The Trump administration’s approach to drug cartels mirrors the tactics used in the War on Terror, experts have said.
The U.S. has conducted several military strikes in the Caribbean against what it says were drug boats, as part of its campaign against cartels, which it had designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
During a Senate hearing last week, FBI Director Kash Patel compared Latin American drug gangs to Al-Qaeda.
Washington believes that combating the cartels with law enforcement has failed to bring them down, arguing instead that the U.S. needs to bring in military agencies.
Despite providing few details on the scope of its military campaign against the cartels, the administration has partly adopted the blueprint of military strikes enacted during the war on terrorism following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Experts have warned that the attacks may amount to extrajudicial killings, without proof of their involvement in the drug trade.
"It's a really bad thing if the president of the United States can decide that a group of civilians that might pose some kind of remote threat can be killed without any form of due process because who is to say what group will be targeted next?" Swansea University professor Luca Trenta, who studies U.S. foreign policy, told NPR.
The global war on terror saw the U.S. target Islamic extremist groups after being given legal authority by Congress. While attacking conflict zones, the government also targeted groups outside these areas if they were deemed a threat to U.S. security, Trenta added.
The professor added, "None of this would apply to the current situation due to the nature of the target and the lack of a threat that the target was posing”.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the outlet that a war-on-drugs-style military campaign may not be effective against drug cartels.
"Certainly, the lethal strikes off Venezuela are an unprecedented change in U.S. actions. The U.S. has had a lot of interdiction in the Caribbean across many decades, and that interdiction has focused on arresting people, manning the boats and seizing cargo. This has generated intelligence,” she said.
Trump’s man in the FBI has defended the use of lethal force against purported drug gangs.
“In order to eliminate - and that's the key, eliminate - the drug trade, we have to use authorities at the Department of War and the intelligence community to go after the threat like we did terrorists when we were manhunting them,” Patel told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.
"We must treat them like the al-Qaeda of the world because that's how they're operating.”
At least three strikes have been carried out against boats in the Caribbean Sea that were suspected of being part of the drug trade.
President Trump posted a video showing a fast boat bursting into flames as it was speeding through open water, before he claimed that 11 suspected members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang were killed, without providing evidence.
Following the second strike, and when pushed by reporters to provide evidence that there were drugs on the boat, Trump said, “We have proof. All you have to do is look at the cargo; it's spattered all over the ocean. Big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place.”
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