Why Has the War on Drugs Restarted?
Why Has the War on Drugs Restarted?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UohYvDKVihw
Tag: Venezuela
Britain and Colombia Cut Off U.S. Intelligence Access Over Caribbean Boat Bombings
“Both countries have been happy to cooperate with Washington against drug trafficking, but think that the decision to kill the suspected smugglers at sea is a step too far.
At least one of the people killed in the boat bombings was a Colombian citizen. “He may have been carrying fish, or he may have been carrying cocaine, but he had not been sentenced to death,” Petro said in a speech on Sunday, according to the Associated Press. “There was no need to murder him.” After Petro criticized the U.S. military campaign last month, the U.S. Treasury accused Petro of being complicit in drug smuggling and imposed financial sanctions on him, his wife, and his son.
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Another neighboring country whose citizens were killed, Trinidad and Tobago, has been more supportive of the campaign. “I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently,” Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said in a September 2025 statement.
The Trump administration has acknowledged that it is choosing to kill suspects that it could have arrested otherwise. “Instead of interdicting [the boat], on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters after the first boat strike in September 2025. He argued that arresting traffickers and seizing their cargo “doesn’t work” because cartels plan for those losses anyway. Administration lawyers argue that drug cartels are wartime enemies, so they can be killed rather than arrested, while also denying that the president is limited by constitutional war powers in this campaign.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/12/britain-and-colombia-cut-off-u-s-intelligence-access-over-caribbean-boat-bombings/
Trump Says His ‘Armed Conflict’ With Drug Traffickers Does Not Involve ‘Hostilities’
“President Donald Trump has sought to justify the summary execution of suspected drug smugglers by arguing that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with criminal organizations that supply prohibited intoxicants. Yet the Trump administration also insists that U.S. forces are not engaging in “hostilities” when they blow up boats believed to be carrying illegal drugs.
Those positions are consistent with Trump’s disregard for legal limits on his use of the military to prosecute a literalized war on drugs. But they are otherwise hard to reconcile with each other, and their implications underline the immorality and lawlessness of his bloodthirsty antidrug tactics.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/03/trump-says-his-armed-conflict-with-drug-traffickers-does-not-involve-hostilities/
Don’t Send Cubans and Venezuelans Back To Suffer Under Communism
“Despite Trump promising to stand “with the good people of Cuba and Venezuela,” his administration has fast-tracked deportations for victims of communism.”
https://reason.com/2025/11/10/dont-send-cubans-and-venezuelans-back-to-suffer-under-communism/
Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced
“In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.
Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.
The men lived on the Paria Peninsula, in mostly unpainted cinderblock homes that can go weeks without water service and regularly lose power for several hours a day. They awoke to panoramic views of a national park’s tropical forests, the Gulf of Paria’s shallows and the Caribbean’s sparkling sapphire waters. When the time came for their drug runs, they boarded open-hulled fishing skiffs that relied on powerful outboard motors to haul their drugs to nearby Trinidad and other islands.
The residents and relatives interviewed by the AP requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals from drug smugglers, the Venezuelan government or the Trump administration. They said they were incensed that the men were killed without due process. In the past, their boats would have been interdicted by the U.S. authorities and the crewmen charged with federal crimes, affording them a day in court.
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The Trump administration has justified the strikes by declaring drug cartels to be “ unlawful combatants ” and said the U.S. is now in an “armed conflict” with them. Trump has said each sunken boat has saved 25,000 American lives, presumably from overdoses. The boats, however, appear to have been transporting cocaine, not the far more deadly synthetic opioids that kill tens of thousands of Americans each year.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a statement to the AP that the Defense Department has “consistently said that our intelligence did indeed confirm that the individuals involved in these drug operations were narco-terrorists, and we stand by that assessment.”
So far, the U.S. military has blown up 17 vessels, killing more than 60 people.
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After seeing clips on social media that mentioned his death, relatives broke the news to his mother, but not until after ensuring she had taken her blood pressure medication. Sánchez’s youngest son, a third grader, could not accept for days that his father was gone. He kept asking adults if his father could have survived the explosion, noting he might still be at sea.
No, the adults told the boy. His father was gone.
One of the first to die”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-accused-boat-crews-being-052306566.html
Did the U.S. Just Kill a Random Fisherman?
