Angry Planet - The War On Terror on Drugs

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comOn September 2, 2025 the United States escalated its decades long War on Drugs with a tactic borrowed from the War on Terror. It used a drone to blow up a boat it said was full of drugs then said the 11 people killed in the strike were terrorists.Is this legal? Does that matter?On this week’s Angry Planet, journalist Mike LaSusa of InSight Crime comes on the show to walk us through the ins and outs of America’s long-running War on Drugs and how War on Terror tactics are shaping the fight.What’s Tren de Aragua?The real connections between Tren de Aragua and the government of VenezuelaIs this legal?How America’s drug interdiction worksDoes violence deter?On narcoterrorismCartel as misnomerViolence isn’t sustainable“We don’t even know these people’s names.”America’s partners in the War on Terror on Drugs“Motivations matter.”How do you solve a problem like illicit drugs?How the Trump admin hurt its own cause in the drug warPoppies in AfghanistanDrug use as a moral failing11 is a lot people for a drug boatThe Cartel of the SunsHow War-on-Terror Tactics Could Change the Fight Against Organized CrimeBoat Suspected of Smuggling Drugs Is Said to Have Turned Before U.S. Attacked ItRand Paul Reveals Venezuela Boat Attack Was a Drone StrikeTren de Aragua: Fact vs. FictionHow Trump’s Anti-Money Laundering Rollback Could Help LatAm CriminalsSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Did you know that Angry Planet is almost entirely listeners supported? It's true. Just go to Angry PlanetPod.com, sign up.

You can get early access to our mainline episodes, and they are all commercial free. It really helps the show. There's a great one out right now that is all about dissecting. the brain rot memes of the Charlie Kirk shooter. If you really want to know what all of that stuff means and why we think the killer's ideology is more internet motivated and less of a left-wing, right-wing thing, then please check that out. It will not make you feel better, but you may understand a little bit more about what's going on. Without further ado, here's the show. Hello, and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

I am Matthew Galt, and we here at Angry Planet would just like to take it. a moment to congratulate Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North on his marriage to co-conspirator Fawn Hall after all these years. Love truly wins. So today we're going to be talking about the global war on terror on drugs. There's probably a better, more pithy way to say that. And we've got a wonderful guest here from Insight Crime. Sir, can you introduce yourself? Sure. Thanks, Matthew. My name is Mike Lassusa. I am the deputy director of content for Insight Crime, which is an NGO that covers organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean. So we're going to be talking about, obviously, the strike on the boat in Venezuela, and kind of that as an entry point into talking about war on terror tactics being used to fight organized crime.

And coincidentally, Insight Crime has got a panel coming up about this. Can you tell us about this? Yeah. So obviously, as we're going to be talking about today, this is a new development in, or, you know, kind of a continuation of some developments that we've been seeing in the U.S. war on drugs. And so we're going to be having a panel about that issue on September 26th. So if you enjoy this conversation and you want to participate in that briefing with me and my co-director, Stephen Dudley, you'll be able to ask us some questions and be a little bit more engaged in the conversation than the podcast format will allow us. And that's on September 26th at 10 a.m. And we will have a link to it in the show notes. And it is something that you can attend on Zoom if any of the listeners are interested in. Yep.

All right. So I have so many questions. I guess the first is last week, America blew up a boat in international waters. Right? That's the most uncontroversial version of the events that I can lay out. Yeah. What can you tell me from your perspective, like what actually happened here? Yeah, I mean, obviously, we are still investigating that.

Pretty much every other news outlet in the world is still investigating that. So more information is coming out every day. But basically what you said is what we know. The Trump administration said that they blew up an alleged drug-carrying boat. They said it left from Venezuela. They said it was manned by. members of the Venezuelan gang, Trandera Agua, and they said that 11 people died in this strike. What is this cartel?

Like, how strong is it? How much of a known quantity is it? So are you referring to Trandaeragua? Yes. Okay, yeah. So Trondaragua, I don't think we would describe it as a cartel. I don't think it's normally described that way. We kind of shy away from that term in general because of its economic connotations.

But let me talk about Train de Aragua. Trained Aragua is a Venezuelan prison gang. It was born in the mid-2010s in Venezuela, in the state of Aragua, in a prison there. The gang became very powerful within that prison and was able to project its power not only onto the streets of Venezuela, but eventually made its way into other countries in South America with large Venezuelan diaspora populations. So the gang was causing pretty significant security concerns in those areas, and those governments then put pressure on Maduro to do something about the gang. So for the past, like roughly two years, the Venezuelan government has been concentrating pretty heavily on trying to dismantle this gang and disrupt its activities. Well, that's, it stands in stark contrast to what we hear from the Trump administration, which is that Maduro is behind this gang, or is,

