America’s New War on the Cartel

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Though the president’s effort to classify foreign gangs as “terrorist organizations” has primarily been in the news for its deportation implications, it also speaks to his administration’s new approach to the cartels. On his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order designating international cartel networks as federally recognized terrorist organizations, authorizing broader government powers to track, sanction, and punish the groups. In his order, Trump said that Tren de Aragua and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), included in the FTO-designation list, conduct “campaigns of violence and terror in the United States and internationally are extraordinarily violent, vicious, and similarly threaten the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.” In the administration’s view, that sanctions violence against them. But will last week’s strike, and those promised to follow, actually disrupt or disincentivize cartel activity?

Historically, the Coast Guard has been primarily responsible for intercepting suspected drug trafficking boats, only using lethal force in cases when the accused turn violent. “They’ll arrest the people on board, they’ll seize the cargo,” Michael Burgoyne—an assistant professor at the University of Arizona and retired U.S. Army Colonel who served as a policy analyst at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy—told TMD. “The only time they’re using lethal force is in self-defense.” Meanwhile, the Navy has been tasked with providing intelligence, including monitoring and locating suspected drug boats. 

“That has a long history, since the Reagan era,” Walsh noted, citing a 1986 national security directive issued by former President Ronald Reagan that “declared drugs a national security threat and authorized, and ordered, the military to take on this support role as the lead agency for monitoring and surveillance.”

“But that’s as far as it goes,” Walsh added. “It is, and always has been, understood to be in that sense a law enforcement mission.”

Indeed, even then-Vice President George H.W. Bush—in defending the Reagan administration’s move—was skeptical that military force could effectively curb drug smuggling. “You do encounter a justifiable concern on the part of the military in terms of their readiness,” Bush said, per a Washington Post article published two months after Reagan’s directive.

This more aggressive approach could theoretically have a deterrent effect on drug smuggling, just as the president’s immigration actions have disincentivized border crossings, but that’s far from guaranteed. The administration has not identified the 11 suspected drug smugglers, but Walsh explained that cartel druglords likely consider them as “readily replaceable” and therefore, this is little more than a planning inconvenience. “If I’m in the drug trafficking business,” he told TMD, “I’m looking at it as, ‘I’m going to avoid that route.’”

Ziemer agreed. “The folks who are transporting narcotics are not high up in the cartels,” he said. “They are people who have been paid, who … may be fishermen who make a living on the side by smuggling drugs or narcotics. We obviously don’t know the nature of the folks on the boat, but they’re not big fish.”

Even if cartels are deterred from smuggling drugs overseas, Burgoyne noted that would likely lead them to shift more of their trafficking operations to land—and therefore make them more difficult to monitor and combat, as they would be located directly on foreign soil. “What you could actually be doing on accident is just further destabilizing Central America and Mexico by having these groups adapt and send their drugs on land,” he said, “which corrupts everything it touches.”

And smugglers will keep taking risks to bring drugs across so long as Americans want to buy them. “Just because we’re a rich and populous country,” Walsh said, “we have very large and vibrant illicit drug markets in our country.” According to a 2019 study from the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research institute, Americans spent a total of $150 billion on cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine in 2016, about 0.8 percent of the nationwide gross domestic product in that year. 

Though airstrikes look like decisive action, by seizing contraband, you have forensic evidence to potentially track down where the drugs are coming from. “If you have whatever they’re moving—cocaine or what have you—you could actually trace better, you just have more evidence,” Shannon O’Neil, senior vice president and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told TMD. “If you have a murder … you can kind of find a lot of clues if you have a crime scene. But if the crime scene is destroyed, it’s very hard to tell what it was.”

And then there are the ethical concerns. “Outside of an armed conflict, we have a word for the premeditated use of lethal force on other people,” Brian Finucane—a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and former legal adviser at the State Department—told TMD. “That word is murder.”

On September 4, Trump gave official notice in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the Senate president pro tempore, of his military action that targeted a vessel “assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities,” pursuant to the War Powers Resolution Act. Passed in 1973, the act requires the president to inform Congress “in every instance” in which U.S. forces are used against hostilities within 48 hours, unless Congress has already declared war or voted to approve the action. The president’s military action is not, per the law, permitted to continue longer than 60 days, though the president—by writing to Congress on the need for prolonged force—can extend that deadline for an additional 30 days.

If Congress decides the president should not have the authority to use lethal force to strike suspected drug traffickers, it can pass legislation to do precisely that. “This really is incumbent upon Congress to exercise its own constitutional prerogative and responsibilities here,” Finucane explained. “It needs to be Congress to decide whether or not it’s appropriate to use military force in this context. … It should not be the president of the United States deciding on his own to engage in such activities.”

GOP Sen. Rand Paul seems to agree. Responding to Vice President J.D. Vance—who defended the strike by arguing that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military”—the libertarian-leaning legislator from Kentucky expressed concerns with the administration’s move. “Did [Vance]ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??” he wrote on X. “What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”

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