Trump’s Phoney War on Narcoterrorism

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Trump’s Phoney War on Narcoterrorism

 

The Shield of the Americas sets a dangerous agenda for the Western hemisphere.

 

by Jordan Liz –The Progressive - March 30, 2026

 

On March 7, President Donald Trump hosted the inaugural “Shield of the Americas” summit, bringing together leaders from across the Caribbean and Latin America. The summit’s purpose was to announce the formation of a new international coalition committed “to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all.” 

 

This is not a new initiative for the Trump Administration. Between early September and March 26, it launched forty-seven airstrikes targeting alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, resulting in the extrajudicial killing of at least 163 civilians. 

 

Yet, despite this declared war on narcoterrorism, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty in 2024 of taking bribes and allowing drug traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. 

 

None of Trump’s crusade against narcoterrorism is actually about drugs, crime, or terrorism. Like President Richard Nixon’s infamous “War on Drugs,” Trump’s real targets are his political opponents. As John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon aide, explained it in a 1994 interview:

 

“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.”

 

Trump is using the same playbook. Consider Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro was a longstanding Trump critic. In 2019, he referred to Trump’s government as a “gang of extremists” that he hoped would be “defeated by powerful world-wide public opinion.”

 

In 2025, Trump claimed that Maduro was the leader of the “Cartel de los Soles,” an alleged drug trafficking association in Venezuela. This was a strategic choice. Like antifa, Cartel de los Soles is not a formal organization with a clearly defined leadership structure. Rather, experts describe it as a loose network of individuals broadly involved in the drug trade. 

 

Despite this, as with antifa, the Trump Administration designated the fictional cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The presidents of Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, and the Dominican Republic—all Shield members—followed suit, as did Peru, a non-Shield member. That designation gave Trump the pretext to invade Venezuela, kidnap Maduro, and put him on trial for his alleged narco-crimes. Now that he’s in custody, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has dropped the claim that the Cartel de los Soles is an actual organization. 

 

Full a t:

 

https://progressive.org/op-eds/trumps-phoney-war-on-narcoterrorism-liz-20260330/