First published in Stars and Stripes
By Robert Weiner and Hallvard Misje
To bomb-to-kill the people on Venezuelan boats and threaten a land war appears to be an excuse to weaken and remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the Trump administration dislikes. It has little to do with the drug issue, since Venezuela is a minuscule piece of the drugs issue.
The major suppliers of cocaine to the U.S. are Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico. The major supplier of fentanyl and methamphetamine and their chemicals is China (and via Myanmar), and includes transportation through Mexico. When you consider that President Donald Trump just pardoned from a 45-year prison term the ex-president of Honduras who said he wanted to shove the cocaine up the noses of the Gringos and was convicted of a conspiracy supplying 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., the administration comes across as not really caring about the drugs, just about getting Maduro out. Great Britain, a major U.S. cooperator against international financial crimes, and Colombia, a key (and the largest) partner in combating narcotics, now have both halted intelligence sharing in the Caribbean with America because of the apparent illegality and extreme nature of the U.S. military strikes. Barry McCarey, a retired U.S. Army general, was the commander of U.S. Southern Command and later was the White House National Drug Policy director who conducted several anti-drug missions to Latin America and Mexico on which we participated. His plan supporting Colombias aerial eradication and alternative crop substitution dropped cocaine production by half and reduced crack supplies in the U.S. by two-thirds.
On Dec. 3 he said that aerial eradication has been stopped in Colombia and as a result, in the last 10 years, cocaine production has tripled. His missions to Colombia helped teach the military there how to be eective in curtailing drug supplies and avoiding human rights violations which means not killing survivors hanging onto bombed boats at sea.
There is a right way and a wrong way including the military to conduct counternarcotics and drug interdiction. The current administration needs to learn those and stop playing politics against leaders they oppose at the expense of the real drug killing of Americans over 100,000 of whom die a year from drug overdoses.
Robert S. Weiner is former spokesman for White House Drug Policy Oice and U.S. House Narcotics Committee, participant in several government anti-drug missions to Latin America, and senior sta for Gen. Barry McCarey, Reps. Claude Pepper, Ed Koch, John Conyers and Charles Rangel, and Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Hallvard Misje is a Norwegian journalist, policy analyst at Robert Weiner Associates News, and was a border guard in the Norwegian army serving on the Russia-Norway border.