Like there's vague references to him funding it or being in control of it in some way. So there's like no evidence of that at all. No. The ties between the Venezuelan government and Trin de Ragua are somewhat complex. But I think it's, you know, there's a pretty straightforward way to explain it, which is around the time that the gang was born in the mid-2010s, the Venezuelan government was having a lot of problems in prison system. So there were a lot of high-profile institutions. instance of violence, riots, etc. And the solution that they basically came up with was we're going to leave what happens within the prisons to the prisoners themselves and just make sure that they

just stay inside the prison. That's our job is just keep them in there. Whatever they do inside is up to them. So they handed control of prisons, including this prison in the state of Aragua, two gang leaders. Those gang leaders were able to create basically criminal empires behind bars. They were protected from the outside. They were protected from rivals. They had a captive base of people that they could extort and earn money from and recruit for their gang activities. And so many gangs, including Trineda Dara Gwa, grew pretty powerful under that system. The difference with Trin Derauga was it was able to expand beyond Venezuela's borders. And it was the only gang that was able to do that. And is this, if it is what they say

it is. Is this the kind of thing that they do? Is, like, 11 people on a boat, uh, shipping unknown substances? Is that, is that typical of the way that they do business? No, Trin de Ragua is not typically associated with this kind of international drug trafficking. Um, they're associated with other criminal economies. So primarily extortion, human smuggling, human trafficking. Um, some small scale drug dealing. So like retail level drug dealing, but again, not. not international narco trafficking. And what has Venezuela said about this? What's the latest from them?

Well, with respect to Trane de Ragua, the government there claims that the gang has been smashed. Like I said, about two years ago, they really turned against the gang. The Maduro government mounted this huge operation to retake control of the prison that this gang had used as its headquarters for many years. And then they cooperated with countries around the prison. the region to arrest, you know, some, some fairly high-level leaders. So they've really, they've really turned, turned a corner on the gang and put them in the, in the crosshairs. But what did they said about the strike? Oh, about the strike? Well, at first they said it was fake and that it was an AI video and it didn't happen. It seems pretty clear from our reporting on the ground and the reporting

that others have done that this strike really did happen. So, you know, at first it was a denial and it's also been sort of mixed with this messaging that is essentially saying, you know, this is, this is the U.S. It's not about drug trafficking, that it's really about, you know, taking out Maduro and seizing Venezuela's oil. That's kind of their general line. I think it's not not about that. It's about a lot of things. You know, I think that it's not not about that, perhaps. I wouldn't want to be the person in charge of processing Venezuelan oil, though.

It's not exactly an easy one to deal with. That aside, okay, but like I think the real thing that strikes me about this is that we have been kind of like you said at the beginning of the conversation, that this is just, this does feel like a natural evolution of something that's been happening in the U.S. for a long time, which is like war on terror tactics becoming part of the war on drugs. And like that stuff that we did in Afghanistan and Iraq and in the broader Middle East kind of coming home. It is not as if America hasn't been doing drug interdiction and fighting like a hot war against drugs for a long time. But this is the first time that like we've extra judiciously like killed. people in in you know on a boat like this right like nothing nothing like quite like this has ever

happened before no no as far as we know um nobody has ever been blown up on a alleged drug boat by a drone strike is this legal at all that is a question that a lot of people are asking um i know i've seen a lot of people who have um a background in law saying that they have questions about whether it was legal, the Trump administration hasn't said, what legal authorities it's relied on for the strike. You know, I'm not a legal expert, so I can't give a definitive answer on that, but it's certainly part of the conversation. I guess the other question is, if it's not legal, does that matter? I think that's an easier question to answer in many ways. In my view, I don't think it matters that much. I mean, nothing is going to bring those people back, right? They're dead.

strike happened, can't wind back the tape on that. I think it may have some implications, you know, deciding that question might have some implications for whether the Trump administration continues to use this kind of action in the future. But I think I saw J.D. Vance was asked about this, whether it was a war crime. And I don't know if I'm allowed to curse here, but he said he didn't. He said he didn't give a shit. So, you know, I think that implies that they don't really care whether it's legal. or not. Yeah, I think if we're in a crude era where you're going to have to be able to curse to quote the people that are in power.

Right. And that's just the way it is now. So is there, is this even a useful other than as a demonstration of power, like in prosecuting a war on drugs, is something like this even effective or useful, do you think? I think there's a limited way in which it can be effective as a deterrent. I think it's very unlikely that anyone right now is going to be operating these kind of boats in that part of the world for a legitimate fear of what might happen to them. But that does not at all mean that drugs are going to stop coming out of Venezuela or out of South America. and it's not likely to provide any deterrent outside of that immediate geographical area where the strike occurred. Why would you not, and this is something, I guess can you paint me, paint the audience a picture for people that may not know, like, how big an operation American drug interdiction is in Latin America? Because it's a, like, even, like, well, predating Trump by decades, this is like a pretty, we routinely do this, right? Yeah.

Yeah. In fact, the Coast Guard just offloaded, like, a record amount of drugs that had seized. It obviously didn't seize them all at once. But what they do is they do these seizures and they kind of, like, put them all together. And when they bring it back to the interdiction point, they say, we seized this many tons of drugs. And that's super common. That's been happening for many years. not only do U.S. forces themselves do these interdictions.

We obviously give foreign assistance in the form of intelligence, training, equipment, et cetera, to partner countries so that they can also perform these interdiction tasks. And like, do we know what the size of the forces? It's mostly the Coast Guard that are involved, correct? Yeah, primarily the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy are the ones doing the interdiction. And in these kind of in like open water right. But I mean it's not just it's in Latin America itself proper too that it means not the coast guard that's doing it there. But like American troops have gone into Latin America to process like do drug interdiction for decades. Normally we don't see US boots on the ground doing this kind of thing.

