How America Can Coerce the Cartels
Key takeaways
- BENJAMIN LESSING is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Founding Co-Director of the Program on Political Violence at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.
- A Smarter War on Drugs Begins With Selective Punishment
- President Donald Trump’s approach to the drug war has been characteristically brazen.
BENJAMIN LESSING is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Founding Co-Director of the Program on Political Violence at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.
A Smarter War on Drugs Begins With Selective Punishment
President Donald Trump’s approach to the drug war has been characteristically brazen. Since September, spectacular boat bombings by American forces in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific have killed nearly 200 people, violating international law while doing little to curb the U.S. fentanyl crisis. Washington strong-armed Mexico into finally taking out the drug lord Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, in February. Two months later, U.S. prosecutors indicted Rubén Rocha Moya, governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, on charges of aiding drug trafficking. In March, Trump hosted 12 Latin American leaders at a Florida country club for the first summit of the “Shield of the Americas,” a new, U.S.-led regional security initiative to counter drug cartels and transnational crime. Casting the effort as an “armed conflict” against “narcoterrorists,” Trump has designated Mexican and Venezuelan cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and is threatening to do the same for Brazil’s powerful prison-based gangs. Across all of these efforts, U.S. officials have floated direct military action that would shred diplomatic boundaries long thought inviolable.