The grainy, black-and-white footage shows a speedboat whizz through the waves before a fireball lights up the screen, stopping the boat in its tracks.
“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” US President Donald Trump posted on his platform, Truth Social, on 2 September.
Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan gang classed as a “foreign terrorist organisation” by the US government earlier this year, akin to ISIS or Boko Haram.
The 30-second clip is also notable for what it didn’t show. It didn’t show the crew brandishing weapons or posing an imminent threat to Americans in any way. It didn’t show the boat turning around after realising they were being followed. And it didn’t show the boat being hit, again and again, long after it had been stopped, until it sank.
“The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action,” Trump continued.
“No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!”
There was no attempt to capture the crew. The eleven dead Venezuelans were not given a chance to prove their innocence in court. We don’t know if they were ruthless cutthroats from the Tren de Aragua, or doing what they were doing because this was the most viable way to support their family through Venezuela extreme economic struggles. There’s some suggestions from local sources that the Venezuelan boat hit carried migrants or other smuggled goods like gasoline across borders.
Since then, there’s been at least two more such strikes as several US warships patrol the south Caribbean sea off the coast of Venezuela, ostensibly to deter drug smuggling.
On hearing of the first strike, this writer immediately felt echoes of the War on Terror and how the American national security establishment believed it had the right to kill anyone, anywhere, along with any family and innocent bystanders.
The new War on Narcoterrorism
Trump’s now combining two of America’s most celebrated and successful policies, which famously earned it a lot of trust and goodwill across the globe – the War on Drugs and War on Terror – into a new War on Narco-Terror, or narcoterrorism.
September 11th is, to this day, one of America’s single deadliest days in its history – and one that set the future for the world. After invading Afghanistan for harbouring bin Laden, Bush, Blair and Cheney turned their gaze to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, whom they accused of hoarding weapons of mass destruction and being in league with terrorists – claims that were wild exaggerations if not outright lies.
Then, as now, the public was misled.
By the early 2020s, American drug overdose deaths were topping 100,000 per year, or the equivalent of 9/11 happening every week-and-a-half. This wasn’t a crisis; it was, and is, a health catastrophe. Most of these deaths involved fentanyl or other synthetic opioids, smuggled across the Mexican border by cartels.
While the Biden government adopted a policy of harm reduction (belatedly, but not without success), the Republicans employed the language of war: the cartels were the enemy, and fentanyl was their weapon of mass destruction. Their tough talk on the border resonated with desperate communities devastated by unexplained overdose deaths.
It makes sense then that the White House would drum up some military fervour by now framing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as the mastermind behind Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns, portraying them as terrorists seeking to poison children through disco powders.
But as with Iraq, lies and exaggerations are being used to push for regime change.
Get those terrorists
The State Department has offered a bounty of $50 million for Nicolás Maduro and a warrant for his arrest as the leader of the “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Cartel of the Suns. However, the indictment against Maduro accuses him of leading the group before he was even in office, which is unlikely. It also accuses him of working with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, which Mexico believes is also unlikely. Though Venezuelan generals do indeed profit from facilitating cocaine trafficking through their country, most of it is headed towards Europe. The bulk of blow that winds up Americans’ noses arrives there through the Pacific or Central America. There is almost no fentanyl passing through Venezuela.
While an all-out physical invasion akin to Afghanistan or Iraq is unlikely, tensions are mounting in the south Caribbean as Venezuela has deployed its own warships in its waters, and American forces assemble, position themselves strategically, and encroach on others.
In Mexico, Trump has made it clear he wants drone strikes or commando hit squads taking out cartel leaders, which the Pentagon all but confirmed it’s exploring. A physical incursion was categorically rejected by Mexico. But history shows that complaints from meddling foreign governments can’t stop American national interests; the unilateral military operation to kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 still happened despite being considered an “act of war”.
What drives narcoterrorism?
Back home, the War on Terror eroded civil liberties, enabling mass surveillance through the Patriot Act to “protect the people”. Of course, the War on Drugs has also been violating civil liberties for decades. But while the War on Terror singled out Muslims, the War on Drugs had already perfected the hunt for minorities: African-Americans, Chinese and Mexican immigrants, even German beer brewers have all been targeted at one point. Now it’s the turn of Venezuelan immigrants, whom Trump accuses of being part of the “narco-terrorist” Tren de Aragua.
Just like Guantanamo Bay worked as a black site for terrorist detainees, now CECOT prisons in El Salvador can also hold narco-terrorist foreigners without due process in nightmarish conditions. With the New York Times reporting that new legislation would allow for Trump to take military action against “narco-terrorists” without congressional approval, we might just see a new phase of covert anti-narcoterrorist operations happening across the globe.
What’s a clear difference between the motivations behind the War on Terror and this new creature is that the fentanyl, cocaine and other drug markets are just responding to basic supply and demand market dynamics. No matter how many times the DEA brags that it’s seized enough fentanyl to kill the whole world, or that American blood is “poisoned” by immigrants and their drugs, the simple fact is that the drugs are there because American citizens want them.
At least with the War on Terror, it can be argued that many of the “terrorists” really did want to kill Americans en masse in horrific ways. But drug smugglers only want to help them get high: that this leads to a lot of death is a consequence of failing to transmit information on dosage or unexpected drug combinations; in the right circumstances, people can use fentanyl safely and without dying. Equating this with a religious fanatic detonating a bomb in a crowded stadium is completely absurd.
Of course, none of this is new. The War on Drugs never really went away, even though it’s been reformed around the edges. The War on Terror is also still petering along, although with Trump’s flavour of airstrikes over boots on the ground. However, this evolving amalgamation of narcoterrorism is deliberately painting large, poorly defined groups of non-white others as a potential threat to the US – and that means they deserve to be obliterated by the full might of the American war machine, whether they’re actually guilty or not.
