Trump’s death squads are darkly familiar

Today, Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.

Many brushed off his proclamation early in his second term that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America as a foolish, yet harmless, show of dominance. Now, however, he’s created an ongoing bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea.

The Pentagon has so far destroyed 18 go-fast boats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence has been presented or charges brought suggesting that those ships were running drugs, as claimed. The White House has simply continued to release bird’s-eye view surveillance videos (snuff films, really) of a targeted vessel. Then comes a flash of light and it’s gone, as are the humans it was carrying, be they drug smugglers, fishermen, or migrants. As far as we know, at least 64 people have already been killed in such attacks.

The kill rate is accelerating. In early September, the U.S. was hitting one boat every eight to ten days. In early October, one every two days. For a time, starting in mid-October, it was every day, including four strikes on Oct. 27th alone. Blood, it seems, lusts for blood.

And the kill zone has been expanding from the Caribbean waters off Venezuela to the Colombian and Peruvian coasts in the Pacific Ocean.

Many motives might explain Trump’s compulsion to murder. Perhaps he enjoys the thrill and rush of power that comes from giving execution orders, or he (and Secretary of State Marco Rubio) hope to provoke a war with Venezuela. Perhaps he considers the strikes useful distractions from the crime and corruption that define his presidency. The cold-blooded murder of Latin Americans is also red meat for the vengeful Trumpian rank-and-file who have been ginned up by culture warriors like Vice President JD Vance to blame the opioid crisis, which disproportionately plagues the Republican Party’s white rural base, on elite “betrayal.”

The murders, which Trump insists are part of a larger war against drug cartels and traffickers, are horrific. They highlight Vance’s callous cruelty. The vice president has joked about murdering fishermen and claimed he “doesn’t give a shit” if the killings are legal. As to Trump, he’s brushed off the need for congressional authority to destroy speedboats or attack Venezuela, saying: “I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead.”

But as with so many Trumpian things, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions put in place by all too many of his predecessors. His horrors have long backstories. In fact, Donald Trump isn’t so much escalating the war on drugs as escalating its escalation.

What follows then is a short history of how we got to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response of all too many reporters, politicians (Rand Paul being an exception), and lawyers was little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, encouragement.

A Short History of the Longest War

Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was our first drug-war president.

On June 17, 1971, with the Vietnam War still raging, he announced a “new, all-out offensive” on drugs. Nixon didn’t use the phrase “war on drugs.” Within 48 hours, however, scores of newspapers nationwide had done so, suggesting that White House staffers had fed the militarized phrase to their reporters.

Nixon’s call for a drug offensive was a direct response to an explosive story published a month earlier in the New York Times, headlined “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were addicts, with some units reporting that more than 50 percent of their men were using heroin.

At press conferences, Nixon was now being questioned not just about when and how he planned to end the war in Vietnam, but whether drug users in the military would be sent to rehab or punished. What, one journalist asked, was he “going to do about” the “soldiers who are coming back from Vietnam with an addiction to heroin?”

What he did was launch what we might today think of as Vietnam’s second act, a global expansion of military operations, focused not on communists this time, but on marijuana and heroin.

In 1973, shortly after the last U.S. combat soldier left South Vietnam, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Its first major operation in Mexico looked eerily like Vietnam. Starting in 1975, U.S. agents went deep into northern Mexico, joining local police and military forces to carry out military sweeps and airborne fumigation. One report described it as a terror campaign of extrajudicial murder and torture against rural marijuana and opium producers, mostly poor peasant farmers. The campaign treated all villagers as if they were the “internal enemy.” Under the cover of fighting drugs, Mexican security forces, supplied with intelligence by the DEA and the Central Intelligence Agency, ferociously suppressed peasant and student activists. As historian Adela Cedillo wrote, rather than limiting drug production, that campaign led to its concentration in a few hierarchically structured paramilitary organizations that, in the late 1970s, came to be known as “cartels.”

So, the first fully militarized battlefront in the War on Drugs helped create the cartels that the current iteration of the War on Drugs is now fighting.