“A few scenarios are possible. One is that the U.S. really is striking narcotraffickers, and that either their families don’t know their dead relatives are narcotraffickers or are obfuscating. Another possibility is that the U.S. is striking innocent fisherman and calling them narcotraffickers. There could, of course, be a mix of smugglers and fishermen.
But the U.S. government is almost definitely acting illegally here. These people are not combatants. We don’t know if they’re affiliated with groups designated terrorist organizations. Congress has not approved these strikes, and Trump doesn’t even appear to be seeking retroactive approval. When some senators did try to check Trump via the War Powers Act, it didn’t go all that well. And rest assured that Petro, Maduro, and all other who stand to profit are going to keep milking this for all it’s worth, using Trump’s inevitable screw-ups as a means of distracting from their own misbehavior.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/20/did-the-u-s-just-kill-a-random-fisherman/
Trump Allegedly Misidentified a Colombian Fisherman as a Venezuelan ‘Narcoterrorist’
“Colombian President Gustavo Petro says one of the “narcoterrorists” recently killed by U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean was a “fisherman” who had “no ties to the drug trade.” That man’s death, one of at least 32 ordered by President Donald Trump, therefore qualified as “murder,” Petro declared on Saturday.
That much would be true even if the dead man, whom Petro identified as a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, really was smuggling drugs. Trump’s new policy of summarily executing drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and violates long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process.
On September 15, U.S. forces blew up a boat that Trump said was “in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics,” killing three men he described as “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.” But according to Petro, the attack that killed Carranza happened in Colombian waters, and the target was a “Colombian boat” that “was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure.”
Trump reacted angrily to that charge on Sunday, calling Petro “an illegal drug leader” who is “strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs…all over Colombia.” He said the U.S. government would punish Petro by ending all “payments and subsidies” to his country.
Notably, Trump did not actually contradict Petro’s claim that Carranza had been erroneously identified as a Venezuelan “narcoterrorist.” And Trump has repeatedly acknowledged that his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy could threaten innocent fishermen.
After the first strike on an alleged drug boat in early September, Trump joked about the potential for lethal mistakes: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'”
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Trump claims drug traffickers are “murdering” Americans because some of their customers—about 82,000 last year—die after consuming their products. By the same logic, alcohol producers and distributors, who supply a product implicated in an estimated 178,000 deaths a year in the United States, likewise are guilty of murder.
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The Trump administration also argues that the U.S. government is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which makes the boat strikes consistent with the law of war. That claim, Cardozo Law School professor Gabor Rona says, is “utterly without precedent in international law.”
Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the law of war, agrees. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”
Trump, in short, is killing people without a legal justification. There is a word for that.”
https://reason.com/2025/10/22/trump-allegedly-misidentified-a-colombian-fisherman-as-a-venezuelan-narcoterrorist/
The Constitution Does Not Allow the President To Unilaterally Blow Suspected Drug Smugglers to Smithereens
“Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”
When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he “didn’t give a shit.”
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But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial.
Why? Because sometimes the accused is actually not guilty.
As passions subside, a civilized people should ask: To be clear, the people bombed to smithereens were guilty, right?
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The administration has maintained that the people blown to smithereens were members of Tren de Aragua and therefore narcoterrorists.
Certainly, then, if we know they belong to a particular gang, then someone must surely have known their names before they were blown to smithereens?
At the very least, the government should explain how the gang came to be labelled as terrorists. U.S. law defines a terrorist as someone who uses “premeditated, politically motivated violence…against non-combatants.” Since the U.S. policy is now to blow people to smithereens if they are suspected of being in a terrorist gang, then maybe someone could take the time to explain the evidence of their terrorism?
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Few independent legal scholars argue the strikes are legal. Even John Yoo—a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who infamously authored the Bush administration’s legal justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques”—has criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the strikes, saying: “There has to be a line between crime and war. We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.””
https://reason.com/2025/10/08/the-constitution-does-not-allow-the-president-to-unilaterally-blow-suspected-drug-smugglers-to-smithereens/?nab=1
US Marches Towards War With Venezuela
The United States military is making extrajudicial illegal killings of potential drug traffickers, apparently killing a boat of Colombians this time. The U.S. is threatening a regime change war with Venezuela.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HUUKscEspQ
The U.S. Keeps Killing Venezuelans on Boats. Is That Legal? | The Daily
Trump’s strikes on drug boats appear to be illegal. These military men and women are likely breaking the law by following orders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYAwwZDLUy4