Front Burner - Donald Trump’s war on drug cartels

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Donald Trump has declared a war on drug cartels. He’s wielded the flow of narcotics, namely fentanyl, into the U.S. as one of the major reasons behind aspects of his global trade war. He’s added a number of cartels to the foreign terrorist organisations list. And last month, the Trump administration stepped things up by quietly signing a Pentagon directive to allow the use of military force against drug cartels. That led to a U.S. drone strike on a Venezuelan boat on international waters, killing all 11 on board. Now, the possibility of more attacks hangs over Venezuela and Mexico, another target of Trump’s cartel war. Alexander Aviña, an associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University joins us to talk about the impact of these recent escalations and what history tell us about how effective drug wars really are..For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

You know, shopping for a car should be exciting, not exhausting, and that's where Car Gurus comes in. They have advanced search tools, unbiased deal ratings, and price history, so you know a great deal when you see one. It's no wonder Car Gurus is the number one rated car shopping app in Canada on the Apple app and Google Play, according to AppFollow. Buy your next car today with Car Gurus and make sure your big deal is the best deal at Car Gurus.ca. That's C-A-R-G-G-U-R-U-R-U-R-U-E. us.ca.cargooros.ca.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody. I'm Jamie Plesson. Today we're going to discuss something that hasn't received the attention that it deserves. Maybe you've missed it in the recent flurry of news. Since the start of the year, Donald Trump declared a war on drug

cartels. He's wielded the flow of narcotics, namely fentanyl. into the U.S. as one of the major reasons behind his global trade work. The fentanyl coming through Canada is massive. The fentanyl coming through Mexico is massive. He's added a number of cartels to the foreign terrorist organizations list. And last month, the Trump administration stepped things up by quietly signing a Pentagon directive to allow the use of military force against drug cartels. Latin America's got a lot of cartels.

They've got a lot of drugs flowing. So, you know, we're playing a tough game. Then, after weeks of threatening to arrest Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, accusing him of being a narco-trafficker and sending warships, jets, and troops to the Caribbean, the U.S. struck a Venezuelan boat on international waters, killing all 11 people on board. They say it was carrying drugs for Trenda Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the administration has accused of invading the U.S. We have a lot of drugs pouring into our country coming out very heavily from Venice.

A lot of things are coming out of Venezuela. We took it out. Now the possibility of more attacks hangs over Venezuela. And for Mexico, another target of Trump's cartel war, the fear of U.S. military presence looms large, as President Claudia Scheinbaum walks the thin line of cooperating with the Trump administration while also assuring Mexicans that the country's sovereignty will remain intact. What's been the impact of these recent escalations and what does history

tell us about how effective drug wars really are? Alexander Avenia is an associate professor of Latin American history at Arizona State University, and he's going to talk to me today about how Trump's war on cartels is a continuation of the troubling history of America's war on drugs and a ratcheting up of the foreign intervention that has come with it. Alexander, thank you so much for coming on to Front Burner. Thank you so much for having me, Jamie. So let's begin at the start of this year, shall we?

Not long after he was inaugurated, President Trump put eight drug cartels and gangs on the U.S.'s list of foreign terrorist organizations. Six of them are Mexican. The two others are Trend to Aragua from Venezuela and Elizuela. El Salvador's MS-13. In part, the White House's reasoning was that, quote, international cartels constitute a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime. What do you think they meant by that? And what was the significance of them making this distinction? As a historian, I read this announcement as part of the U.S.'s long history of empire in the Western Hemisphere in Latin America and the Caribbean.

And the idea that drug trafficking organizations with our criminal organizations can also be designated now as terrorist organizations opens up the possibilities, response possibilities of the U.S. government toward those organizations. And so on the one hand, if we think about the long history of U.S. Empire and Latin America, the more recent background to it is the war on terror. And this is the way that I see the use of the foreign terrorist organization designation to the drug trafficking organizations is it's a melding of these two wars, right? So that's like the top layer. The top layer is war on drugs logics mixing with war on terror logics. We can, the U.S. can respond to a criminal activity as if it were some sort of foreign terrorist organization like al-Qaeda and ISIS. So that opens up all sorts of military possibilities that we, unfortunately, we've already seen. But then that's overlaid a longer history of U.S. attempts to dictate life in the region, thinking about different modalities and possibilities through which they can achieve imperial control over Latin America and the Caribbean.

