Media headlines Blare about Defense Sec. hegseth sending American Warhips to hunt down and sink unarmed drug running ‘fast boats’!
Make America ‘Great’!
Stop ALL drugs?
Probably NOT the linked NY Times piece points out….
Again?
Trump and his Defense Sec trying to sell something that is NOT Poassible
Using the American military aginst people who don’t shoot back. isn’t gonna do it either…
(Makes a good media bite for Trump?)
This IS an Illegal Drug pipeline that keeps adjusting like a flowing river to continue…..
The money gained is just too much stop the flow….
The market FOR the drugs too Large…..
When the United States military launched an airstrike on a speedboat as it approached the southern shore of the Dominican Republic last month, killing three people on board, Dominican authorities said more than 375 packages of cocaine went flying into the Caribbean Sea.
Dozens of them had red packaging with a brand name clearly labeled in black and white capital letters, MEN, according to photos distributed by the Dominican anti-narcotics agency.
The 1,000 kilos of cocaine recovered from the wreckage were added to the nearly 19,000 kilos of drugs the Dominican Republic’s anti-narcotics agency had already captured since January, in what had been a record-setting year of narcotics seizures at sea before U.S. warships moved into the region.
The Trump administration, claiming to battle drug-trafficking cartels it labels terrorists, has been destroying speedboats in the Caribbean, shining a fresh light on a decades-old industry responsible for bringing tons of cocaine into the United States each year.
Long known as a popular corridor for moving people, drugs and guns, the Caribbean is no longer the dominant route it was in the 1980s, when television shows like “Miami Vice” captured the way Colombian drug cartels shipped and flew illicit products to South Florida.
But as enforcement strategies have changed throughout the years, the region has periodically re-emerged as a popular channel for moving illicit goods, increasingly to Europe, where the demand for cocaine, and the price, is higher.
Despite the Trump administration’s portrayal of the Caribbean and Venezuela as a rampant conduit for drugs killing Americans, the vast majority of maritime drug trafficking bound for the United States actually occurs on the Pacific, U.S. and United Nations data show.
Still, experts say, the Caribbean continues to be an important hub for the trafficking of Colombian cocaine, with some of it passing through Venezuela, though it plays no role in the movement of fentanyl, which had been President Trump’s chief concern before the strikes on the boats began….
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This much is clear: The world has never been awash in so much cocaine. The U.S. Coast Guard seized nearly 175,000 kilos, or about 193 tons, of cocaine on the high seas in the fiscal year that ended in September, more than double the amount seized the year before. A third of that — about 64 tons — was in the Caribbean.
The Coast Guard, whose practice generally is to intercept drug-smuggling vessels, confiscate contraband and detain suspects, stressed that much of its enforcement remains in the Pacific, and declined to comment further for this article….
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Cartels have also shifted strategy by dividing tasks such as growing, storage and transportation among interconnected organizations so no one cartel controls the entire operation, making dismantling smuggling networks more difficult….
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Since the beginning of September, the Trump administration said, it had destroyed at least four go-fast-style boats and killed 21 people. Administration officials, without offering evidence, have said they were smuggling drugs for “narco-terrorists’’ who threatened the security of the United States. Experts on the rule of law widely agree that the attacks violate international law.
The administration justified the military assaults by citing the enormous number of overdoses in the United States. But most drug deaths are from fentanyl, none of which is trafficked through the Caribbean….
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The price of a kilo, or 2.2 pounds, of cocaine in the Caribbean region is about $3,000. Early indications suggest that the Trump administration’s military buildup in the region is pushing the price up, but the full effect will not be seen for several months, experts said.
Still, experts say, U.S. warships will probably do little to dent what is an extraordinarily lucrative market.
“There is an overproduction of cocaine in the producing countries,” said Alberto Arean Varela, a regional coordinator for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “There’s more to smuggle.”
“We cannot stop using drugs,’’ he added….
Note…
Actually?
There is a Legal question of the US Militarty attacks in International wars…
But Trump does much care about legal stuff, eh?
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