In February 1979, former Colombian President Alberto Lleras Camargo wrote an opinion column in the Colombian press to respond, in his own way, to an article published by the magazine. time He had published in those days: “The Colombian Connection.” Lleras Camargo said the article “gives us the dubious honor of drugging, poisoning and corrupting millions of Americans.” And then, with this subtle irony that Colombian presidents never encountered again, he wrote these lines: “War and drugs will stain the reputation of our future citizens. And when a senator, a representative of the United States, a European teacher, or a geographer from any part of the world needs to know something about Colombia, he will learn there about our pernicious influence on a society that is mostly white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, an influence that has in a few years replaced that of France and Mexico in the world market for marijuana.” And cocaine, and he invented the boldest and best ways to reach the heart of an honorable and militant people with his ships, planes, mafia, murderers, smugglers, mules, and all the harmful pollution tools of our time.
I was remembering that article these days about boats exploding in the middle of the Caribbean Sea and aircraft carriers supposedly sent to fight drug cartels. Forty-six years have passed since that prescient article, and the dinosaur is still there: drugs in Latin America continue to corrupt innocent Americans. “To all the terrorist thugs who smuggle toxic drugs into the United States of America, beware: We will wipe you off the face of the Earth,” Trump said at the United Nations in his stark speech. (We will erase you from existence He said in his language: “My translation does not accurately reflect the dialect of the terrorist killer.” Then he continued: “Every boat we sink carries drugs that could kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.” Which is a lie, of course: as Jonathan Blitzer noted in… The New Yorkeroverdose deaths in the United States are due to fentanyl made in Mexico, not cocaine. No, attacks on boats are not intended to protect anyone from anything. They are looking for something else. What’s the matter? We already know that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just announced an operation to “expel narco-terrorists” from the Western Hemisphere and protect “our homeland from the drugs that are killing our people.”
(In parentheses: Hegseth, of course, is the quintessential official in Donald Trump’s world: a narcissist accused of sexual harassment, financial dishonesty, and alcohol problems. And not only that: Before leading the world’s most powerful military, Hegseth was the host of trash-talking Fox, that cable TV network whose relationship with the truth is only casual and whose venal journalists flag down any propaganda, misinformation, or lies. Hegseth has been one of Trump’s most devoted pursuers, despite the fact that That he once mocked him, his lack of knowledge of international politics and the numerous excuses with which he avoided the draft during the Vietnam War I always thought that Trump likes this too: he likes to appoint those who were once his harshest critics to the most powerful positions: Marco Rubio is not the only example of the perverted pleasure in proving that everyone is corrupt, and that everyone is so.)
The operation that Hegseth has just announced cannot come as a surprise to anyone, as it did not begin with this announcement, but with boats. Since last September, the United States Army has killed eighty Latin American citizens, accusing them, without any evidence, trial or judgment, of being drug terrorists. We’ve all seen the images: the boat advancing on the sea, the flash of light, the unrecognizable remains. These are extrajudicial executions of foreigners carried out in international waters, which at other times would have caused at least some indignation; But in the lawless world of Donald Trump, under the brutal rule of his government of thugs, such practices do not matter, at least not in public life. And what’s even scarier is that they probably don’t have any consequences for our own lives either: we’ve all seen the attacks on boats like a video game, but without noise or colour, and with part of our heads aware that there, on the gray screen, are the remains of human bodies floating or sinking alongside the remains of the boat and the drugs they were carrying.
To be clear: Yes, I also believe some of the boats were carrying drugs. But we are in a very poor state if I have to explain why, in this case, it is the least of it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. There will even be some who are content to kill people because of what we suspect they are doing, or worse, because of what we expect they will do: these men died because they were drug dealers according to Trump, and others will die in the near future because Trump’s word will be enough to kill them. One does not know where to begin lamenting: it is naive to lament extrajudicial executions, or to naively lament the absence of due process, or to naively lament the violation of so many civil rights and so many constitutional guarantees in the same act of unpunished violence. Or remorse for the easy lie of the Trump government, which justified the murders under the pretext of national defense and the war against “those drugs that are killing our people.” There are so many levels of hypocrisy in those words that one doesn’t really know where to begin to peel the layers of the onion.
I say it again: The drugs that kill the majority of victims do not come on boats from Latin America. Rather, they are manufactured, like fentanyl, elsewhere. And I’ll say it again, too: No one in Trump’s cabinet really cares that “our people” are putting lines of cocaine from Latin America into their bodies; The hobbies of some of Trump’s inner circle are well known, and political satire shows have entertained them for years. And finally: no one can know, at this point, that the attack on the boats, the declaration of war against the Venezuelan cartels, and the presence of the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford in the Caribbean, are nothing more than the latest incarnation of what the war on drugs has always been: a form of political control by foreign governments, at best, and at the rest, a grotesque form of imperialist intervention. This has already happened in Panama, and when it was not about cocaine cartels, but rather about agrarian reforms with bananas as a background, it happened in Guatemala under Jacobo Árbenz.
Yes, we have already seen this movie. We already know what is coming: political turmoil that will wreak havoc. We already know what’s not coming: solving the drug problem. The important thing is that the problem persists.
It is the most useful problem in the world.
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