And the war on drugs has served that function for decades now. A month after that announcement, the Canadian government followed suit with our own terrorist organizations list. This was fulfilling a promise that our former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made to Trump as part of trade negotiations. at the time. The designation of cartel as terrorists on the criminal code is going to give us additional powers to effectively follow the money and disrupt the activities of cartels. What do you think the implications are of other countries joining the U.S. in this? I mean, these countries have already done this.

The global regime of drug interdiction that we have now really begins after World War II, and it's a U.S.-led effort. So for decades now, the U.S. government has used a variety of means to kind of cajole other countries to follow its approach to the issue of illicit drugs, which is a militarized drug interdiction approach that attacks the production and the cultivation of drugs at the source while not really doing anything about the consumption of drugs from a public health perspectives within the United States. The White House also said that part of what warrants them designating cartels as terrorist organizations is because of their, quote,

infiltration into foreign governments across the Western Hemisphere. Over the past couple of months, we have seen Trump accuse Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro of being one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world, offering $50 million for information that could lead to his arrest. Maduro uses foreign terrorist organizations like TDA, Sinaloa, and Cartel of the Sons to bring deadly drugs and violence into our country. To date, the DEA has seized third. 30 tons of cocaine linked to Maduro and as associates with nearly seven tons linked to Maduro himself.

Venezuela has repeatedly denied any direct government involvement with Trenda Aragua or any other criminal organizations. What do you make of this administration tying foreign governments, in this case a longtime adversary to narco-trafficking organizations? The war on drugs is not about drugs, primarily. And I think this example really highlights that historical and present trend. I think one thing we should think about is the idea that the U.S. is actually the world's largest narco state. We have 4 to 5% of the world's population. We consume over 80% of illicit and illicit opioids. There's something going on right there, right?

For instance, we consume 99% of the world's hydrocodone. So there's something going on in the United States, right? And if we look at the history of particularly in the Cold War of U.S. Empire in the global South, again, it's a long track record of using the war on drugs to target governments that are deemed enemies of U.S. national security interests. And this is just the latest example of it. And another thing to think about is that throughout, particularly since World War II, the U.S. has used the charge of narco state very consistently against left-wing governments.

It goes back to labeling China after the Chinese revolution as being a major expert. border of heroin into United States. It did it to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. It did it to Nicaragua after their revolution in 1979. The charge against Venezuela is the latest part of this history. One more thing I'll mention is that one of these organizations that are on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, the Cartel de los Soles, the cartel of the Sons. So Nicolas Maduro is accused of being the head of this cartel, and that's why he has a $50 million bounty in his head. We don't even know if this cartel actually exists. The first reference of this this cartel goes back to the late 80s and early 90s.

And it was actually a CIA-led operation working with a Venezuelan general who was actually the head of the country's anti-narcotics unit. And they worked together to traffic tons of Colombian cocaine into United States. Back in the 1980s, the CIA was mandated by then President Reagan to develop intelligence on the Colombian drug cartels. And so the CIA with Venezuela's Guardia Nacional or National Guard, set up an undercover operation, a drug smuggling operation in Venezuela that could handle the transshipment

of the Colombian cartel's cocaine on its way to market. The plan was to infiltrate the cartel and it worked. The idea from the CIA's perspective was this would allow them to track the source of the cocaine, which was in Colombia with the Medellin cartel.

But it turned into an operation where the CIA was working with this corrupt Venezuelan general to traffic tons of cocaine into the United States. And that's the first mention of this quote-unquote Cartel de los Soles. And then it kind of goes away and then it reemerges in about 2020

when the Trump administration during his first term started to go after Venezuela. So there's also like a more immediate five-year history of the Trump administration going after President Maduro in Venezuela. But it goes back to the late 80s and early 90s with this really shady CIA operation. That is so interesting. Is there any evidence that Maduro or anyone in his government is connected to any other cartels like the Trenta Aragua? Not that I've seen. In terms of, let's think about it this way. There is no evidence that would indicate that Maduro himself is the head of a narco state where he's doubling as president and also a capo, a drug kingpin of the so-called Cartel de los Solis. I'm sure that there are individual members of the Venezuelan state that are somehow involved with the drug trade. The drug trade does not work without active state protection and collaboration, whether it's in Venezuela, whether it's in Mexico, whether it's in the United States.