Like I said, it's it's more of a training, advising, an assisting type role. So the American forces wouldn't be the ones directly seizing the drugs, but they might be, you know, kind of there's been many instances in which they're, you know, right shoulder to shoulder with the people that are doing it who are, you know, who have the jurisdiction because it's their, their national territory. Right. And when, when the U.S. Coast Guard interdicts one of these boats, what usually happens to the people on it? So assuming that they are caught with drugs or contraband, then they are arrested and often prosecuted in the United States. And usually get information out of those people that can help you lead to other arrests, build out a map of the criminal organization, etc., right? Yeah, yeah. The vast majority of criminal cases, including drug cases in the U.S. are resolved through plea bargaining, so someone will agree to provide.

information or other assistance to law enforcement in exchange for prosecutors recommending a reduced sentence. And the Coast Guard is good enough at this that they can, I mean, they brag about it on their social media profiles all the time. They've got people that can like take out a motor from a helicopter and just stop a boat in its tracks. So it is not as if it's just like the droning a boat is such. an overwhelming escalation

that I just like I need I need the audience to understand that like we've been doing this for a long time. We're pretty good at it. It hasn't stopped the flow of drugs. And that just deciding to blow people up is a pretty big jump. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a very big jump. And I would say, you know, it's these, this kind of operation sending, you know, a drone and expending a missile. I think, you know, the reporting shows now that it might have been even more than one missile.

That's really, really expensive compared to the value that you're getting out of, you know, killing some people that are, frankly, the lowest, the lowest rungs of the drug trafficking chain, the most easily replaceable people. It's a really expensive, complicated thing to do for not much payoff. I'm going to ask you to, speculate, but like, why then do it? Why do this? I don't think I have to speculate. I think you can listen to what Trump and officials around him have said, which is that they want to deter people from doing this, right?

From except, like, a lot of the time what will happen is, you know, these communities that are on the coast, there aren't a ton of economic opportunities. So if you're a drug trafficker, you go in, you say, who's got a boat, here's some money, take this load. to Trinidad or one of these other islands that's nearby off the coast. So I think the goal is to change the cost-benefit calculation for the people that are, you know, considering accepting those kind of offers. If you think that the risk is that you're going to get blown up by a drone strike, you may be less willing to do that. So I think that's their theory. We'll see how that plays out for them.

I think America really likes drugs. And until you figure out a way to solve that problem, I can't imagine that the economic incentives to bring drugs into America is going to go away. Yeah, I mean, I would add that it's, you know, the Trump administration and high-level officials have argued that this boat was headed for the United States, but they haven't actually provided any evidence of that. And something that we know very well from our research over many years in Latin America is that drugs are increasing, in particular cocaine, is increasingly headed to Europe. So it's a certainly possibility that these drugs did not even have the United States to their final destination. And I mean, speaking of that, something that happened that was reported out by the New York Times earlier today before we jumped on the call is that the boat was turning around when it was shot, possibly.

what's the what's the information like what do we know about that yeah i mean we haven't independently confirmed that reporting um but it doesn't sound far-fetched i mean if you if you look up i think pretty much everybody in the world at this point knows what these drones look like and they know that they're scary and you don't want to be underneath them um so it sounds like what happened as they saw this drone decided not to continue making the run and turned around um again we haven't independently confirmed that, but that's what the New York Times reported. And we're killed anyway. Correct. Yeah.

So the way that this works, I guess, in the just in like the mind of the people prosecuting the drug war is that these people are not just drug dealers. They are a narco-terrorist. what is a narco-terrorist? What's the kind of the origin of this term? And like I know earlier you said you didn't like the word cartel. How do you feel about the word narco-terrorist? Yeah, I mean, I think it has pretty limited utility in terms of understanding this phenomenon. I would say that for me, the biggest difference to understand between drug trafficking and terrorism is

the motivation behind it, right? So with drug trafficking, the motivation is simply and purely to make money. Like, you just want to make money and the less violence and disturbance you cause around that, probably the higher your profit margin, right? The more smoothly, easily you can get these drugs to the destination market, the more money you're going to make. Terrorism is motivated by ideology, right? It's motivated by beliefs about morals and ethics and doesn't necessarily correspond. to profitability or business incentives, economic incentives. And so I think it's really important to understand that distinction because if you properly understand the motivation of the people and groups involved in these two different illicit activities, you will be better able to

formulate policies to address them, right? Like what is going to stop someone who has a certain ideology based on moral, ethical, religious, whatever deeply held beliefs is completely different than what's going to stop somebody who is just out to make money. So I think it's really important to understand that distinction. So not a fan of the word narco-terrorist then? Yeah, again, I think it conflates to things that don't have, you know, terrorism is not, I think we often fall into this trap kind of following political discourse of calling anything that scares us terrorism. If it's terrifying or scary, it's terrorism. And I think that, you know, that might be sort of an easy colloquial way of speaking about this. But in terms of formulating policy,

again, it's really important to understand the different motivations behind that and behind drug trafficking. Why don't you like the word cartel? Because it is not necessarily an accurate description of how these groups actually function. So we often hear, I think probably the most frequent reference whenever we're talking about Mexican criminal groups, people call them cartels. A cartel is a centrally managed, centrally organized, a group that has the goal of maintaining economic hegemony over a certain sector. The groups that are often called cartels are really very much dispersed, diffuse networks that don't operate in that way. So like with a cartel, like the classic cartel example is the Medellín cartel of Pablo Escobar.

