“Are they just playing insane or are they actually insane?”
Amid all the economic chaos and fallout triggered by Trump’s tariffs barrage and with markets continuing to slide even after Trump’s announcement of a 90-day pause on tariffs on everyone but China, one could be forgiven for failing to hear the faintest but growing sounds of war drums. The Trump administration appears to be upping the ante in its standoff with Mexico’s drug cartels — at least according to two staunchly anti-Trump US media outlets.
First, CNN reported on Tuesday that the CIA is “reviewing its authorities to use lethal force against drug cartels in Mexico and beyond” — presumably starting in Venezuela — as the Trump administration moves to make taking on the cartels a major priority for the intel agency”:
The review does not indicate President Donald Trump has ordered the CIA to take direct action against the cartels. But it is designed to help the agency understand what kinds of activities it could legally undertake and what the potential risks would be across the suite of options, the sources said — underscoring how seriously the Trump administration is considering the possibility.
It goes without saying that this is all rather speculative. CNN offers no named sources to back up this claim, just one anonymous “US official and three people briefed on the matter.”
The same goes for the second report, which came out hours later.
Citing “six current and former U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence officials with knowledge of the matter,” NBC reported that the Trump admin is weighing up launching drone strikes on drug cartels in Mexico as part of “an ambitious effort to combat criminal gangs trafficking narcotics across the southern border.” The discussions currently involve the White House, the Department of Defense, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, according to NBC:
Still, the administration has made no final decision and reached no definitive agreement about countering the cartels. And unilateral covert action, without Mexico’s consent, has not been ruled out and could be an option of last resort, the sources said. It is unclear whether American officials have floated the possibility of drone strikes to the Mexican government.
NBC’s six unnamed sources apparently indicated that the discussions are still in their “early stages,” and that the administration has not reached a definitive consensus.
The article even suggests that Mexico and the United States “may proceed together with drone strikes, or other action”, which is, to put it mildly, an imagination-stretching claim. As the Mexican veteran journalist Eduardo Ruiz Healy recently said on his daily news program, if Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was to give the green light for drone bombings in Mexico, her popularity, currently at record levels of over 80%, would collapse overnight:
How many countries have invited another country to come and invade then? … It’s true that in Mexico there are some people who would love to see that happen. In Mexico there are a lot of people who do not love Mexico, and we have to acknowledge that. They would love to see it happen because they think they themselves would live better under the Gringo’s boot.
But that is not the case for the rank and file of Sheinbaum’s political party, Morena, which defines itself in its statute as a party of free men and women who fight for the democratic transformation of the country. They will not take kindly to any Mexican government, particularly one led by Morena, giving the US carte blanche to conduct drone strikes against targets in Mexico. Nor will most Mexican civilians, who, as Ruiz Healy points out, are an extremely patriotic people.
In her response to the latest US media reports, Sheinbaum reiterated her staunch opposition to any such military action:
“We do not agree with any kind of intervention or interference. This has been very clear: We coordinate, we collaborate, [but] we are not subordinate and there is no meddling in these actions.”
A Long Time Coming
The fact that the Trump administration is talking about using drones against Mexican targets is hardly surprising. This has been on the cards for at least two years.
In early March 2023, a coterie of Republican lawmakers called for direct US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels. They included the then-US Senator and now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Washington’s number-one chicken hawk, Lindsay Graham, and former Attorney General (under both George HW Bush and Donald Trump) William Barr. The Republican lawmakers also called for Mexico’s drug cartels to be designated as “foreign terrorist organizations under U.S. law.”
That has already been ticked off the Trump Admin’s “To Do” list — a move that some current and former US officials believe was designed “to build a predicate for lethal action”, notes the CNN article. Ominously, the CIA is also already flying surveillance drones that are capable of being armed over Mexico.
Trump himself reportedly brought up the idea of bombing Mexico as early as 2020, according to his then-defence secretary, Mark Esper. Senior members of his administration, including US Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson, a former CIA agent and Green Beret, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have also expressed openness to using military force against the cartels, with both stating at separate moments that “all cards are on the table.”
The pertinent question, as the title of this post suggests, is: will the Trump Administration take such a bold, potentially game-changing step, even as the US and global economy reel from his tariff tantrums. Put simply, are they that mad? The following tweet, from Sven Henrich, captures the essence nicely, albeit in reference to Trump’s disastrous trade war:
I suppose we're rapidly approaching the moment where we find out whether they're just playing insane or are actually insane.
— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) April 9, 2025
There are myriad reasons why drone-bombing Mexico would be a bad idea far beyond the simple fact that it will end up killing lots of innocent civilians. The following is by no means an exhaustive list:
#1: Proximity. As even the CNN article notes, it’s one thing to bomb a country on the other side of the world, as the US has been doing on and off (but mainly on) since the Second World War; it’s quite another to bomb your direct next-door neighbour:
It also highlights some US officials’ concerns that using traditional counterterrorism tools against cartels — as the Trump administration has said it intends to do — carries a much higher risk of collateral damage to American citizens than similar operations conducted in the Middle East, far from US soil.
Among the issues agency lawyers are examining is the CIA’s and its officers’ liability if an American is accidentally killed in any operation, according to one of the people briefed.
Judging by the text, the CIA’s lawyers appear to be a lot less worried, if worried at all, about Mexicans being “accidentally killed in any operation,” which, of course, would be true to form. Wherever and whenever the US has used drone strikes, many innocent people have tended to perish. A 2021 investigation by the New York Times Magazine found that US airstrikes had killed thousands of civilians in countries including Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan.
Trump is often hailed by his most devout supporters as “anti-war”, mainly because he didn’t actually start a war during his first term, unlike many of his predecessors. However, he did have — and if recent events in Yemen are any indication, continues to have — a soft spot for drone strikes.
During the first two years of Trump’s first presidency (2017-19) there were 2,243 drone strikes , compared with 1,878 in Obama’s eight years in office, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. In 2019, Trump revoked a 2016 Obama executive border requiring US intelligence officials to publish the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside of war zones. Judging by his government’s recent actions in Yemen, Trump continues to have a soft spot for drone strikes.
#2: Neighbourly Relations.
Strange as this sentence may sound, if there is one country that will particularly resent being bombed by drones of death remote-controlled by the US air force, it is Mexico. The country has already suffered at least ten invasions and incursions at the hands of its northern neighbour since winning independence from Spain over 200 years ago, most recently in the US marines’ invasion and occupation of Veracruz in 1914.
As Mexican citizens are well aware and USians unfortunately far less so, in one of those invasions — the so-called “Mexican-American War” (1846-48) — the US seized 55% of Mexico’s territory, including present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. If the US attacks Mexico again, the relations between these two highly interconnected, highly interdependent neighbours will once again sour to the point of curdling.
“There is no doubt if there were unilateral action inside Mexico, this would put the bilateral relationship into a nosedive,” said Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States from 2007 to 2013, in comments to NBC News about the revelations. “It would be put in a tailspin, as it would represent a violation of international law and an act of war.”
Gustavo A. Flores-Macías, professor of government at Cornell University, said:
“Unilateral U.S. strikes on Mexican soil would be devastating for the bilateral relations and could be detrimental to the objective of fighting drug cartels.”
If Mexico were to break off relations with Washington, which, of course, it would be perfectly entitled to do, much, if not all, bilateral cooperation and coordination will come to an end — not only on the war against the drug cartels but on security matters in general, including border control. Which brings us to the third reason.
#3: More War = More Immigration.
If the Trump Administration is genuinely interested in tackling illegal immigration, the last thing it wants to do is sow further mayhem on its very doorstep — especially if it is thinking about spreading that mayhem to other parts of Latin America, such as Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. This should be basic common sense — something that, unfortunately, appears to be in acutely short supply in Washington these days.
If history has taught us anything, it is that war is one of the main, if not the main, causes of migration. According to estimates by the Costs of War Project, the War on Terror has resulted in the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.
Europe has first-hand experience of what this means. As the US, often with the support of its NATO allies, spread war throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the wake of 9/11, Europe reaped the whirlwind of uncontrolled migration. As Josep Borrell would put it, the jungle invaded the garden. If the US does the same in its own direct neighbourhood, it will almost certainly face a similar fate. And that could be a serious problem for a government that ran on a platform of cracking down on illegal immigration.
#4: Another Forever War
The Global War on Terror is already 24 years old and shows no sign of ending any time soon, which, of course, was by design. By declaring war on a nebulous, undefinable enemy, the US and its NATO allies have created an unending conflict — and with it, the perfect war racket. Now, the US seeks to do the same with the Global War on Drugs — a war that is itself, officially speaking, 54 years old.
