Donald Trump has long been a fan of using the U.S. military to wage a more vigorous war against drug cartels in Latin America. He also shows signs of using that justification as a pretext to oust regimes considered hostile to other U.S. interests.
The most recent incident in the administration’s escalating antidrug campaign took place on October 3 when “Secretary of War” Mike Hegseth announced that U.S. naval forces had sunk yet another small boat off of the coast of Venezuela. It was one of four destroyed vessels and a total of 21 people killed since late September. The administration claims they were all trying to ship illegal drugs to the United States.
Colombian president Gustavo Petro said publicly Wednesday that one of the vessels was carrying Columbian citizens and that they were killed. Two administration officials confirmed to the New York Times that Colombians were on one of the boats blown out of the water. The White House called Petro’s claims “baseless” and “reprehensible.”
However, Trump’s enthusiasm for the military option in the war on drugs long predates this episode. Mike Esper, who served as secretary of defense during the final stages of Trump’s first term, relayed in his memoirs that the president had seriously explored the option of conducting missile strikes against suspected traffickers in Mexico. Esper recalled that his boss asked him at least twice in 2020 about the feasibility of launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and wipe out the cartels.
The president considered such a drastic step to be justified because Mexican leaders were “not in charge of their own country.”
Esper’s account is not the only evidence of Trump’s enthusiasm for the military option. After a 2019 incident in which cartel gunmen massacred a family of American Mormon ex-pats in northwest Mexico, Trump reacted with a tweet insisting that “this is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR (sic) on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth. We merely await a call from your great new president!” He added: “If Mexico needs or requests help in cleaning out these monsters, the United States stands ready, willing & able to get involved and do the job quickly and effectively.”
Hellbound and Down 