And there was one guy, Pablo Escobar, at the top, basically running everything through him and a group of close allies. That's not how most of the groups that we colloquially refer to as cartels. That's just not how they operate anymore. It's much more decentralized and much more horizontal. So I think the term is just not descriptive of the reality. And I don't want to downplay. Things do get fuzzy, I think, because some of these criminal organizations do run, they don't have territorial ambitions, most of them. But they do want it, like you said, their motives are moneymaking.

But some of them do have like parallel state-like structures in territories that they control. they do kill politicians and journalists. They stage horrifying massacres to send a message. Some of the violence that's perpetrated by these groups is horrifying, right? Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think it's important not to fall into the trap of describing this as terrorism, even though it is terrifying. These incidents are meant to instill terror in many cases.

but again, the motivation is not to achieve some sort of ideological objective, like imposing your moral or ethical system on a population. In the cases, well, I guess, you know, we have to be careful how we talk about this because there are still groups that are ideologically motivated and that fund their ideological struggle through drug trafficking. So in those cases, it's a bit more complicated. but in the majority of the cases that I think we're talking about, certainly in many of the cases that the Trump administration has referred to, you know, for example, the Mexican quote-unquote cartels as terrorists, those groups do commit serious violence, often politically inflected violence, but that violence is, again, for the purpose of controlling a criminal economy

for the purpose of making money. They don't have an ideological goal in mind when they're doing that. these things. Do you think, like, I'll play devil's advocate for just a minute. Do you think ratcheting up the violence here and doing like a saccharioification of the border could ever be effective in tamping down the drug war? I mean, it's, obviously it's hard to, it's hard to say without knowing, you know, what the specific contours of all that might might entail.

But what I will say is like, in general, what we have seen in our research is that these kind of militarized, um, harsh tactics against drug trafficking and organized crime in general tend not to be sustainable in the long term. Um, they may, they may generate some. some temporary drops in violence, some changes in the way that criminal groups operate, changes in criminal dynamics. But they are not generally, I mean, really the only example where we've seen even a little bit of sustainability from this kind of like really harsh campaign is in El Salvador, where the government basically locked up, you know, thousands and thousands of people, you know, many of whom were only locked up on very, very limited evidence of their ties to the gangs. And that has really decreased violence in that country, has really disrupted the activities of particularly the MS-13.

So, you know, there are some instances where you can see this kind of harsh approach having some success. But often what we see is that this kind of militarized campaign, number one, it creates issues in terms of human rights and civil liberties and all that kind of stuff. but it also tends to fragment these groups. So if you take out a powerful top leader, as we did in the 90s with Pablo Escobar, what happens is that these groups then fragment. They don't necessarily die. They just kind of become more loosely organized and continue their activities, but without the centralized leadership,

which in many ways makes them harder to combat because then you're fighting, you know, a bunch of different groups instead of one centralized organization. Well, then we may be entering an era where we just did what we did for decade in the Middle East, which is find the next guy that's in charge, lock in on his cell phone signal, and then just assassinate him, right? Yeah, I mean, I would say in this case, it's a little different, at least so far, because they didn't target a top leader. They targeted the lowest of the low, right? We don't even know these people's names. So, and I don't think that we would know who they were if they revealed the names.

So, you know, in the case of like targeting, yeah, like every other week you hear we got the top ISIS guy. Well, in those cases, they're targeting the top rungs. In this case, they were targeting, you know, the opposite side of the chain, basically. Can you talk about what other kind of war on terror tactics you're seeing? the America start to ramp up along the border and in Latin America. Like what else are you seeing that maybe you're worried about or you're concerned about? Well, I think one of the most important things that the Trump administration has done is adding these groups to the foreign terrorist organization list. What that does is it basically gives you powers to sanction these groups economically,

target them, which is very important, right, as we've been talking about, profit is the motive. And so if you can cut off the money flows, that can be a big dent in these groups' operations. So, you know, just I think the biggest thing under the Trump administration has been the change in rhetoric and just talking about these groups as terrorist groups using the tools of the war on terror like these kind of drone strikes that are very much associated with those, with that other theater of operations, so to speak. And I think many of the other aspects are less visible right now, but they're still there. So like all the surveillance architecture that we built up since 9-11 is also being deployed,

has been for years, but is still being deployed by the Trump administration to target these groups. So yeah, we have legal tools. have surveillance tools, we have military tools. Pretty much all of it is is on the board now. Who are going to be America's partners in the region? That is a good question. And I think it depends to a great extent on politics. So right now, to just take an example, Colombia, the world's biggest producer of cocaine, one of the most historically important partners for the United States in the war on drugs, is led by a leftist president who has, had, has decent relationships with leftist governments, including next door Venezuela.

So, you know, there's talk right now about whether the Trump administration will decertify the Colombian government and say that its efforts to fight drug trafficking aren't good enough. But what's likely to happen in the next election is that a more conservative, more right-wing president will be elected, in which case the government will be much more likely to be open to the kind of militaristic approach to the drug war that the United States wants to take. So it's kind of hard to say, like, who will be an ally? Who is an ally is a little bit difficult, too. If you look at a country like Mexico, do they cooperate with the United States?

