On Friday, the United States destroyed what the Defense Department alleged was a boat affiliated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group, using the Southern Caribbean to smuggle drugs into the country. The latest operation, which reportedly killed three people, is the seventh since the aerial campaign began in September. It took place on the same day that President Donald Trump claimed another successful strike earlier in the week, this time against a semi-submersible that took off from Venezuela. Two people were killed in that attack, according to the government.
We’ve heard the phrase “war on drugs” before. President Richard Nixon declared it in the early 1970s, and each successive president since has largely used the war paradigm to describe the campaign against drug traffickers. Yet up until last month, the tagline has always been associated with aggressive law enforcement action at home and intelligence collaboration with other countries that have a vested interest in reducing the scourge of illegal narcotics. The Trump administration, however, is taking the “war” part literally. Bombs have replaced arrests as Washington’s principal tool. The terminology being deployed sounds eerily similar to what former President George W. Bush used to say when he was talking about America’s fight against al-Qaida.
Indeed, senior Trump administration officials are branding drug traffickers as terrorists who need to be eliminated. The global war on terrorism we saw during the presidencies of Bush and Barack Obama is expanding under Trump to include a whole suite of new enemies. The fisherman allegedly doubling as a drug smuggler to make some extra cash is now on a par with the likes of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Referring to Latin American drug cartels, FBI Director Kash Patel told Congress in September that the United States “must treat them like the al-Qaidas of the world because that’s how they’re operating.” Ditto Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has labeled the cartels “the Al-Qaida of the Western Hemisphere.”
It doesn’t take a genius to understand what the White House is doing: It’s trying to justify its ongoing U.S. military campaign against the cartels by tapping into language that is still quite sensitive to Americans’ ears. The cartels are, after all, ruthless organizations that often use terrorist tactics—car bombings, indiscriminate killings, beheadings and assassinations of public figures—to scare the population, consolidate their control over territory and intimidate the state. And despite the reduction in overdose deaths since mid-2023, the organizations producing and trafficking these drugs are still responsible for tens of thousands of American fatalities every year. Nobody is shedding a tear when some of these traffickers are killed, arrested and extradited to a U.S. courtroom for prosecution.
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