The topic is hideous but it’s getting harder to ignore: Venezuela is becoming the New Medellin, an emerging drug-trafficking capital for our hemisphere. It’s a big change.

As brave President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia crushes Marxist narcotraffickers in his own country, these same narcos are finding greener pastures by moving next door, to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. It represents a historic shift because Venezuela’s lawmen have always fought Colombian drug traffickers like cougars to keep them out. Today, Hugo Chavez embraces these same dopers as Marxist allies in his struggle against U.S. “imperialism.” You can imagine how dispiriting this must be to at least some of the lawmen.

It also corresponds to Chavez’s kickout of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Caracas, putting Venezuela in the same lonely pariah-state league as Burma for noncooperation in the global war on drugs.

It’s not all that revolutionary a topic, I agree. But it is starting to get unavoidable. Look at this incredible explosion of drug busts chronicled by Alek Boyd in this well-written essay here! Who knew of all this drug activity going on in so many places? I didn’t. Mexico and every major European port have been hit – and recently.

This development is not surprising. Given that Hugo Chavez is a man of money, rather than democratic institutions, and given that money, rather than ideas, powers his dictatorship, it’s pretty natural that drug dealers would find a comfortable place in his regime. Drug traffickers speak the language of money, they offer enticements through money and best of all, they harm the U.S.

As a bonus negative, Cuba, under the Fidel Castro regime, and especially through Castro’s younger brother Raul, is a major narcotics transshipment point through which drugs flow though the Caribbean. That suits Chavez fine.

But the consequences of this will be lethal for Venezuela and here is why:

Just as crime has exploded across Venezuela, bringing on progressively more horrible murders and kidnappings of the young and the helpless, so has drug-trafficking, and these two trends are probably related.

Hugo Chavez doesn’t need a KGB to create totalitarian terror when he’s already facilitated an atmosphere of terror through extreme lawlessness. Venezuelans are terrified to go out of their own homes at night. In the Venezuelan dictator’s mind, it’s a political plus to allow foreign drug traffickers to conduct their operations there and make billions, because it keeps his opponents terrified.

But when they START making billions, they will be in a position to challenge Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian state. Then they will create a narcostate, same as they did to Colombia and Afghanistan. From there, untold tyrannies and cruelties will descend, turning Venezuela into a living vortex of hell.

It will be very hard to get rid of, as both Mexicans and Colombians well know. In fact, an embedded drug culture in Venezuela will be harder to get rid of than even Chavez himself, due to all the cultural damage of drugs and the way its culture penetrates all levels of society. By allowing drug traffickers to use Venezuela as their base of operations, Hugo Chavez plays with fire.

UPDATE: Be sure to see Fausta’s superb roundup of news around this trend called “The Egosimo of the Three Amigos,” in this link here.