Yes. But are there significant tensions in that security cooperation relationship? Absolutely. So, you know, there are countries that are sort of more on board with the direction the Trump administration is going. There's countries that have more reservations. But there are very few that do not cooperate at all, period. Like Venezuela is one that just doesn't cooperate. Nicaragua, Cuba, I mean, you know, the usual suspects.

What are the tension lines with Mexico right now? Well, Trump administration has been obviously using the threat of tariffs to try to extract concessions from Mexico on a number of fronts, including this issue of drug trafficking and organized crime. And so I don't think, I think just anybody can understand nobody likes to be threatened into doing something, right? The Mexican government understands the security threat posed by these groups. They understand the, you know, the way that they make their money is getting drugs into the United States, and they understand that they have a role to play in addressing that issue. And they understand that working with the United States is, you know, crucial to doing that. But when that cooperation is seen as being coerced, it just makes the relationship more tense and more difficult. Is it really just a...

so much stuff is like a tone thing with Trump and the administration. There's so much of this that feels like, it's like aesthetic in its theater, but with deadly consequences. We are talking about 11 people whose names we don't know dead in the Caribbean, right? In part to make a show of how America is going to be tough in this realm now. Um, how do you, how do you partner with somebody like that? Do you have thoughts on that? I think that there are, there are strong relationships outside of the sort of, um, the, the bigger

headline kind of relationships like the, the relationship between Mexican president Claudia Shinebaum and President Trump is obviously the one that most people are going to be familiar with, because that's in the headlines. They're the, the big name leaders. But there's all, all these people that we, whose names, you know, we may not know, at the lower levels, mid-level folks in, you know, the Justice Department, in the military, in the State Department, that are, that are cooperating with their counterparts in Mexico on a sort of more day-to-day practical basis that's not necessarily about projecting an image as a leader, as a head of state, as a politician that wants to be, you know, re-elected or, you know, continue to have political power. So I think, you know,

those relationships at the more day-to-day practical level are really important. And I think a lot of things continue to get done, even though there's these sort of like bigger picture tensions going on kind of as a background. As long as the eye of Sauron doesn't fall upon you, things will continue kind of in the background as they have been. Yeah. When did you first notice, when did this become an area of interest for,

you, this idea that there was an escalation of war on terror tactics in the America's drug war? Well, you know, I'm, I was born in 1990. So, you know, I kind of came of age. You know, I was, I was becoming a teenager as the United States was entering the Iraq War. And so my whole kind of like education, my higher education and early career was, you know, the war on terror was the backdrop for that. And as somebody who was studying journalism, investigative journalism,

with a focus on national security, you know, that was the big issue for those many years. I got, I got sort of personally attracted to the work in South America and Latin America because I had some language skills and experiences in my personal life that drew me that way. But, yeah, I've been thinking,

I mean, it's, to me, it's, it's all U.S. national security policy, right? I think we don't need to necessarily. There's good reasons to talk about things in silos, but there's also good reasons to think about them holistically. And so I think, yeah, I don't necessarily remember a certain point that made me connect these two issues. For me, it's kind of always been part of the same thing. That's super interesting because this is something that a friend of the show, Joseph Trevithic from the drive, talks about a lot when I talk to him.

is that like there is this siloing off, but it is all of the same piece. And it's like, like war on terror is actually a continuation of drug war. And then now it's just kind of circling back around. Right. Can you talk about why we silo? Can you just talk about that a little bit more?

Like why do we silo these things off? Why is that perhaps not helpful? Why is it important to see it all of a piece? Yeah, I mean, I think I'll start by saying, just kind of reiterating why I think it is important to sometimes silo these issues. It's for what I was talking about earlier, right? The motivations matter. The intentions of these groups matter. And addressing the groups, you know, based on those intentions is important.

So I think there are sometimes good reasons to think about these things in silos. But I, and then I think there's why do we silo them? There's additional bureaucratic concerns, right? like who gets what funding for what mission, right, like after 9-11 terrorism was the big issue. And so all of the funding that Congress wanted to provide was for terrorism. And so, you know, if you're an agency that wants to keep its budget big, you want to keep your people on staff, you're an agency leader that doesn't want to have to fire people. You're going to turn your attention to what Congress is willing to fund. So I think there's a big bureaucratic component to why these things get siloed in that way.

And then there's also, you know, a real, a real component to these are just different, they're just different issues. But I think it is important to talk about them as a holistic piece because as we're seeing, you know, the tools, the legal tools, the physical equipment is being used for both purposes. And often they seem to be relying on sort of similar either legal, legal bases or just sort of operational logic when they're approaching these two issues. What do you mean by operational logic? So like the idea that you can throw a bunch of military assets at a problem and crush it out, basically is what I'm referring to. Right. We've seen how well that's worked in the past 50 years of American foreign policy has gone super well every time we've done that. How do you solve a problem like the drug war, if you're going. not with overwhelming military might. That's the million dollar question, right? And it's something that we think about every single day at Insight Crime because it is.

