COMMENTARY President Trump's Shield of the Americas agenda to militarize hemispheric crime-fighting risks diminishing crucial efforts to build better police in Latin America and the Caribbean.
I sympathize with the dozen Latin American and Caribbean leaders aligned with President Donald Trump who came to his Shield of the Americas Summit last weekend in Doral, Fla.
I just don’t agree with what they came for: the magic military bullet.
I understand they’re being waylaid by spikes in violent, transnational crime, from murder to narco-trafficking to kidnapping. Even in Chile — once considered a safe, gated community in a region with the world’s highest homicide rates — a quarter of the population now fear they could be murder victims in the coming year.
So is there a problem if the Chiles of the hemisphere see Trump’s push to militarize their crime fighting — “to operationalize hard power to defeat these threats to our security and civilization,” as he puts it — as a cure for their gangland cancer?
Yes, there is.
READ MORE: Soldiers aren't drug cops, President Trump. Don't send them into Latin America's narco wars
This is just the latest instance of Latin American and Caribbean governments slacking off the harder, quieter but more lasting work of building reliable police and judicial institutions, and opting for the easier, louder but ultimately less effective fix of hulking martial forces.
Who needs law enforcement, they figure, if you’ve got the lethal weapon?
Consider Honduras — one of America’s chief sources of crime-driven illegal immigration.
Honduras’ police were historically, like so many others in Central America, an undertrained and underpaid farce, both corrupt and incompetent. That meant narco-gangs known as maras were the de facto rulers of large swaths of Honduras, and its homicide rate was the world’s worst.
Have Trump's Shield countries signed up to trade long-neglected police upgrades for the performative warrior thrill he sells by bombing drug boats?
So about two decades ago, Honduras’ leaders, with U.S. encouragement, turned to the magic military bullet. The result: a negligible reduction in drug-trafficking and mara murder — but an avalanche of army human rights abuses that made the U.S. reconsider its approach there.
A decade later, with U.S. assistance and funding, Honduras started making its cops more professional — and adopted U.S.-proven community policing techniques and technology in gang-ravaged cities like San Pedro Sula.
It curtailed the mayhem: a Honduran murder rate of 60 per 100,000 people in 2015 dropped to 26 per 100,000 last year.
Narco-crime weeds
That’s still high, but the trend points to a key reality. Soldiers and cannons might clip the narco-crime weed for an ephemeral, feel-good moment; serious cops and investigations — not just kingpin arrests but RICO-style seizure of cartel assets and arms — can kill its roots.
Which is why it was unsettling to see Honduran President Nasry Asfura on the Shield of the Americas Summit stage with Trump.
The right-wing Asfura does owe Trump big-time: Trump threatened to pull U.S. aid to Honduras if Asfura didn’t win last year’s election.
Still, the core vision of Trump’s Shield — aka the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition — is a hemispheric militarization of the drug war. Meaning: Honduras may feel pressured now to revert to a more blunt but potentially blunderous tool.
It has possibly signed up to trade its police upgrade for the performative warrior thrill Trump is selling, as the U.S. military continues to bomb suspected narco-boats and kill their suspected narco-trafficking passengers.
This despite widespread warnings that it violates international law, no matter how much Trump declares those civilian criminals are “narco-terrorist war combatants.”
What’s more, it’s a strategy drug-war experts advise will have a miniscule if not counterproductive effect on interdiction.
Another Shield enrollee is Trinidad and Tobago. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s support of Trump’s hard power against cartel traffickers is so full-throated she’s urged the U.S. military to extrajudicially “kill them all — violently.”
Again, I get where Persad-Bissessar is coming from: thanks to well-armed narco-gangs, Trinidad and Tobago registered its highest-ever homicide rate two years ago.
But here’s the irony: last year the country’s murder tally dropped by 42% — to the lowest level in a decade — thanks largely to state of emergency operations that relied not on military shock and awe, but on new police training and technology, like border security radar systems that helped stanch the flow of gun trafficking.
Trinidad and Tobago demonstrated that Latin America and the Caribbean can reduce the killing that civilian criminals commit without firing military missiles to “kill them all — violently.”
But if Persad-Bissessar mentioned any of that to Trump in Doral, did it matter?
After all, who needs cops when you’ve got the Shield?
