WASHINGTON — Under President Donald Trump, the war on drugs looks a lot like the war on terrorism.
To support strikes against Latin American gangs and drug cartels, the Trump administration is relying on a legal argument that gained momentum after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which allowed U.S. authorities to use lethal force against al-Qaida fighters who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The criminal groups currently targeted by U.S. strikes, however, are a very different enemy, born in Venezuela’s prisons and fueled not by anti-Western ideology but by drug trafficking and other illicit enterprises.
Legal scholars say Trump’s use of overwhelming military force to combat such groups and authorization of covert actions inside Venezuela, possibly to oust President Nicolás Maduro, pushes the limits of international law. It comes as Trump expands the military’s role domestically, deploying the National Guard to U.S. cities and saying he is prepared to invoke the nearly 150-year-old Insurrection Act, which allows military deployment only in exceptional cases of civil unrest.
So far, the army has killed at least 28 people in six shots on boats that the White House said were carrying drugs.
THE the last one happened on Thursdaywhen U.S. forces struck a ship suspected of carrying drugs and captured survivors, who are being held by the U.S. military.
Thursday’s action brings the death toll from the Trump administration’s military action against ships in the region to at least 28.
Trump has justified the strikes by claiming that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration when it declared a war on terrorism after the September 11 attacks. This includes the ability to capture and detain fighters and use lethal force to eliminate their leaders.
The strikes took place without any judicial investigation or traditional congressional declaration of war. It raises questions about the justifications for Trump’s actions and the impact they could have on diplomatic relations with Latin American countries that remember repeated U.S. military interventions during the Cold War with deep resentment.
The American intelligence community also contested Trump’s central claim that Maduro’s administration is working with the Tren de Aragua gang and orchestrating drug trafficking and illegal immigration into the United States.
“You can’t call something a war.”
Trump’s assertion that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels relies on the same legal authority that the Bush administration used when it declared a war on terrorism after the September 11 attacks. This includes the ability to capture and detain fighters and use lethal force to eliminate their leaders.
But the United Nations Charter specifically prohibits the use of force except in self-defense.
“You just can’t call something a war to give yourself war powers,” said Claire Finkelstein, a professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania. “While we are frustrated by the means and results of law enforcement efforts to combat the flow of drugs, to suggest that we are in a non-international armed conflict with cartels constitutes a travesty of international law. »
After September 11, it became clear that Al-Qaeda was actively planning new attacks intended to kill civilians. But the main ambition of the cartels is to sell drugs. And that, while detrimental to U.S. security overall, constitutes a dubious justification for invoking war powers, said Geoffrey Corn, a law professor at Texas Tech who previously served as a senior adviser to the military on law of war issues.
“It’s the government, in my humble opinion, that wants to invoke war powers for many reasons,” Corn said.
“Even if we assume there is an armed conflict with the Tren de Aragua, how can we know that all the passengers on that boat were enemy combatants?” he said. “I think Congress needs to know that.”
Trump defends strikes
Asked at the White House on Wednesday why the United States is not using the Coast Guard to stop Venezuelan ships and seize drugs, Trump replied: “We’ve been doing this for 30 years and it’s been totally ineffective.” »
The president also suggested that the United States could strike targets inside Venezuela, a move that would significantly raise tensions and legal stakes. So far, strikes have taken place in international waters beyond the jurisdiction of a single country.
“We have almost completely stopped it by sea,” Trump said of the drug flow. “Now we will stop him by land.”
Trump was also asked about a New York Times article claiming he authorized a covert CIA operation in Venezuela. Trump, who harshly criticized the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein’s government, refused to say whether he had given the CIA authority to eliminate Maduro, saying it would be “ridiculous” to answer.
Numerous American laws and executive orders since the 1970s have prohibited the assassination of foreign officials. But by declaring Venezuelans illegal combatants, Trump may be seeking to circumvent those restrictions and return to an earlier era when the United States — in countries like Guatemala, Chile and Iran — routinely conducted covert regime-change missions.
“If you pose a threat and wage war against the United States, you are not a protected person,” Finkelstein said.
During Trump’s first term, Maduro was indicted by the US federal government on drug charges, including narcoterrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. This year, the Justice Department doubled the reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million, accusing him of being “one of the world’s largest drug traffickers.”
But Trump’s focus on Venezuela overlooks a basic fact of the drug trade: The bulk of overdose deaths in the United States are due to fentanyl, which is transported overland from Mexico. And although Venezuela is a major drug transit zone, about 75 percent of the cocaine produced by Colombia, the world leader, is smuggled through the eastern Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean.
Congress and the ICC have been sidelined
According to the Constitution, it is Congress that must declare war. However, so far there is no indication that Trump’s allies will oppose the president’s expansionist vision for his own power to take on the cartels that the White House accuses of being responsible for tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States each year.
The GOP-controlled Senate recently voted against A war powers Democratic-sponsored resolution that would have required the president to seek congressional authorization before further military strikes.
Despite pressure even from some Republicans for a fuller accounting, the Trump administration has yet to provide underlying evidence to lawmakers proving that the boats targeted by the American army were transporting narcotics, two American officials close to the matter told the Associated Press. Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said he and other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a classified briefing this month, were also denied access to the Pentagon’s legal opinion on whether the strikes complied with U.S. law.
The legal pushback is unlikely to influence the White House either. A Supreme Court ruling stemming from a 1973 attempt by a Democratic congresswoman to sue the Pentagon to stop the spread of the Vietnam War to neighboring Laos and Cambodia set the bar high for any legal challenge to military orders, Finkelstein said.
Meanwhile, relatives of Venezuelans killed in the boat attacks face their own hurdles following several high court rulings narrowing the ability of foreign citizens to pursue legal action in the United States.
The military strikes took place in international waters, opening the door for the International Criminal Court to launch an investigation along the lines of its war crimes probes against Russia and Israel – which, like the United States, do not recognize the court’s authority.
But the Hague court has been racked by a sexual misconduct investigation that forced its chief prosecutor to step down. US sanctions following the indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have also hampered his work.
