Unpacking the Dangerous Myth of 'Narco-Terrorism'

Between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, the US government has a long history of waging bloody and unsuccessful wars against broad concepts that can not be meaningfully defeated. What makes the government’s latest “armed conflict” unique is not just its combination of these two failures, but also that its target—“narco-terrorism”—is largely a myth.

Under the title “Operation Southern Spear,” the Trump administration has launched a campaign intended to target the drug cartels that it designated as terrorist organizations earlier this year. So far, this has involved at least 21 airstrikes, killing upwards of 83 people on small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific; a military buildup involving 15,000 troops; and covert operations by the CIA in Venezuela. Though President Donald Trump lacks the legal authority for these activities, the Senate’s latest attempt to restrain military action failed in a narrow vote of 49-51.

Key to the White House’s case is the idea of “narco-terrorism,” a label they have applied to both the airstrike victims and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The US claims that Maduro is closely connected to the Tren de Aragua cartel (despite a National Intelligence Council analysis suggesting otherwise) and that he is the leader of the supposed “Cartel of the Suns” (which, despite its terrorist designation, does not exist as an organization). The specter of “narco-terrorism” has also been invoked to bash the progressive governments of Colombia and Honduras.

To say that “narco-terrorism” is a myth is not to deny the obvious violence associated with the black market drug trade, but to acknowledge that the term does more to confuse than to clarify. The idea does not accurately explain the complex dynamics of the global drug trade; instead, it radically oversimplifies the problem. By portraying military intervention as a response to drug trafficking, the “narco-terrorism” myth allows politicians to ignore all of the ways in which military intervention is a cause of drug trafficking.

Strange Origins

“Narco-terrorism” has its origins in the early 1980s, when US Ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tambs began referring to leftist rebel groups like FARC and ELN as “narco-guerillas.” Some of his specific claims were fabricated: After Colombian police completed what was then the largest drug bust in history, Tambs falsely claimed that communist rebels were involved in the operation, prompting another State Department official to admit that “Tambs got ahead of the evidence.” Regardless, the idea quickly gained acceptance as a justification for military intervention in Latin America, suggesting that the only way to reduce drug abuse at home was to wage war against foreign suppliers. By 1985, the Reagan administration was alleging an “emerging alliance between drug smugglers and arms dealers in support of terrorists and guerrillas.”

Ironically, Tambs himself later played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal, helping to traffic drugs and guns for the violent anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. The full scope of the CIA’s involvement in bringing the Contra’s drugs into the US remains unclear, but at the very least it is obvious that officials like Tambs helped support the group. Thus, the idea of “narco-terrorism” was created by someone who participated in it.

The “narco-terrorism” label has always been controversial. Drug traffickers are motivated solely by profit, while “terrorists” and “guerillas” are motivated by goals like ideology and territory. Though some armed groups in Latin America engaged directly in the drug trade, many others either had no involvement or were involved only by “taxing” traffickers for revenue. “Narco-terrorism” misrepresents this extortion racket between two opposed groups as an alliance of like-minded organizations. By “combining two threats that have traditionally been treated separately,” critics argue that the term can “complicate rather than facilitate discussions on the two concepts…”

Many of the largest foreign interventions in US history created new pathways for drugs to reach the country while also generating new demand among traumatized veterans.

Far from being allies, rebels and drug traffickers often fought one another. Most rebels were communist outsiders, while many traffickers hoped to build ties with Colombia’s elite. The rebels sometimes imposed wage and price controls in coca-growing communities in hopes of building popular support, rules which ate into the traffickers’ profits. These tensions eventually escalated into violent conflict, and it was later revealed that dozens of officers from the US-backed Colombian military had collaborated with the traffickers in a campaign to crush the rebels. The rebels and traffickers were “staunchly opposed social forces” in the words of journalist Collet Merrill, meaning that “narco-guerilla” was “less an analytical model than a political slogan.”

The Trump administration’s definition of “narco-terrorism” seems even less useful than its original meaning. Speaking to the United Nations, a US delegate commented on the recent terrorist designations of cartels to say: “When you flood American streets with drugs, you are terrorizing America...” Similarly, the White House claims that drug imports “constitute an armed attack” all by themselves. In other words, traffickers no longer need to have any “terrorist” connections to be considered “narco-terrorists,” because all drug trafficking is now considered “terrorism.”

The language used in our debates about drug trafficking is poisoned by this type of imprecision. Even the concept of a “cartel” is suspect, as it often portrays loose networks of organized criminals cooperating with state authorities as well-coordinated paramilitaries that lack government connections. This sort of terminology survives because of its usefulness to government officials in search of ready-made explanations, officials who did not want to draw attention to their own role in the global drug trade.

Stop Hitting Yourself

Many of the largest foreign interventions in US history created new pathways for drugs to reach the country while also generating new demand among traumatized veterans, leading some scholars to conclude that “every major foreign war of the past century produced a domestic drug crisis.” At times, the US government has even purposefully supported drug traffickers to advance its short-term objectives.