It's really easy. And I'll admit, we fall into this trap ourselves sometimes. It's really easy to criticize these efforts and say, look, it's failing. It's failed for 50 years. You know, it's not working. So then the question that obviously everyone should be asking is, what could work. And that's the question you're asking now. And I think there are, again, some, there's some models out there for what can work. I think, you know, addressing money laundering.

Money is the lifeblood of these groups. That is important. That's an important aspect. There's big challenges that come with that. So those need to be taken into account. But, you know, I think a combination of what we've seen be successful in the past in other countries that have really dealt with organized crime problems in a sustainable way as a combination of focusing on the money laundering aspect, taking away the assets of these groups, and then building big, complex cases in which you take down the most important links in the chain. That doesn't necessarily mean taking down the top people. Sometimes if you can take out a really important broker or middle manager, you can disrupt the entire chain both above and below that link.

So I think you just have to be really thoughtful about the exact contours of criminal dynamics that you're talking about, really understanding these networks, understanding how they operate, understanding where those important links are and targeting those. But that is all very complex, lengthy work. And it's much simpler, faster, and easier to just, like, shoot somebody. Yeah, it doesn't feel as good as blowing up a boat in the Caribbean, right? Yeah. So you talked about money laundering. and this is something you've covered before quite extensively. And there are things that the Trump administration has done that are perhaps counterproductive

to fighting cartel or fighting these criminal organizations via the money. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So the policies are still somewhat in flux. And it's been a couple of months since I really dug into this. So I don't want to say anything that's inaccurate because I think some things have changed, particularly in recent weeks. But, yeah, essentially when the Trump administration first came in, it's suspended enforcement of a crucial law that was intended to tackle money laundering. And this was the Corporate Transparency Act.

One of the biggest, most important parts of this law was that it would require companies to tell authorities, tell federal authorities who actually owns and controls the company. So as many of your listeners might know, you can kind of go set up a company pretty anonymously in the U.S. at the state level. You can just sort of find someone to be your registered agent. They don't have to ever do anything for the company other than basically except your mail. And you can kind of hide or you were able to hide behind that. The Corporate Transparency Act, the intention was that you would have to say, look, I know this person is the registered agent, but I am the person that actually benefits from this corporation's existence. And that was supposed to help authorities track down.

Who is using these corporations? Who's really benefiting from them? Who does this money really belong to and where did it come from? The Trump administration suspended enforcement of that, trying to sort of figure out some – basically the argument was that this is an onerous burden on businesses that's going to have negative economic impacts. So they said they wanted to suspend enforcement while they figured out a better way to apply the law. I believe that they have issued new rules recently, or at least preliminary ones,

that they're sort of moving towards reestablishing the law, like reinstituting their enforcement of the law under some new guidelines. But that was a concerning period when we weren't sure, you know, are they just going to kill this what was described as like the most important anti-money laundering law in a generation? are they just going to kill it? It doesn't seem like that's what's happening, but it was concerning at that time. Can you describe how,

this may be a very basic question, but how do these criminal drug organizations use money laundering to live, to facilitate what they do? Is it not just a cash business? In many, well, it depends on kind of what level you're talking about, right? If you're talking about at the retail level where people are buying individual quantities of drugs for their own individual consumption, it's most likely that's done in cash. So when you get, you know, all that cash amassed together, it's difficult to distribute it to the people in your organization that you need to.

It's like payroll, right? Like if a company was operating on a completely cash basis, it would be an overwhelming undertaking to try to pay all of your employees in cash. So these organizations are no different. They need to put their money in the bank somehow. They need to be accessible, liquid, movable across borders. Sometimes that happens with bulk cash smuggling. So you'll just get a bunch of dollar bills, put them in a box or a bag or whatever, and put them on a truck and drive them to wherever they need to go. but there are also more sophisticated ways of money laundering, like using shell companies,

real estate transactions, sort of ways that you can disguise the origin of your funding and you can move it across borders without necessarily, without the authorities necessarily knowing where it came from. And again, that's really important because everybody is in this for the money. And so if you don't get paid, you're not going to work. Do we have any idea like what a corporate flow chart or organizational chart of the app, like of a typical, say, large sized organization like this looks like? How much money are we talking? It really depends on, first of all, what criminal economy you're talking about. So are you talking about synthetic drug production?

Are you talking about cocaine? Because those are made in completely different ways, right? Cocaine is produced ultimately from the leaf of the coca plants. You need farmers to grow a plant that then you need people to come and pick the leaves. And then you need people to process those leaves into the, ultimately into the powder that gets sent to consumer markets. Right. So there's a lot of different steps in that chain. Synthetic drug production is totally different.

You have people that you basically get a bunch of chemicals together and kind of like we've all seen on Breaking Bad. you know, you mix them together into the final product. You don't need, you don't need farmers, you don't need a bunch of acreage. You just need, you know, a small space that's relatively small but large enough to do this kind of, this kind of chemistry. So what the flow chart looks like is going to be totally different in those two different cases. I think it also depends on kind of how you conceptualize these networks, right? Like, to take the synthetic drug example, you know, we hear about these big names. Your viewers and listeners might know the name El Mayo was one of the top, allegedly top leaders of the Sinaloa cartel.

