In justifying American military strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs, President Donald Trump has asserted that the longtime U.S. strategy of interdicting such vessels at sea has been a major failure.
“We’ve been doing that for 30 years,” he said last month, “and it’s been totally ineffective.”
Trump’s comments came around the same time that the U.S. Coast Guard announced it had set a record for cocaine seizures — a haul of 225 metric tons of the drug over the previous year. That milestone, however, has not dissuaded the Republican president from upending decades of U.S. counternarcotics policy.
Under Trump, the U.S. military has blown up 20 suspected drug boats, resulting in 80 deaths, in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea. Trump and other top officials have contended that such boats are being operated by narco-terrorists and cartel members with deadly drugs bound for America.
The strikes have generated international pushback from foreign leaders, human rights groups, Democrats and some Republicans who have raised concerns that the United States is engaging in extrajudicial killings that undermine its stature in the world.
Veterans of the drug war, meanwhile, say U.S. resources would be better spent doubling down on the traditional approach of interdicting drug boats, especially in the long term. That is because crews of drug boats frequently have valuable intelligence that can help authorities better target cartels and trafficking networks. Dead men, they say, tell no tales.
The Coast Guard has fought the drug war a long time
The Coast Guard for decades has interdicted small vessels suspected of smuggling illicit narcotics. Much of that work is focused on halting shipments of cocaine, most of which is produced in the jungles of Colombia.
Working with partner nations and other federal agencies — the Drug Enforcement Administration, the departments of State and Justice as well as U.S. Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force-South in Key West, Florida — the aim is to inflict heavy losses on traffickers and limit the amount of drugs entering the U.S.
That campaign, by at least one measure, has never been more successful, despite constant complaints by the Coast Guard that it lacks funding to seize even more drugs.
The Coast Guard’s recent record cocaine seizure was almost 40% higher than the past decade’s annual average. The haul included 38 tons of cocaine offloaded by the cutter Hamilton when it returned from a two-month patrol. It was the largest amount confiscated by a single Coast Guard ship during a deployment, the Coast Guard reported. The interdictions have continued as part of what’s known as Operation Pacific Viper even during the federal government shutdown, with several cutters reporting major seizures last month.
In almost every case, drug smugglers have been brought to the U.S. for prosecution, and valuable information about ever-changing smuggling routes and production methods was collected — all without any loss of life and a far lower cost to American taxpayers. Experts said each missile strike is likely to cost far more than the payload of cocaine on every ship.
“The Coast Guard has extraordinary powers and authorities to do effective drug interdiction without killing unidentified people on small boats,” said Douglas Farah, a national security expert on Latin America and president of IBI Consultants. “When resourced, they are far more effective, sustainable and likely legal than the current Pentagon-led operations.”
Trump administration officials say strategy needed to change
Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week defended the shift in strategy, saying that “interdictions alone are not effective.”
“Interdictions have limited to no deterrent effect,” he added. “These drug organizations, they’ve already baked in the fact they may lose 5% of their drug shipments. It doesn’t stop them from coming.”
Part of the problem is that demand for cocaine is high, and supplies have never been so robust, according to authorities and experts. A sign of that trend: Cocaine prices have been hovering at historical lows for more than a decade.
The Coast Guard also does not have enough vessels or crew to halt it all. At most, it seizes not even 10% of the cocaine that officials believe flows to the U.S. on small vessels through what is known as the “Transit Zone” — a vast area of open water larger than Russia.
Cocaine shipments bound for the U.S. primarily work their way up the west coast of South America to Central America and then overland into the U.S. via Mexico. Shipments heading to Europe are smuggled through the Caribbean, often hidden in container ships.
Such interdiction efforts target cocaine, not fentanyl
In social media posts, Trump has claimed that his strikes have blown up boats carrying fentanyl and that each destroyed vessel has saved 25,000 American lives. According to experts and former U.S. counternarcotics officials, Trump’s statements are either exaggerations or false.
For the past decade, U.S. officials have sounded the alarm about rising overdose deaths in the U.S., particularly from opioids and synthetic opioids. Overdose deaths from opioidspeaked in 2023 at 112,000 but dropped to 74,000 in April. Experts have attributed that decline mostly to Biden administration efforts to boost the availability of lifesaving drugs that prevent overdose deaths.
The drug flowing to the U.S. from South America is cocaine. Fentanyl, on the other hand, is typically trafficked to the U.S. overland from Mexico, where it is produced with chemicals imported from China and India. Cocaine overdose deaths are less frequent than those from fentanyl. In the last year, just under 20,000 people in America died from cocaine overdoses, federal data shows.
Trump and administration officials have also claimed that the crews of targeted vessels were narco-terrorists or members of cartels.
The Associated Press visited a region in Venezuela from which some of the suspected boats have departed and identified four men who were killed in the strikes. In dozens of interviews, residents of the region and relatives said t he dead men were mostly laborers or fisherman making $500 a trip.
Law enforcement officials and experts echoed those findings, saying the smugglers captured by the Coast Guard are hired for little money to ferry drugs from point A to point B.
“They are hardly kingpins,” said Kendra McSweeney, an Ohio State University geographer who has spent years researching U.S. drug policies.
Trump administration officials recently promoted big seizures
In April, months before Trump launched his military campaign, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, traveled to South Florida to welcome home the Coast Guard cutter James from its latest antinarcotics patrol. It had seized 20 tons of cocaine worth more than $500 million.
Flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel, she praised a “prosecutor-led, intelligence driven approach to stopping these criminal enterprises in their tracks.”
“This is not a drop in the bucket,” said Bondi, standing in front of the vessel loaded with colorful, plastic-wrapped bales of narcotics stacked several feet high. “Behind you is half a billion dollars of pure, uncut cocaine.”
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