During the Vietnam War, the CIA allegedly facilitated drug trafficking in Southeast Asia to help fund anti-communist organizations, helping to turn the region into the source of the majority of the world’s heroin by the early 1970s. Much of this heroin made its way to US soldiers stationed overseas and, through the trafficking efforts of troops like Army Master Sergeant Ike Atkinson, to the United States itself. The subsequent rise in drug addiction helped inspire the original “War on Drugs,” a war which the US fought on both sides of.

The pressures of the Drug War helped bring Mexican “cartels” into existence. One of the first such organizations—the “Guadalajara Cartel”—emerged as an organized effort to survive the joint US-Mexican attempts at destroying the then-disorganized drug trade. Later efforts to support foreign security forces backfired when some of the Mexican soldiers who received special forces training in the US defected to form their own cartel: “Los Zetas,” which carried out a wave of extreme violence in Mexico in the 2000s-2010s.

With our focus exclusively on military efforts to disrupt the supply of drugs, little time is spent on the real solution: reducing demand.

Similarly to Vietnam, the War in Afghanistan created new channels for heroin trafficking. After the Taliban lost control of the country, a US government report noted that Afghanistan saw “increased poppy cultivation and drug production as farmers and traffickers took advantage of the power vacuum…” The growing opium trade corrupted the highest levels of US-backed leadership in Afghanistan. As a result, US-occupied Afghanistan was “producing nine times more heroin than the rest of the world combined,” according to journalist Seth Harp.

Sensing a profitable opportunity to connect this supply of heroin with the demand at home, a group of current and former US troops began smuggling the opium into the world’s largest military base, Fort Bragg. These smugglers then moved the drugs around the country by plugging into the distribution network of the Los Zetas cartel (whose founders had coincidentally received training at Fort Bragg decades earlier). US military interventions thus produced all of the necessary ingredients to inflame the opioid crisis: a flood of new heroin production abroad, flights to smuggle it into the US, and a cartel with the skills to distribute it.

These are just a few of the moments throughout history when the US government facilitated drug trafficking all over the world. More recently, the US provided extensive support to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández despite widespread allegations that he was connected to cocaine trafficking. Only after he left office did the US government bother to indict him for “protect[ing] some of the largest drug traffickers in the world,” helping to bring more than 400 tons of cocaine into the country. In an absurd act of hypocrisy, President Trump recently pardoned Hernández on the grounds that the convicted drug trafficker was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

Believe it or not, this was not even the first time that something like this had happened. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration tolerated the obvious drug trafficking of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega because of his cooperation with their geopolitical priorities. As with Hernández, the government even provided cover for Noriega by claiming that he helped fight against drug trafficking. But when US officials finally lost patience with him near the end of the decade, a Panamanian official predicted that “suppressing drug trafficking might be the Reagan administration’s excuse for an invasion.”

Though George H.W. Bush claimed that the 1989 invasion of Panama was intended in part “to combat drug trafficking,” others were skeptical. The Academy Award-winning documentary The Panama Deception argued that the true purpose of the invasion was to reinforce US dominance over the Panama Canal (a topic which is now an obsession of President Trump’s). Though this regime change operation against a former ally serves as a classic example of how military interventionism creates its own villains, it is now often remembered as a success, even earning praise from Republicans arguing in favor of Trump’s airstrikes. Panamanian diplomat Carlos Ruiz-Hernández recently criticized this comparison as a “fundamentally flawed” analogy which “persists because it’s emotionally satisfying for US hawks.”

Get Real

By misunderstanding and overemphasizing a select few of the groups involved in the drug trade, the “narco-terrorism” myth redirects our attention away from more significant causes of drug trafficking. First, the focus on supply distracts us from the far more important question of demand—so long as drug addiction remains a major problem in this country, the drugs will always find a way in. Additionally, the exclusive focus on non-state actors distracts us from the role that our own government plays in facilitating the global drug trade.

Framing “Operation Southern Spear” as a battle against “narco-terrorists” is a desperate attempt to commit new violence using old excuses, one which ignores the security state’s history of creating its own enemies. In truth, this is a domestic problem as much as a foreign one. Of those convicted of drug trafficking in the US, 80% are citizens. MS-13, now designated as a foreign terrorist organization, was founded in Los Angeles and spread abroad by the US government’s deportation practices. More than two-thirds of the Mexican cartels’ guns come from the US, and US military weaponry regularly shows up in the hands of cartel members.

With our focus exclusively on military efforts to disrupt the supply of drugs, little time is spent on the real solution: reducing demand. In fact, the Trump administration has undermined real public health solutions by repeatedly firing employees at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, discouraging lifesaving harm reduction efforts, and proposing massive cuts to drug abuse services. No amount of immoral and illegal airstrikes will ever save even a fraction of the lives lost by these decisions.

Perhaps the greatest flaw of “narco-terrorism” is that it encourages us to believe that complex human problems have simple military solutions. Sociologist C. Wright Mills once astutely criticized US elites for accepting a “military definition of reality,” a distorted perspective which prevents them from imagining policy solutions that do not involve military intervention. So long as the government insists upon seeing non-military problems through a military lens, they will never be solved.