But like, how much day-to-day involvement does he have in, you know, the guy's mixing chemicals in an apartment somewhere? Like, he's not really overseeing that. And so the way that the money gets to him is much more complex than, for example, like a trained at Ara Agua cell that is smuggling people across a busy border, right? That's a much more sort of like self-contained operation. So, yeah, it really, it really depends. But at the big picture level, you know, the international cocaine business is multi, multi-million dollars, synthetic drug business. Same thing. Human smuggling, human trafficking. We're seeing a little bit of a decrease now because of the U.S. immigration policies. But again, you know, these are huge, huge criminal economies. How much interdiction happens at earlier points on the supply chain?

Not sure that I can really describe in like a percentage term, but certainly like, yeah, there's definitely like precursor chemicals are often interdicted by authorities. before they are ever turned into synthetic drugs. Governments do eradication operations to eradicate coca crops, marijuana crops, opium poppy crops. You know, there's intermediate stages before cocaine becomes processed into its final powder form that we all know from the movies. There's cheaper forms that are sort of intermediate stage toward that that are interdicted. So, yeah, a significant amount. So all along the supply chain, like, it is like the drugs are being seized or destroyed, not just as they are going across the border or after they've dropped onto the border. We and other countries are also attacking like every stage of the production, right?

Yeah, absolutely. And it just doesn't stop like the financial. And you said they're multi-billion dollar businesses. The financial incentives are too strong. Yeah. I mean, you know, a big issue is that in many of these places, you know, like the coca growing areas of Columbia, there really just aren't a lot of viable alternatives for people. This is the most economically viable path for most people to take. And it's not surprising that they do take it.

So that is certainly a huge driver of these economies. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of Afghanistan to make another, you know, to make another war on terror connection. We went in there and poppy farming got really big and we couldn't quite eradicate it. We attempted to, I think one of my favorite ways that we tried is like paying farmers to grow soy instead of opium. But it was just the poppy just made too much money. It made too much money. And it seems like the flip side of that is like if you really want to eradicate this kind of thing, it requires the hard hand of, say, a Taliban to really go out there and just do what it appears that we want to be doing now and just like just kill everybody that's involved.

right? If you really want to eliminate crime, you have to do some pretty horrifying things in order to make that happen, is what it appears. I mean, we've certainly seen examples of that. You know, I mentioned El Salvador earlier, right, as an example of a place where really harsh repression seems to have worked. Again, the jury is still a bit out because it's only been a couple of years, so we'll see, you know, I would like to, I would love to answer that question. again in like five years. But, you know, I think it, I think there are, I think we need to think more deeply about the possibilities for non-militarized approaches to this issue. You know, you mentioned like crop substitution programs, right? Those have been attempted in Colombia. And one of the issues has been that the criminals themselves will go in and intimidate.

date the communities, even if it might be economically more viable, maybe they're paying them enough to grow cocoa instead of coca. You know, if somebody comes and threatens you, don't do that, I will shoot you. You're not going to do it. So, you know, when we're thinking about designing those programs, you need to take that stuff into account. It's not enough to just put the money there and say, here's money to grow a new crop. You have to guarantee that the people will actually be secure enough to grow that new

crop. So there's there's a lot of sort of, I think, nuance to the way we need to approach these questions. And those are complex conversations and they're really complex issues. And again, it's much easier to say, like, let's just go in there and just kill them. I'm imagining now a world in which we provide security guarantees to Latin American farmers as well as like money for crop replacement. Can you imagine that? I know that it will probably never happen, but I'm just like picturing it in my head.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you're touching on something that's important, which is the political feasibility of some of these kind of things, right? Like, are American taxpayers willing to pay money for drones to shoot drug boats in the Caribbean? I don't know. I haven't done a poll. Are they as willing to pay for that?

as they are to pay some farmer in Columbia to grow something other than coca. Like, I don't know. I think it's a hard argument to make for people. I think Americans in general are really skeptical of foreign aid. And I think these kind of, like, quote unquote, softer side programs like crop substitution or like, you know, educational programs or job programs for people, I think they, I think it's a tough sell. I also think we have to talk about consumer habits too in America. And there is this strange thing, I think. And you were a dare kid, presumably, like you grew up with all that kind of stuff.

Like there is a rabid desire in America for substances. And also there's all these kind of weird mixed things, right? There's like that rapid desire for the substances. there's this kind of, say, like libertarian-esque leaning from a lot of the public, I think, that, like, you should be able to do what you want with your body. At the same time, there is this sense that if you do whatever you want with your body and, like, it gets the better of you, that's a moral failing on your part, right? It is not, you're not like a victim of whatever circumstances or somebody took advantage of you so much as like you failed. And I just, I think that we have to have like as part of trying to figure out how to stem the flow of drugs into the country. Like we have to talk about consumer habits.

And I don't hear that a lot. Why do you think that is and do you have any thoughts on that? You know, I think you're probably right. In many instances, I have encountered that sort of that argument that it is just a moral failing and that it is not society's responsibility to help people with problematic drug use. But I think there's a very strong practical argument that whatever your morality is around the issue, what's best for society is to try to treat this. as a public health issue, the vast majority of drugs are consumed by the small minority of users, right? And so if we address that problematic use, that can make a huge difference in demand for drugs. And most people, well, I don't know about most people, but a large share of people

that have issues with problematic drug use don't want to live like that, right? They want help. And they will accept it if we provide it. So I think it's important for us to think about that as a potential part of the collection of solutions that we can apply to this problem is reducing demand for drugs. And that will particularly focus on, again, the small minority of users that use the vast majority of drugs. So, yeah, I think that's an important part of this conversation. Well, I also think that it's a bigger problem because it requires, I think that the people that, the reason why each, any individual uses like, and you know, I'm not here talking about like smoking weed on a Friday night or whatever. I'm talking about like hard drugs, problematic use.

