For decades across Latin America and the Caribbean, U.S. drug enforcement officials have tried to cut off narcotics trafficking by intercepting boats, trucks and even horses laden with drugs and arresting the smugglers.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said those efforts are not bold enough. He has helped steer the Trump administration toward a much more aggressive — and deadly — tactic: use military force to destroy suspected drug boats and kill the people on board, without a legal process.
“Interdiction doesn’t work,” Mr. Rubio said at a news conference in Mexico City last week when asked about the U.S. attack on a boat in the Caribbean. President Trump had boasted that the strike had killed at least 11 people.
“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” Mr. Rubio added. “And it’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now, I don’t know, but the point is the president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations.”
Mr. Rubio has cast himself as a top general in that war.
No senior Trump official has spoken more forcefully about the new campaign of violence against Latin American criminal groups and their allies. And no senior aide to Mr. Trump has as long a history working on Latin America policy.
Over 14 years as a Republican senator from Florida, Mr. Rubio pressed three administrations to go on the offense across the region. The son of anti-Communist immigrants from pre-revolutionary Cuba, he was motivated by his loathing for the Castro government and its allies, notably Venezuela — a stance well rewarded by Florida’s sizable population of expatriates from those countries.
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The post Rubio Leads Charge in Trump’s New War in Latin America appeared first on New York Times.