Gerald Ford (1974-1977) responded to pressure from Congress — notably from New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel — by committing to a “supply-side” strategy of attacking drug production at its source (as opposed to trying to reduce demand at home). While countries in Southeast Asia, along with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, had been major suppliers of heroin to the U.S., Mexicans, long a source of marijuana, had begun to grow poppy to meet the demand from heroin-habituated Vietnam vets. By 1975, it was supplying more than 85 percent of the heroin entering the United States. “Developments in Mexico are not good,” a White House aide told Ford in preparation for a meeting with Rangel.

Ford increased DEA operations in Latin America.

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) supported the decriminalization of pot for personal use and, in his speeches and remarks, emphasized treatment over punishment. Overseas, however, the DEA continued to expand its operations. (It would soon be running 25 offices in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries.)

Ronald Reagan(1981-1989) reigned in an era when drug policy would take a turn toward the surreal, strengthening the linkages between rightwing politics and illicit drugs.

But let’s backtrack a bit. The convergence of rightwing politics and drugs began at the end of World War Two when, according to historian Alfred McCoy, U.S. intelligence in Italy came to rely on crime boss Lucky Luciano’s growing “international narcotics syndicate,” which would reach from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean Sea and from Istanbul to Havana, to conduct covert anti-communist operations. Then, in 1959, after the Cuban Revolution shut down that island’s lucrative drug trade, traffickers moved elsewhere in Latin America or to the United States, where they, too, joined the anti-communist cause.

The CIA then used those gangster exiles in operations meant to destabilize Fidel Castro’s Cuban government and undermine the domestic antiwar movement. At the same time, the CIA ran its own airline, Air America, in Southeast Asia, which smuggled opium and heroin as a way to support that agency’s secret war in Laos. And the FBI notoriously used the pretext of drug policing to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” political dissidents, including the Black Panthers. They worked, for example, with local police in Buffalo, New York, to frame African American activist Martin Sostre, who operated a bookstore that had become the center of that city’s Black radical politics, on trumped-up charges of selling heroin.

Nixon’s creation of the DEA drew those threads together, as its agents worked closely with both the FBI in the U.S. and the CIA in Latin America. When, after the war in Vietnam ended in defeat, Congress tried to rein in the CIA, its agents used the DEA’s expansive overseas network to continue their covert operations.

By the time Reagan became president, cocaine production in the Andean region in Latin America was in full swing, with a distinctly curious dynamic in operation: the CIA would work with rightwing, repressive governments involved in coca production even as the DEA was working with those same governments to suppress coca production. That dynamic was caught perfectly as early as 1971 in Bolivia when the CIA helped overthrow a mildly leftist government in the first of a series of what came to be known as “cocaine coups.” Bolivia’s “cocaine colonels” then took as much money as Washington was willing to offer to fight their version of the drug war while facilitating cocaine production for export abroad. President Carter cut off drug-interdiction funding to Bolivia in 1980. Reagan restored it in 1983.

The rise of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet followed the same dynamic. Pinochet partly framed his 1973 CIA-enabled coup against socialist President Salvador Allende as a front in Nixon’s drug war. Working closely with the DEA, the general tortured and killed drug traffickers along with political activists as part of his post-coup wave of repression. Meanwhile, Pinochet’s allies began “to deal drugs with impunity,” with Pinochet’s family making millions exporting cocaine to Europe (with the help of agents from his infamous security forces).

Once in office, Reagan began escalating the drug war as he did the Cold War — and the bond between cocaine and rightwing politics tightened. The Medellín cartel donated millions of dollars to Reagan’s campaign against Nicaragua’s leftwing Sandinista government. The ties were murky and conspiratorial, part of what McCoy has termed the “covert netherworld,” so it’s easy to fall down the deep-state rabbit hole trying to trace them, but details can be found in reporting by Gary Webb, Robert Parry, Leslie Cockburn, Bill Moyers, John Kerry, and CBS’s 60 Minutes, among others.

George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) engaged in a very Trump-like move in making his case to the public that the war on drugs needed to be escalated. He had the DEA go to the poorest part of Washington, D.C., to entrap a low-level African American drug dealer, Keith Jackson, paying him to travel to the White House to sell an undercover agent three ounces of crack cocaine. Bush then held up the drugs on national television to illustrate how easy it was to buy narcotics. A high school senior, Jackson spent eight years in prison so Bush could do a show-and-tell on TV.