It’s worth bearing in mind that this war, declared by Richard Nixon in 1971, was ultimately created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies. That’s according to former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman, who told Harper’s magazine in 1994:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Since then, the War on Drugs and aspects of the drugs trade itself have become a key tool in Washington’s foreign policy arsenal, allowing it to maintain geostrategic dominance in key, invariably resource-rich regions of the world while keeping the restive populace at home in line — or in prison, generating big bucks for the prison industrial complex. And as we’ve seen in recent weeks, the scope and reach of that complex is creeping beyond US borders as countries, starting with El Salvador, offer to house US “criminals” and deportees.
For a US government seeking to reassert its control over its “backyard” amid China’s increasing economic influence, the war on the drug cartels offers the perfect pretext. Also, as reader Ciroc correctly notes in the comments below, Trump’s real target is MORENA, an anti-neoliberal movement on the US’ doorstep, not the drug cartels.
But this all comes with huge risks, for this is a war that will also be fought on the US’ doorstep. As the Cato Institute warns in its recent paper, “The Cognitive Shift: How the Terrorist Label May Lead to Another Forever War“, by designating the cartels as narco-terrorists and then ramping up the rhetoric around their criminal activities, the Trump Administration will further intensify the militarization of the War on Drugs and likely undermine what diplomatic successes it has already achieved through its cooperation with the Mexico’s Sheinbaum government:
Trump’s strong-arming of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum resulted in the Mexican government deploying additional national guard troops to its side of the shared US-Mexican border. Concurrently, and perhaps causally, according to the Customs and Border Protection’s statistics, drug seizures are the lowest that they have been in three years. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a 25 percent decline in overdose deaths.
The exact causal elements of these trends are still unknown. Still, they ought to be met with further examination and not more overheated rhetoric, especially as continued veiled threats of military intervention alienate a necessary, if imperfect, partner in the Mexican government.
In an attempt to placate the Trump Administration’s demands and avoid an escalation in tariffs or unilateral US military strikes, the Sheinbaum government has already flown 29 alleged cartel bosses to the US in what Washington has referred to as an “extraordinary transfer process”. Now, according to the Mexico-based crime journalist Ioan Grillo, is “looking at carrying out another mass ‘expulsion’ of senior cartel figures from Mexican prisons to US custody, with a list of 40 potential targets including the Jalisco Cartel’s “El Cuini,” or Abigael González Valencia.”
So, for the moment, Mexican authorities are doing Washington’s bidding by intensifyying their crackdown on the cartels, so why put all that at risk by launching drone strikes? Also, it’s not as if US authorities are upholding their side of the bargain. As a new article in the Mexican news weekly Proceso reveals (h/t Robin Kash), both the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation cartels are still using the US financial system to launder the proceeds of their fentanyl business. Some things never change!
Sheinbaum, like her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has repeatedly underscored US authorities’ unwillingness to address the demand-side drivers of the US’ opioid epidemic; as NC reader Robert asks below, “why is it that a significant percentage of the US’ adult population, teenage population and pre-teen population need to self medicate just to get through the darn day?” US lawmakers have shown little interest in this issue, preferring instead to pin the entire blame on outside forces. They have also shown little inclination in stemming the “iron river” of US weapons constantly flowing southward to the drug cartels.
#5: Economic Disintegration. Another potential (unintended?) consequence of Trump launching drone strikes in Mexico is that it could hasten the unravelling of the USMCA trade deal. The trade agreement was negotiated by Trump himself, who on its completion in 2020 described it as the “the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law”. Now, Trump seems ready to bin it.
The trade deal, now in its fifth year of existence and up for renegotiation in 2026, is already looking frail as the trilateral relations between the erstwhile “Three Amigos” of North America have become dangerously strained. Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada, with Canada retaliating by imposing its own counter-tariffs on the US, goes against not only the letter but the spirit of NAFTA 2.0.
As readers may recall, it wasn’t so long ago that senior policymakers in Canada such as Doug Ford and Chrystia Freeland were threatening to walk away from the USMCA altogether and sign a bilateral trade deal with Trump. From our Nov. 26 article, Is Trump About to Deal a Mortal Blow to NAFTA 2.0?:
[S]ince the signing of the USMC, Canada’s trade with the US has more or less stagnated. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that in 2018, Canada’s share of imports from the US has barely budged. Meanwhile, Mexico has overtaken both China and Canada to become the US’ main trade partner, primarily as a result of the nearshoring trend sparked by the US’ trade war with China during the first Trump administration.
