduro.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Trump's national security adviser, comes out of the right-wing Cuban exile community in Miami, one that has for decades engaged in drug trafficking and a dirty war against those it condemns, like Maduro, of being communists.
The investigative journalist Maureen Tkacik at The [American] Prospect in her article “The Narco-Terrorist Elite” [‘Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again?’, The American Prospect (TAP), December 23, 2025] looks at the close ties these anti-communist Cubans, including Rubio's inner circle, have with the drug trade and their full-throated support for Latin American leaders, including the Ecuadorian president [Daniel Noboa], whose family fruit business is accused of trafficking 700 kilos of cocaine who are engaged in drug trafficking.
Joining me to discuss this long nexus between the drug trade in Latin America and the Cuban anti-communist movement, as well as the CIA and the DEA, is Marine Tkacik. It's a great article and let's just go through it.
I want to begin with... how you open it. So, you're talking about Marco Rubio as a teenager, working for his brother-in-law Orlando Cecilia. Explain.
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