The president then ramped up funding for the war on drugs, expanding military and intelligence operations in the Andes and the Caribbean. These were the Miami Vice years, when efforts to suppress cocaine smuggling into Florida only shifted transport routes overland through Central America and Mexico. Bush’s signature contribution to the War on Drugs was Operation Just Cause, in which, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, he dispatched 30,000 Marines to Panama to arrest autocrat Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges. Noriega had been a CIA asset when Bush was the director of that agency. But with the Cold War over, he had outlived his usefulness.

Bill Clinton (1993-2001) escalated his Republican predecessor’s “tough on drugs” policies. He maintained mandatory minimum sentencing and increased the number of people serving jail time for drug offences.

In his last year in office, Clinton rolled out Plan Colombia which committed billions of dollars more to drug interdiction, but with a twist: privatization. Washington doled out contracts to mercenary corporations to conduct field operations. DynCorp provided pilots, planes, and chemicals for the aerial eradication of drugs (which had horrible environmental consequences) and worked closely with the Colombian military. A cyber start-up, Oakley Networks, now part of Raytheon, also received Plan Colombia money to provide “Internet surveillance software” to Colombia’s National Police, which used the tech to spy on human-rights activists.

Plan Colombia led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and widespread ecological devastation. The result? Estimates vary, but roughly twice as much Colombian land is now believed to be dedicated to growing coca as at the start of Plan Colombia in 2000 and the production of cocaine has doubled.

George W. Bush (2001–2009) again escalated the war on drugs, increasing interdiction funding both domestically and internationally. He also urged Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to launch his own brutal military assault on the drug cartels. By the time Calderón left office, security forces and the cartels combined had killed or disappeared tens of thousands of Mexicans.

Conceptually, Bush linked the post-9/11 Global War on Terror to the Global War on Drugs. “Trafficking of drugs finances the world of terror,” he claimed.

Barack Obama (2009–2017), like President Carter, emphasized treatment over incarceration. Nonetheless, he took no steps to wind down the war on drugs, continuing to fund Plan Colombia and expanding Plan Mérida, which his predecessor had put in place to combat cartels in Central America and Mexico.

In February 2009, the former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — Fernando Cardoso, Ernesto Zedillo, and César Gaviria — released a report entitled “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift,” which called for an end to the war on drugs, proposing instead decriminalization and the treatment of drug use as a public health issue. The authors were establishment politicians, and Obama could have used their breakthrough report to help build a new public health consensus concerning drug use. But his White House largely ignored the report.

Donald Trump (2017–2021) increased already high-level funding for militarized counter-narcotic operations at the border and abroad, calling for the “death penalty” for drug dealers. He also floated the idea of shooting “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” but to do so “quietly” so “no one would know it was us.”

In Trump’s first term, he offered a now-forgotten (in the U.S. at least) preview of the killing of civilians on boats. On May 11, 2017, DEA agents and their Honduran counterparts traveling by boat along the Patuca River opened fire on a water taxi carrying 16 passengers. Overhead, a DEA agent in a circling helicopter ordered a Honduran soldier to fire his machine gun at the taxi. Four died, including a young boy and two pregnant women, and three others were seriously injured. The incident involved 10 U.S. agents, none of whom suffered any consequences for the massacre.

Joe Biden (2021–2025) supported de-escalation in principle and actually decreased funding for aerial drug fumigation in Colombia. He also issued blanket pardons to thousands of people convicted on federal marijuana charges. Nonetheless, like the presidents before him, he continued funding the DEA and military operations in Latin America.

Donald Trump (2025-?) has opened a new front in the war against Mexico’s drug cartels in New England. The DEA, working with ICE and the FBI, claims that in August it made 171 “high-level arrests” of “members of the Sinaloa cartel” throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative team, though, reports that most of those arrested were involved in “small dollar drug sales,” or were simply addicts, and had no link whatsoever to the Sinaloa cartel.

Trump insists that the “war on drugs” isn’t a metaphor, that it’s a real war, and as such he possesses extraordinary wartime powers – including the authority to bomb Mexico and attack Venezuela.

Considering this history, who’s to argue? Or to think that such a war could end anything but badly — or, for that matter, ever end at all?

• Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale University. He previously taught at New York University. His most recent book was the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in General Nonfiction, "The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America." His previous books include, "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman," "The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World" and "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.