Via the NYT: Trump Says U.S. Attacked Boat Carrying Venezuelan Gang Members, Killing 11.
President Trump said on Tuesday that the United States had carried out a strike against a boat carrying drugs and killed 11 “terrorists,” the administration’s latest military escalation in Mr. Trump’s war against Venezuelan drug cartels that he has blamed for bringing fentanyl into the country.
Mr. Trump offered few specifics about the strike during his news conference on Tuesday, but later in the afternoon he posted more details on Truth Social.
“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists,” Mr. Trump wrote. He said the strike “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”
My guess is that a lot of people will applaud this, and many others will just shrug it off. The administration has already created a patina of legality by declaring certain criminal gangs/cartels as “terrorist organizations.”
Like many of his domestic declarations of “emergencies,” what we have here is Trump pushing boundaries of his power to allow him to use violence with impunity. There is no concern whatsoever for due process of law by this administration. Rather, this is Trump declaring that merely being a member of a certain organization can be a death sentence without trial.
The strike is an astonishing departure from traditional drug interdiction efforts. In the past, U.S. authorities focused on seizing drugs and identifying suspects to build a criminal case. A second senior U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there would be more such attacks against cartel boats.
The action comes amid a major buildup of U.S. naval forces outside Venezuela’s waters. The administration has also stepped up belligerent rhetoric about fighting drug cartels and labeled Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, a terrorist cartel leader.
“The president is very clear that he’s going to use the full power of America, the full might of the United States, to take on and eradicate these drug cartels, no matter where they’re operating from, and no matter how long they’ve been able to act with impunity,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio before boarding a plane in Florida to head to Mexico.
It is worth noting that drug smuggling is not a capital crime, and even if it were, a trial is required to establish guilt and assign punishment.
Recognizing that drug smugglers don’t deserve a lot of compassion, if the president can set aside the rule of law whenever he wants, then everyone is at risk lest their actions be deemed part of some other “emergency” or be declared “terrorism.”
It also seems worth noting that while I am sure many Americans will see this as a solution to the drug problem, it won’t be. I have noted many times that while anti-drug policy is not a primary area of expertise for me, it is impossible to have been a scholar of Colombian politics and not have learned a great deal about the subject (and I have taught master’s level courses on the topic).
The 1990s saw a literal war against drug cartels in Colombia, including billions spent by the US government. This did not stop the flow of cocaine into the United States. As long as there are literal tons of dollars to be made, there is going to be drug smuggling.
I would remind everyone how small a massive shipment of fentanyl is: a one-kilogram bag can contain 50,000 doses. Also, most fentanyl is smuggled over land borders by US citizens. Are we going to start raining hellfire missiles down on Corollas in line at the Ciudad Juarez/El Paso border crossing when we “know” drug smuggling is going on?
It seems worth noting that the likely result of these kinds of strikes is a decrease in supply, which, as any Economics 101 student knows, will increase the street price of that which does make it to market. This will increase the value of the drugs and therefore incentivize more smuggling. It can also lead to more violence in the US as gangs fight over lucrative supply and territories.
Violence like this can have a temporary effect on smuggling and supply, but decades upon decades of trying have demonstrated that stopping drug flows completely is essentially impossible. The demand is what drives all of this, not the supply.
(It seems worth noting that Nixon declared the first “war on drugs” and Reagan doubled down on it. For anyone keeping score at home, they were both presidents a loooong time ago. Clinton funded Plan Colombia–it didn’t work.)
Here’s the video and some commentary from Adam Isacson, who works on this topic for the Washington Office on Latin America.
In the thread, he does note the following regarding terminology (and provides a reminder of the time a family of missionaries was blown out of the sky because US intelligence thought it was a drug plane).
