COMMENTARY It's understandable to label today's drug cartels as terrorists — but that still doesn't make U.S. military attacks on them, like last week's in the Caribbean, justifiable under international law.
A chorus of legal and military experts are warning that when the U.S. blew up a suspected narco-trafficking boat in the Caribbean last week, killing 11 Venezuelan gang members, it may well have crossed a dangerous line from drug bust to bloodlust.
The New York Times reports this week that U.S. officials it interviewed about the strike say the boat was actually turning back home after those onboard sensed it was being followed by aircraft. Those sources also say the military made “repeated strikes on the vessel even after disabling it” — suggesting the objective was to take out not just the cocaine but the couriers, too.
I certainly don’t want to cast narco-traffickers — if they did, in fact, as President Donald Trump reports, belong to Venezuela’s violent Tren de Aragua gang — as sympathetic figures.
But I’m also loathe to sympathize with a violation of international law — especially if it’s committed by America, the country that’s supposed to set the rule-of-law example in the Americas.
So it would be wise right now to take stock of how and why we’re likely betraying that role.
To do that, though, you have to reach back further than Trump.
You need to hearken back to something then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said 15 years ago.
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In 2010, amid a ghastly eruption of drug-war carnage in Mexico, Clinton remarked that the criminal cartels there looked more like an “insurgency.” Mexico’s narcos weren’t just gangsters but guerrillas. They weren’t just out to traffic but to terrorize — and take control of the country.
She wasn’t all that mistaken. In those days we were, in fact, seeing an evolution (or devolution) of the Latin American drug cartels’ aims.
They may not have wanted to govern states and towns themselves, but they were determined to dictate who should — and rub out anyone they decided should not. It was an escalation of the model drug lord Pablo Escobar had already set in Colombia, one that visited horror not just on rival narcos but on the general population.
Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization was, by international standards, at war with the U.S. We can't say that about Tren de Aragua.
You can draw a line from Clinton’s observation to the justification Trump now questionably believes he has to interdict drugs with Patriot missiles instead of police.
Because the term “drug war” has come to feel more literal than figurative in this century, we’ve decided it’s apt to slap the “terrorist” label on drug traffickers, as Trump has designated Tren de Aragua and other Latin American mafias this year.
Slippery slopes
I can’t say I disagree with applying that tag in many cases, especially when cartels do indeed commit terrorism — like assassinating inconvenient mayoral candidates and journalists to keep their trafficking lanes undisturbed.
But that impulse leads, and is now proving to lead, down two slippery slopes.
The first is that, according to the warrior logic that was obviously followed last week in the Caribbean, anyone deemed a terrorist now is fair game — game as fair as Osama bin Laden was — to be martially annihilated rather than merely arrested.
Incinerated, not incarcerated.
Problem is, as countless international legal scholars are pointing out, you simply cannot engage a drug-ferrying cigarette boat and its trafficker occupants the same way Maverick fires on enemy F-14’s in Top Gun.
There’s a reason the Coast Guard — our maritime cops — has been deployed since time immemorial to stop drug vessels, seize their loads and cuff their crews for appearance before a judge.
To wit: unless criminal suspects are firing back at you, globally recognized rules say that using deadly military force in instances like that is, well, criminal — even if you’re calling those criminals “terrorists.”
Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization was, by international standards, genuinely at war with the U.S. That's just not the case with Tren de Aragua.
The second slippery slope is perhaps scarier: where does the terrorist targeting stop?
A quarter century ago, our terrorist telescope was largely defined by the likes of Bin Laden and his 9/11 monsters, or by homicidal rebel armies like the Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups that haunted Colombia for decades.
Today it includes dope dealers.
But tomorrow? Who’s next to fall under our new, ad hoc war doctrine?
America owes the Americas, and the rest of the world, a more rule of law-based answer.