So, the combination of USMCA, Trump’s tariffs on China and the nearshoring trend it helped set in motion has been a boon for Mexico’s manufacturing sector, attracting billions in investment and creating millions of jobs, while doing little for Canada’s trade with the US. Given as much, it is perhaps not so surprising that some of Canada’s most powerful politicians are calling for the scrapping of USMCA.
It is against this fragile backdrop that the US is now apparently serious considering launching missile strikes against Mexico, its largest trade partner. Such an action will almost certainly drive the final nail into the USMCA’s coffin — after all, how could Mexico possibly remain in a trade deal with a country that has essentially declared war on it? — and spark the unravelling of decades of North American economic integration.
The economic blowback will be brutal. The US’ bilateral trade with Mexico alone through November last year was worth $776 billion while its bilateral trade with Canada clocked in at $700 billion.
While the collapse of USMCA may bring certain economic, social and political benefits to all three of the signatory members in the long term, in the short term all three countries will face economic chaos and contraction. For the US, its economy would have to grapple with collapsing trade with its two largest trade partners, Mexico and Canada, at the same as the Trump Administration is locked in a spiralling trade war with its third largest trade partner, China.
#6: War Comes Home?
The one thing that drone strikes against Mexican cartels are guaranteed to achieve is a massive escalation in violence on the Mexican side of the border. As Daniel R. DePetris, the syndicated foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune, notes in an op-ed for MSNBC, “using military force to curtail the cartels and limit the flow of drugs into the United States is not a novel concept”, but it all has achieved is ever greater bloodshed:
The cartels’ capacity to inflict terror over the population was never impacted. In 2007, Mexico registered roughly 11,000 homicides; in 2023, the last year full data is available, the number reached more than 30,000 for the sixth year in a row.
Striking cartel operatives from the air is really just an extension of the so-called Kingpin Strategy that the Mexican government has implemented for roughly two decades. Yes, the United States is likely to kill some cartel leaders, and those assassinations will certainly give us the illusion of progress. But neutralizing the leadership won’t kill these cartels; far from it. Instead, there will be jockeying among potential replacements and significant intracartel violence until one of two things happens: a new regime is constructed after somebody consolidates power at the top of the organization, or the organization itself splits into multiple factions. Moreover, other cartels will attempt to muscle into their rival’s territory to grab more of the trade.
Until now, most of the countries the US has targeted with drone strikes have been comparatively small in terms of population, with Pakistan (pop: 250 million), Iraq (45 million) and Yemen (40 million) being notable exceptions, and economic size.
Mexico, by contrast, is a G20 economy with a population of around 130 million and an economy slightly smaller than Russia’s. More important still, it shares a 1,954-mile (3,145 km) land border with the US — the busiest on the planet. No less important, there are an estimated 37 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States, making them the largest Hispanic origin group in the U.S., accounting for 60% of the total Hispanic population. And many Mexican cartels also have a large presence there.
In other words, the blowback from this war will inevitably find its way across the US border. As the Ukraine war has shown, drone warfare is a massive leveller, allowing smaller or technologically less advanced nations or even non-nation actors to project power and defend themselves effectively against larger adversaries. As the following clip from Ioan Grillo’s docu-feature on Mexico‘s cartel drone, they include Mexico’s drug cartels.
A trailer for our guerrilla docu-feature on Mexico's cartel drone war.
The film includes reporting from Guerrero, video from the card of a cartel drone shot down, and interview with a sicario from La Familia from a troop in the mountain using drones. Watch it free on CrashOut… pic.twitter.com/dQkBQSFBcY
— Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) February 24, 2025
As DePetris concludes in his op-ed, the idea that the US military should be prosecuting a war against the cartels, apparently under serious consideration by senior Trump officials, has three major drawbacks: “it’s risky, counter-productive and utterly bone-headed.”
Even the normally war-loving Atlantic Council cautions that a unilateral military action against Mexico would come with serious risks attached, especially given the capacity of Mexican drug cartels to retaliate against US targets:
Mexican cartels are not merely criminal organizations; they operate as paramilitary entities with deep financial resources, global supply chains, and sophisticated logistical networks that extend into the United States. It is unlikely that such groups would passively absorb US attacks. Instead, as history shows, cartels are highly likely to retaliate both pre-emptively and reactively. They possess a substantial capacity for terrorism that, when coupled with their established presence within the United States, could escalate conflict far beyond what proponents of a purely military solution may anticipate.