The reasons people get into that are complex mix of something inside them, yes, but also whatever circumstances they're in. Something pushed them to start doing that as a way to deal with something unpleasant around them, I think. and like as a society we have to start figuring out a way ways that our world is better than like jumping into like a horrifying world of drugs and I don't think that we're in America's particularly in a place to like be having that conversation or be empathetic to problem drug users in that way we just at the moment we we there's a meanness in us that I don't that I don't like

that I am seeing expressed when the president blows up a boat in the Caribbean. I think is all kind of part of a piece of that. Yeah, I mean, you know, the politics of all of it is a bit outside my wheelhouse. But again, I think it's important for us to think about these things, not just from a moralistic perspective, but from a practical perspective about what is going to be best for our society and what's going to keep us safe. All right. Well, you, sir, have run through my questions. Is there anything you think that we need to, that needs to be a part of this conversation that maybe we didn't hit? I guess just, it's kind of a minor point, but I think it's important because it's something that isn't getting talked about, I think, enough in the mainstream coverage of this, which is the number of people that were on this boat. the Trump administration has said that 11 people were killed.

Our research shows that these drug boats normally only have a crew of about three or four. This was actually, you're right. This was one of my questions. It seemed like a lot of people for what should be a small operation because you want to keep the circle close, right? Yeah. And I mean, there's also just the practical reality, like the more people you have on the boat, the less drugs you can fit. So you want to keep it efficient. And you really only need, like, one guy to pilot the boat, one guy to maybe fix the engine if it breaks, and maybe a security guy or two, depending on where you're going and where you're coming from.

You know, some initial reporting that we heard from sources on the ground in Venezuela was that maybe it was a small crew for the drugs and perhaps some extra folks that were essentially trying to migrate in an unauthorized way. that's it wouldn't necessarily be inconsistent with the patterns that we see in this part of the world, but it also isn't something that we see super commonly. So yeah, I mean, it's, again, the administration hasn't really released enough details that we would be able to confirm the number of people on the boat or who exactly they were, etc. So it's something that I think is just notable and for people to, I think it's important for people to understand how these things actually operate, right? Because we're all just kind of talking about 11 people, 11 people. And like for us, that number really jumped out. And we said, like, what is going on here? You know, as experts in this particular field, I think it's something that that really struck us. Is it possible that it wasn't a drug boat at all? I mean, anything is possible, but the reporting that we've heard from sources on the ground was that, yeah, the boat did leave carrying drugs. Okay. That's not a comfort, but, you know, what can you do in these dark times?

Tell us again where we can find your work and tell me a little bit more about what's happening on September 26th. Yeah, so all of our work can be found at Insightcrime.org. What we're going to be doing on September 26th is covering a lot of the same ground that we've covered here. We'll be talking about how the war on terror tactics could change the fight against organized crime. What will be cool about that event is that it'll be more of an open interaction between the audience and myself and our co-director, Stephen Dudley. So you'll be able to ask us questions. We'll give you a copy of our presentation after the event. and it should be, it's been, we've been having a lot more of these events this year and they've been going really well.

So I'm really looking forward to it. What's the most common question you get at something like that? What is, what's something that everybody wants to know? The people that attend our events tend to be like pretty, what we call narco nerds. You know, they're pretty into this stuff. So we don't get like, we don't get sort of like general, general kind of questions. We get real, real specific expert questions. in these events.

I would say, like, the thing that I've been getting asked the most doing a lot of mainstream media appearances about this is the relationship between the Maduro government and Trane de Aragua and drug trafficking and the cartel of the Sons, which is, you know, a group that we haven't mentioned yet. Yeah, do you have, sorry, do you have like a couple more minutes just so I can ask about this? What is the Cartel of the Sons? Okay. The Cartel of the Sons is a term that is used. I want to say first, it's not a group per se, according to the research that we've done. It's not a cartel. We've already talked about the issues with that term. It's a description of a system by which the Maduro administration maintains the allegiance of its security forces. So as everybody knows, economic situation in Venezuela is terrible. government doesn't really have money to pay its security forces. And what normally happens

if you can't pay people is they stop being loyal to you. So the government has basically turned a blind eye to security forces accepting bribes from organized crime, particularly from drug traffickers. And so these these bribes supplement the security forces' salaries, and then they are, you know, in turn, give their loyalty to the, to the Maduro administration. And the cartel of the Suns is a description of that system. Yeah, the term originally came about in the 1990s when there were individual cases of members of the military who were trafficking drugs. And the press kind of applied this term to them because they have sons on their epaulets, I think is how you say it. Gotcha.

So they called them the Cartel of the Suns. but really, like, that term became a catch-all term for, like, any military corruption, basically. Gotcha. Okay. Well, then I will leave it there. Mike, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this wonderful and depressing topic. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields.

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