The journalist Seth Hart just published a really amazing book, the Fort Bragg Cartel, and he delineates a long history of U.S. military personnel being involved in the drug trade. So there is no dividing line between Narcos and states. For this whole political economy to work, you have to have an active collaboration and relationship. So I'm sure there's individuals within the Venezuelan government that are actively involved in drug trafficking, just as there are active agents within the U.S. government at different levels and different corporations that are also involved in that. You know, when we're thinking about this administration's trajectory here when it comes to cartels,

you know, I also can't help but think about Secretary of State Marker Rubio as well and his political background and his track record here. How is his influence being felt right now, you think? Yeah, that's a great point. And it's a really important issue that I think merits more attention. Marco Rubio, as a son of Cuban immigrants who came to the United States at the very beginning of the Cuban Revolution in 1956, so he claims to be, he has a particular story where he says his family fled the revolution and he fled Fidel Castro's government, but his family

actually came to the U.S. before. But nonetheless, he grew up in a political culture in South Florida that is extremely revanchist and anti-communist and right-wing, particularly because it's been nourished generationally by communities of immigrants and exiles who have come from parts of Latin America, where those sectors have either lost in political revolutions and processes, or they fled for whatever reasons. So it's really interesting to think about Florida as a very specific, unique political culture in the United States. And the fact that, as reporting shows, that Marco Rubio is the lead the point person for Donald Trump when it comes to coming up with Latin American policy,

it's a really scary moment, right? Because he represents a particular political faction during the Cold War that aligned itself with really shady characters like death squads. Any sort of reformist government or moderate government in Latin America tend to, through the lens of someone like Marco Rubio tends to be seen as a danger to U.S. national security interests. whether this government that define themselves as communist or social democratic or whatever, if it goes against the U.S. national security interest, it will be deemed as an enemy. Will you act on Venezuelan's soil against the Maguro regime? Well, this is a counter-drug operation.

We're going to take on drug cartels wherever they are and wherever they're operating against the interest of the United States. The president's top obligation is to secure the national interest in the national security of our people. I know of no president that means that more than this one. So we talked about the terrorist designations that came at the beach. beginning of the year, Trump then signs this directive to the Pentagon to use military force against the drug cartels that he's added to the

foreign terrorist list. And he did that in August. And then the first instance we saw of that was on September 1st when the U.S. actually fired a missile at a Venezuelan boat killing all 11 people on board in international waters. The administration

claims it was carrying narcotics and belonged to Trenda Aragua. The U.S. has offered no evidence about who or what was on that boat, but Rubio suggested the military took the most effective action. The United States has long, for many, many years, established intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drugboats, and it doesn't work. What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them. So they were designated as what they are. They are narco-terrorist organizations. And instead of interdicting it on the president's orders, he blew it up. And it'll

happen again. The New York Times reported last week that the boat had actually turned away and was trying to retreat when they saw the American Worship following them. Tell me more about your reaction to this move. This is a horrific action. This is we witness the extrajudicial execution of 11 people who are presumed or alleged by the U.S. government to be small-level narco-traffickers. But if we think about the issue of the trafficking of illicit drugs, that's a criminal issue. Those individuals merited some sort of due process. They merited some sort of legal process to prove whether or not they were involved in this illicit activity. But they were not given that opportunity. They were executed in extrajudicial fashion, which again, harkens back

to war on terror logics with the use of drones to strike at individuals who are claimed to be foreign terrorists. We generally never get to see a lot of evidence, but nonetheless, that doesn't matter. What matters is you use military kinetic force to use their language. to execute people who are charged of something without ever being proven or given the chance to prove that themselves, that they are not a part of this alleged illicit or criminal or terrorist organization and activity. This is also an issue of, and this is a long history of it in Latin America. It's an issue of national sovereignty and self-determination. The U.S. past and present allows itself to not have to respect the national sovereignty and self-determination

of nations in Latin America and the Caribbean. And this is what this latest expeditionary force that's just hanging out off the coast of Venezuela is really demonstrating. Right. I mean, if your goal is to stop the flow of drugs into your country, I also imagine that taking out under a dozen low-level drug traffickers isn't really going to make a dent, right? Like, these guys aren't the ones calling the shots here. That's a really good point. And even if you do take out the guys who are calling the shots, that also doesn't make a dent, right?

