As mentioned on Slog yesterday, Venezuela and the U.S. have been jockeying for the extradition (from Colombia) of cocaine "kingpin" Walid Makled.

Venezuela wants Makled because he is a Venezuelan national they're (allegedly) worried that he might be able to implicate high-level Venezuelan leaders (from Hugo Chavez on down) in his cocaine trade.

The U.S. wants Makled for the same reasons (to implicate Chavez, et al.) and ostensibly could give him a more thorough/fair trial. (Venezuelan courts are severely compromised by political leverage.)

As Slog speculated in yesterday's post, Venezuela won the extradition contest because it secretly promised to start helping Colombia fight its longtime leftist-guerrilla insurgents, the FARC, and stop offering them shelter and succor on the Chavez side of the Venezuela-Colombia border.

And here's some evidence of that (alleged) backroom trading-armed-Marxists-for-cocaine-kingpins deal, courtesy of the BBC:

Venezuela has deported three suspected left-wing rebels to Colombia, a sign of improving relations.

Colombia says one belongs to the Farc rebel group, while the other two allegedly belong to the ELN.

Earlier this year, then Colombian President Alvaro Uribe alleged Venezuela was harbouring rebels.

The deportations came a day after Colombia promised to extradite a drug suspect, Walid Makled, to Venezuela rather than the United States.

And Makled (or, rather, his people) might be the centralized brain trust that introduced the mystery cut levamisole to 70% of the U.S. cocaine market over the past five years.

The more you tug at the loose threads of this story, the more complicated it becomes. NAFTA, crackheads, the FARC, jungles, mountains, alleyways from Seattle to Rio, the halls of power from D.C. to Caracas to Bogotá...

The levamisole question is as small as a key bump in a barroom bathroom and as huge as the Latin American geopolitics of the last century.