If the past week of whipsawing market movements has proven anything, it is that the new Trump administration is either incapable of, or simply disinterested in, anticipating the potential second, third or fourth-order effects from its whack-a-mole policies. And that should be a major cause for concern on both sides of the US-Mexican border, especially as the Trump Administration fumbles for a distraction from its humiliating tariff climbdown.
Mexican drug cartels is to Trump; as LARPing Marxist Grenadians is to 1983 Reagan
with the caveat that the drug cartels have much more firepower than the Grenada regime.
Thanks for this post, Nick. Back in 1989 Tom Clancy came out with a political thriller called “Clear and Present Danger.” The heart of the book was an undeclared war by the President against Colombian cartels which featured a secret high-precision airstrike against a cartel mansion where several important cartel members were meeting. The whole thing was hush-hush and off the records. Well that was then and this is now. You now have several members of Trump’s government talking about strikes on cartels in Mexico. After all, what could possible go wrong? Well, what if the cartel members hit back. Those cartels include highly-trained former member of Mexico’s special forces and they have bought equipment off the Ukrainians. What if they decide to take out a high-visibility military target. Like one of those B-2 bombers or send drone swarms against a US military base? They would have a wealth of options. Trump would rage and maybe send a column to enter into Mexico to go after them but that would lead to them being blocked by the Mexican army. And then what? Like his trade war with China, he likes to get into fights but when his opponents fight back, has little idea of how to back out again.
stupid.
as the crow flies, i’m about 160-200 miles from the border.
quite a bit longer by road.
but there are a LOT of Mexican immigrants, legal and not, even way out here in this tiny county.
we also have Mexican Mafia presence firmly entrenched(I know a lot of them)…and Zeta’s have been known to pass through on occasion.
those folks are not without resources, to say the least.
as a general rule, they make hard separation between Members and “Civilians”…indeed, the MM guys i have known all say the same thing, that they themselves would be killed if they allowed a “civilian” to get caught in the crossfire…too much bad press and scrutiny.
hurts business, etc.
but with this nonsense?
I reckon all bets are off.
and there will be blood.
It would give the Trump Regime an excuse to declare Martial Law, Emergency, Suspension of the Constitution, etc. And begin rounding up and shipping thousands and then tens of thousands of political and cultural targets and “enemies list” names to the stalags and gulags in El Salvadachau.
Which would be the real goal of this whole “Mexico” action.
He’s also planning to drop nuclear bombs on Iran according to at least one “press” source. Lindsey is for this too (maybe not the nuclear).
However it clearly is time to kick up the paranoia level given Trump’s dubious grasp of facts if not reality itself and his coterie of now loyal but equally challenged cabinet members.
Maybe it’s a cunning MAGA plan to help the domestic “one percenters”,(Pagans, Mongols, et.al) become competitive in the Fentanyl lab business, leveraging the skill set they’ve developed with the meth labs.
In the drug biz, sufficient demand will always be supplied, no matter what resources you devoted to an endless game of whackamole
The article doesn’t even mention the possible effect of such a boneheaded ham fisted move like this on the 1.6 million of us USians who live in Mexico. If the U.S. sends drones to attack drug cartels, does that mean it would be okay for Mexico to attack Arizona gun shops that supply the straw buyers of arms for the cartels?
Trump’s real target is MORENA, not the drug cartels. He wants to bring down the Sheinbaum regime. The success of the anti-neoliberal movement in America’s backyard is a far greater existential threat to America than drugs.
in any other administration, say…prior to trump 1.0….i’d say Yup, thats it.
but i dont really think this bunch(or the last one) is really capable of such machinations.
more likely just what it looks like: automatic reaction to a long term righty pebble in shoe.
none of these people look like deep thinkers or masterminds, to me.
My impression is there’s a bit of everything going on here.
As I noted in the post, the threats of intervention in Mexico began at least two years ago, with neocon mainstays Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham and William Barr leading the charge. It’s also worth noting that the US began meddling in Mexico’s elections back in February 2024 by accusing AMLO of narco financing, back when Biden was nominally in charge. At the very least what they’re trying to do is to corral the Sheinbaum government into massively escalating the fight against the cartels, thus keeping the violence on a nice heavy boil while also distracting her administration from other more pro-social policy agendas. The fact that Trump’s in the driving seat while all this is going on gives it all an added dash of unpredictability.