The U.S. has taken out since the 70s and 80s. They've taken out one major drug kingpin after another. Like El Chapo is sitting in a supermax prison in Colorado, and yet the drugs continue to flow. These strategies, these tactics that the U.S. government has implemented, allegedly as part of a war on drugs, they don't work on their own metrics. You mentioned all these forces just sort of hanging out off the coast. So we're talking about thousands of troops here with warships and jets that have been sent to the Caribbean. and this administration has not obviously ruled out strikes on Venezuelan soil. And Venezuela has in turn been preparing by mobilizing its militia members.

Its foreign minister, Yvon Gill, said that they're not seeking any conflict with the U.S. But what position does this put Maduro and Venezuela as a whole in? Yeah, it puts them in a really difficult situation, which has led some observers to highlight the possibility that this entire exercise is meant. as some sort of regime change, right? So trying to create or exacerbate the conditions on the ground in Venezuela that would then lead certain individuals in the Venezuelan state to say, you know, we need to get rid of Maduro. And if we get rid of Maduro, then the United States will kind of let us exist and let us practice our national sovereignty and self-determination.

That's, I think, a plausible explanation for what's going on. And if that's the case, and I think we'll see, we could see, again, going back to the war on terror, we could see the type of military operations that seek to take out or to use, again, their language, decapitate what they deem to be a narco state, right? So maybe using drones or other attacks to try to take out certain leaders within the Venezuelan state. I find it really difficult to think that they would try any sort of like direct military intervention, like landing boots on the ground. But we just saw an incident yesterday or two days ago where the U.S. Marines were attacking and hassling Venezuelan fishermen. Again, accusing them of moving illicit drugs when these were just fishermen.

So it's meant to ratchet up pressure on the Venezuela state on President Nicolas Maduro. And also, let's not forget that Venezuela has the world's largest known deposit of oil. So that is obviously playing a huge role in this. Could this serve to kind of bolster support for Maduro on the ground in Venezuela? Right. And this has happened over and over again. When the U.S. goes into Latin, Latin America or the Caribbean in some sort of overt military operation that tries to show the power and the extent of the U.S. designs and power on the region, there's always a nationalist backlash. And this is another constant of U.S. Latin America relations.

Anytime U.S. Empire becomes very overt and very militaristic, there's a nationalist reaction on the ground. And the consequences, people understandably saying, look, we need to defend our homeland. We're going to close ranks around this leader, even if we don't like him, even if he's unpopular, but when it gets more overt, like in the, you know, in the form of three military destroyers, thousands of Marines, a nuclear attack submarine, you know, people tend to be like, oh, we're going to defend our homeland and we're going to close ranks around the leader, even if we don't like him that much, it doesn't matter. The question is national sovereignty and self-determination.

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Okay, so how come a film about a Canadian icon, John Candy, produced by a Canadian star, Ryan Reynolds, kicking off Canada's biggest film festival, still doesn't count as a Canadian movie. Well, to understand weird little nuances like that, you just have to listen to commotion. We're doing TIF and 12 every single weekday during the Toronto International Film Festival,

and we have our best critics in explaining stuff like this, all in under 12 minutes. Find commotion with me, Alameen Abdul-Mahmoud, wherever you get your podcast, including YouTube. I want to do Mexico with you. So after Trump signed that Pentagon directive, Mexico's president, Claudia, Shinebaum, was asked about the possibility of U.S. troops in Mexico

for counter-cartel operations, and she said, quote, the United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military. We cooperate, we collaborate, we collaborate. but there will be no invasion. It's off the table, absolutely off the table. U.S. military boots on the ground of Mexico have appeared to have been a red line for years, but how close have things gotten to that possibility, especially with their increased presence at the border? It's really scary to think about that possibility. It's an impossibility from the Mexican perspective because of the long history of U.S. Mexico relations and the fact that half of Mexico's

national territory was taken by the U.S. in the mid-19th century. But what's made this more of a scary possibility in my mind is that we've had political figures on the right United States ratcheting up this type of talk demanding some sort of U.S. military action in Mexico as a way to take out in their mind the evil brown men who are poisoning poor hapless Americans with their, you know, with their drugs. And during the late, the last presidential primary for the for the Republican Party, it was almost, it almost became a contest of like who could offer the most bellicose, the most warlike approach to Mexico. I'm not going to send troops to Ukraine, but I am going to send them to our southern border.

