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Today, Donald Trump is president of his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.
Many dismissed his proclamation, at the beginning of his second presidential term, that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America (i.e., the United States), as a silly display of dominance: silly, but harmless. Now, however, it has created a bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea. So far, the Pentagon has destroyed 18 speedboats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence or accusation has been presented to suggest that these ships were transporting drugs, as claimed. Simply put, the White House has continued to release bird’s-eye surveillance videos (a film snuffactually) of an attacked boat. Then comes a burst of light and everything ends there, along with the humans who were on board, whether they were drug traffickers, fishermen or immigrants. As far as we know, at least 64 people have been killed in those attacks.
The death rate is accelerating. In early September, the United States attacked a ship every seven to 10 days. At the beginning of October, one every two days. For a time, starting in mid-October, it was one a day, including four attacks on the 27th of that month alone. The blood, it seems, wants more blood. And the hunting area has expanded from the waters of the Caribbean, off Venezuela, to the coasts of Colombia and Peru, in the Pacific Ocean.
Many reasons could explain Trump’s compulsion to murder. Perhaps he enjoys the thrill and sense of power that comes with issuing execution orders, or he (and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio) hope to provoke a war with Venezuela. Perhaps he sees the attacks as useful distractions from the criminality and corruption that define his presidency. The cold-blooded murder of Latin Americans is also fresh fodder for vengeful Trumpist supporters who have been created by culture warriors like Vice President JD Vance to blame the opioid crisis, which disproportionately infests the Republican Party’s rural base, on the “betrayal” of elites.
The killings, which Trump insists are part of a war against cartels and drug traffickers, are horrifying. They highlight Vance’s utter cruelty. The vice president has joked about the killing of fishermen and says he “doesn’t give a damn” if the killings are illegal. As for Trump, he has dismissed the need to ask Congress for authorization to destroy speedboats or attack Venezuela, saying: “I think we’re going to kill people. Okay? We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, well, dead.”
But, as with so much about Trump, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions created by many of his predecessors. Its horrors have a long history. In fact, Trump is not escalating the drug war, but escalating it.
What follows is a brief history of how we got to a moment when a president can order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response from too many reporters, politicians (with the odd exception, like Rand Paul), and lawyers has been little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, an endorsement.
Brief history of the longest war
Although the convergence of right-wing and drug politics began at the end of World War II, Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was our first drug war president. Gerald Ford continued the war and increased DEA operations in Latin America.
The DEA continued to expand its operations in the Jimmy Carter administration, and Ronald Reagan began to escalate the war on drugs in the same way he did with the cold war. George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush all invested in the drug war. Barack Obama made no attempt to de-escalate the war, and then came Donald Trump’s first term as president. Joe Biden continued to fund DEA and military operations in Latin America.
Donald Trump (2025-?) has opened a new front in the war against Mexican drug cartels in New England. The DEA, in collaboration with ICE and the FBI, claims that in August it made 171 “high-level arrests” of “members of the Sinaloa cartel” in the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. However, the Spotlight research team at Boston Globe reported that the majority of those arrested participated in “drug sales for a few dollars” or were simple addicts, without any link to the Sinaloa cartel.
Trump insists that the “war on drugs” is not a metaphor, but a real war, and that as such it grants him extraordinary wartime powers, including the authority to bomb Mexico and attack Venezuela.
Considering this history, who is going to object? Or to think that such a war could only end badly… or, for that matter, never end at all?
The full version of the article can be read in the following link: https://bit.ly/4o3bT6i
*Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, published by Metropolitan Books in the American Empire Project series; from the Pulitzer Prize-winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall and, most recently, America, America: A New History of the New World. This article was originally published in TomDispatch.com | Link to original article at: https://bit.ly/4pfGApJ
Translation: Jorge Anaya