> The fact that Trump’s in the driving seat while all this is going on gives it all
> an added dash of unpredictability.
Yes, but …
I think it’s imperative to maintain perspective on this (as of course on everything else). Old age has shown me the wisdom of a quip I heard years ago: ‘After all is said and done, a lot more will have been said than done.’
Very good point, Ciroc. Have hoisted the essence of your comment into the post with the customary hat-tip. Thanks.
Yes, of course it is.
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” (Michael Ledeen)
So we’re going upmarket for what constitutes a crappy little country? What about if this crappy “little” country fights back with their own drones? Plus Iran could send them a DVD with the plans for missiles that they could put into a 3D printer. I question whether the US could succeed in any military venture against people that have the ability to fight back. It’s one thing droning and dropping bombs on people with no AAD and primitive offensive weapons, as both the US and Israel have been doing all this century. But I’m not sure the USA! USA! USA! system can withstand the shock of an unambiguous military defeat after all the self-mythologizing we’ve done. There’s a risk of that with both Mexico and Iran.
Destroying the cartels is at least very hard (if not totally impossible), but it should be relatively easy to force them into hiding – and if they hide in the big cities they will (!) causes major problems for the Mexican state (multiple times more than now).
From an imperial point of view it makes quite a lot of sense to keep your neighbors small, especially if they show signs of uppity. Destabilization would achieve that.
It also makes sense wrt to party politics. A civil war just beyond your southern border and increasing gang brutality will cause fear in your country, thus strengthening the hardliners promising to have a “solution” for that.
Of course such a strategy has problems. One of them is imperial overreach.
I don’t envy the next US president.
Thank you for this article, Nick. Late yesterday, I posted a link to this Grayzone investigative report , which ties Ecuador’s current President Noboa to certain drug cartels (but not all) which are using Ecuador as a conduit for drugs being smuggled to such countries as Croatia and Italy, most likely to be distributed to other countries from there. The story piqued my interest because up until a year or two ago, I was considering Ecuador as a possible relocation candidate. My interested soured as I noted that Ecuador had adopted the USD for its currency*, it had elected Noboa, a right-wing candidate, as president (a popular left-wing candidate was killed in a high-profile assassination), and Noboa had invited the u.s. to come in with troops, and now a base is scheduled to be built in the Galapagos Islands (!!!).
Noboa attended Trump’s inauguration, and as recently as 3/29, he’s met privately with Trump at Mar a Largo ostensibly to cement the agreement for the u.s. to build a base there** and provide more troops to help get the cartels under control. Obviously Trump has to know about the alleged drug trafficking by Noboa via his family’s business. So, what’s the real objective? It certainly doesn’t seem to be stopping drug running. Is it to further u.s. control in South America? Is it to keep drugs pouring into into certain parts of Europe? A little of both or none of the above?
*I think the USD facilitates the drug cartels’ business.
**I think Ecuador’s constitution forbids foreign bases on Ecuador’s soil.
I recall the scene in the movie Flight Of The Phoenix where the Jimmy Stewart pilot character gets into a big argument with the German engineer passenger about “toy planes”
This was an interesting piece. Although, as always it focused on the folks that manufacture and supply drugs as the cause of the problem. I say that, if we really want to end illegal drug use in the US, we need to conduct massive studies on why a significant percentage of our adult population, teenage population and pre-teen population need to self medicate just in order to get through the darn day.
Sadly, I don’t think that this will ever happen, because the country would have to face some (many?) disturbing truths about itself. For example… the role of the economic system in causing despair.
It is easier to keep blaming those cartels in Mexico than to do the deeply needed work to begin taking care of our US population regarding employment, housing, health care, etc.
The bible says, if there is a demand, the market shall provide. Folks that manufacture and supply drugs are just doing the capitalism & free market thingy. Those drug cartels in Mexico got nothing on drug cartels in USA (aka. Big Pharma).
marco rubio’s appointment to secretary of state has already proven awful for anyone in the ‘united states’ backyard’ . he’s an alumni of my university which was already discussed here as letting a venezuelan opposition leader teach classes . the administration of the school bent the knee prematurely to desantis so we have anti-abortion groups putting huge banners of fetus gore up in the quad . reminds me of how rubio wants all caribbean states to kiss up to america because of cuba going rouge
This could be basis of the plot of an updated version of the Blood Meridian. McCarthy was asked once what the story was about. I paraphrase his answer: A bunch of good old boys went down to Mexico and it kept getting darker and darker.