When these drug pushers are bringing fentanyl across the border, that's going to be the last thing they do. We're going to use force and we're going to leave them stone cold day. If we can use our military to take out bin Laden or al-Zawahiri or Soleimani or ISIS somewhere else in some other part of the world, then we are ready to use our military to annihilate the Mexican drug cartels south of our own border. That is what it means to be an American.

We solve that problem. But there's already U.S. boots on the ground in Mexico, right? And there's an excellent Reuters report that came out last week that shows the extent of, like, CIA on the ground participation in Mexico with their specially vetted naval and Mexican army units. And they're working hand in hand to target drug kingpins, which is, again, to go back to my previous comment, I think it's ultimately a failed strategy. But that's the approach they're using. If there were any sort of unilateral U.S. military operation against Mexico, that type of collaboration will disappear immediately. The U.S. military to Mexican military collaboration, which is longstanding and very active, that would also be immediately terminated. So the Trump administration would

accomplish precisely what they say they don't want to happen in the event that they choose some sort of unilateral military operation. Just for people listening, that Reuters piece that you referenced, it revealed the CIA had been working with the Mexican military. military to go after cartels, which actually led to the arrest of Al Chapo back in 2023. Yeah. What's really interesting is that the previous president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, had a very nationalistic approach to the DEA and the FBI, at one point even expelling them from the country. But he allowed the CIA to work within the country to wage this war on drugs, but preferring the CIA because they work in the shadows,

right? They're secretly. So he gone publicly, he could still play his nationalist card while secretly allowing U.S. covert agents on the ground to be working with very special units within the Mexican Navy army. It's an ongoing effort in operation. Talk to me a little bit more about the line that Cheyembaum is having to walk right now. She has handed over 55 cartel figures to the U.S. but has denied that it was part of any deal with Trump. She also is facing, like Canada, other kinds of threats around tariffs, right? And so, what kind of line is she having to walk here in terms of protecting Mexico's sovereignty while also making these deals with the U.S.? I mean, she's in a really tricky situation, right?

As the old dictator of Mexico famously said about Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. So, you know, they have to, they have to always pay attention to a neighbor to the north that's much more powerful and tends not to be very neighborly at one point taking half of its national territory. So how do you manage that? The one thing that Mexico does have in the form of leverage is that 2,000 mile long. border. So this is why, you know, going back to the Admiral administration, going along with United States approaches to migration, while from my perspective was, I think, a tragedy and misguided, allowed the Mexican government a little bit of collaborative space and a way of managing Trump. So you have people within the shame bomb administration who are veterans of having to deal

with Trump, of giving up certain things, but also receiving some in return. This issue, of potential military strikes against so-called narcos in Mexico, though, obliterates that approach. And it puts someone like Shanebaum in a really difficult situation. Like, what do you have left to give Trump to prevent that from happening? You've already given them drug kingpins. You already go along, more or less, with his approach to migrants and refugees and asylum seekers. She's put up some resistance, I think pretty effective resistance on the question of tariffs. But what more do you have to give up when you get to the point of U.S. drone strikes in Mexico and a hypothetical.

All she has left at that point is to go back to fall back to the question of national sovereignty and self-determination, how do you, and the implementation of that. How are the cartels responding to all of this? It's an interesting question. It remains to be seen, right? Like how they're reacting to the rendering of Mexican drug kingpins into the U.S. legal system in a way that's much more direct than in the past. It remains to be seen how they're going to react.

act to this. You know, something similar happened in Colombia in the mid-1980s, and that led to these different confederations of drug smugglers to essentially declare war on the Colombian state over the question of judicial rendition into United States. I don't think something like that's going to happen in Mexico. I think some of the drug kingpins that were handed over to the U.S., you know, their significance, their actual, like, logistic or criminal significance was really decreased by the time that they were handed over to United States. But I do wonder if there's thinking within some of these drug trafficking organizations where they are questioning whether they should take a more bellicose approach to the Mexican government over

this question of you know if you capture us you're going to send us into United States I don't know I don't think so these organizations are also very nimble they respond to changes in the market right so that's also been a long-term trend of these drug trafficking organizations sometimes they're hierarchical sometimes are centralized sometimes they're a confederation of smugglers who are pulling resources and sharing smuggling routes and tactics and markets, right? So they tend to be very agile organizations that at bottom are not really political organizations. They're criminal organizations that are trying to make a buck. And that's going to be the logic that really leads them forward. Alexander, thank you so much for this. This was really, really interesting.

I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jimmy. Pleasure. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.