COMMENTARY Sending soldiers into the drug war is more performative than productive — and takes a heavier human toll than the law enforcement we should be promoting in Latin America does.
I would love to see the militarization of the drug war win the drug war. I really would.
And I say that as an aging Latin America correspondent who’s been waiting four decades — from the deserts of Mexico to the rainforests of Colombia to the barrios of Honduras — for drug-war militarization to achieve drug-war victory.
But it doesn’t. And it likely never will.
Oh sure, it will score some big cocaine busts and some big kingpin arrests.
But you know what? So does conventional law enforcement.
You know what else? Conventional law enforcement — while it hasn’t “won” the drug war, either — doesn’t carry the heavy costs of militarization.
READ MORE: Soldiers aren't drug cops, President Trump. Don't send them into Latin America's narco wars
For starters: the often appalling collateral damage — the civilian lives lost and property destroyed, as the Sherman tank of militarized drug interdiction tries to wipe out the cockroaches of criminal drug cartels darting under one refrigerator to the next.
Sending troops and firing missiles after that narco-plague looks and feels great. It’s the high of la mano dura, as they call it in Latin America, the iron fist. It’s the cathartic abandonment of inconvenient police protocol for fire-and-brimstone annihilation of the violent evil that ferries fentanyl into small-town Ohio.
And it’s so much more politically performative. Which is, of course, why politically performative President Donald Trump has made drug-war militarization — with macho monikers like Operation Southern Spear and Shield of the Americas — the street enforcer of his “Donroe Doctrine” campaign to own the western hemisphere.
Sooner or later, the distinction between a criminal thug transporting narcotics and an innocent fisherman casting nets gets blurred in the “fog” of “combat.”
It’s why we’re seeing national headlines this week alerting us that the Trump administration’s anti-narcotics offensive in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific — where deadly U.S. attacks on civilian vessels allegedly carrying drugs and “narco-terrorists” have been condemned by just about every international law expert you ask — is now moving inland across Latin America.
Colombia, Ecuador and Honduras are among the countries onboard as joint participants.
Again: I really hope it neutralizes the hemisphere’s drug mafias.
And again: history warns us it really won’t.
More cocaine
In fact, a year-and-a-half of the fire-and-brimstone boat bombings suggests just that:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has actually seized more cocaine coming into the U.S. since those missions began — and price and supply on the street reflect it.
But what makes that reality doubly distressing is the larger pile of ashes the militarized drug-war crusade accumulates compared to what law enforcement leaves in its wake.
A stark reminder are the incisive and unsettling dispatches that Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America Studies at the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations, has published this year from Ecuador.
Freeman’s findings presaged what other U.S media investigations have now discovered: airborne strikes on Ecuadorian fishing boats in the Pacific point to a covert CIA operation aimed at narco-vessels.
As in the cases of many other seacraft targeted in Latin America since last year, the men killed or missing off Ecuador appear to have been what their families insist they were: non-criminal pescadores.
Such is the militarized drug war. When traffickers are cavalierly designated terrorists, they’re free game not for the arrest and prosecution that rule of law dictates, but for the summary execution that martial law greenlights.
And sooner or later, the distinction between a thug transporting narcotics and a fisherman casting nets — or a migrant hitching a ride or a woman being sex-trafficked on a real drug boat — gets blurred in the “fog” of “combat.”
“[W]ho is doing the killing,” Freeman asks, “and who, if anyone, can hold them accountable?”
That’s rarely if ever a question when a suspected drug boat is intercepted by, say, the U.S. Coast Guard, a mostly law-enforcement agency, which over the past year is likely responsible for keeping as many drugs if not more off U.S. streets as the U.S. military has been.
But without potential war crimes charges hanging over its head.
Militarization boosters will argue: it’s precisely because so many Latin American countries don’t have reliable cops that we have to depend on soldiers, theirs and ours, in this fight.
They have a point. And they don’t.
The better solution is for the U.S. to keep helping train better police in Latin America.
It might not “win” us the drug war overnight. But neither will militarization — whose human costs are higher.
