Cartesian Thoughts on Drug Cartels

Treating them as Foreign Terrorist Organizations has at least two logical extensions

Our newly elected CEO-in-chief has labelled the foreign cartels that traffic drugs, people, and children across our southern and northern borders as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. This designation, by law pronounced by our Secretary of State, empowers federal government to seek out the members of these organizations regardless of state or even national boundaries. How can it be that these groups, often the main economic supports of vast regions of their home countries (and government officials), be subject not just to criminal law but now to international law and interdiction by our national security apparatus? After all, they are merely satisfying America’s unquenchable thirst for euphoric escape, cheap labor, and perversion. To be terrorists, they must have some ability and intent to undermine our people and our nationhood. If we accept such a standard, we must also confront the implications of that new designation.

In a prior column, The Old China Trade Returns, I argued that China’s governmentally sanctioned supply of fentanyl and its precursors is asymmetric biological warfare. I suggested that, if accepted, that thesis requires many strong economic and military actions against that trade, a kind of reversal of the Opium Wars of the 1800s. While the CCP’s enabling of international drug cartels’ production and trade in illegal opioids is not at the same style and level as the state-sponsored terrorism of Iran and others, it has become far more deadly and disabling to U. S. citizens. It passively threatens our cohesive nationhood in exactly the same ways that we and the British threatened China by actively forcing the Opium Trade upon them. The international drug cartels, all competing for predominance in the market, threaten the U. S. on behalf of their state sponsor (the CCP) and their independent interests just as the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah threaten Israel. All the more so now that the international drug and human trafficking cartels have spread their production of drugs and acquisition of people to Africa, Asia, and other countries. Mere domestic criminal laws in our cities and states cannot meaningfully touch the body of the octopus, much less its many arms. Thus they may best be attacked with ways and means based in the designation of terrorism. But how to fit them into that category?

What are International Terrorist Organizations? 8 U. S. Code Section 1189 gives the essential characteristics. The organization is foreign. The organization engages in terrorist activity or retains the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity. The terrorist activity or terrorism of the organization threatens the security of U.S. nationals or the national security of the United States. This Immigration and Nationality Act goes on in great detail as to what may be held to be terrorist activity. The unlimited brutality of the drug cartels against each other and against anyone who impedes their activities certainly qualifies. These same definitions also apply to international organizations not primarily engaged in drug production or marketing of drugs and people. MS-13 and Tren de Aragua come to mind, especially the latter, who to some journalists were a minor problem in Aurora, Colorado, since they had only forcefully taken over a “handful” of apartment complexes. Both the international drug cartels and the international criminal gangs use terror as their primary weapon to gain and maintain their position. This clearly threatens the individual and collective security of many U. S. nationals, as do their products. The cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of ongoing deaths and addictions, as well as the provision and maintenance of a large underground of perversion and illicit labor, pulls apart the threads of our democratic republic, decaying its foundational virtues and beliefs. Aside from that obvious threat to our national security, the physical security of our sovereign border had become a joke, eviscerated by the coordinated actions of these organizations. Although advocates for these organizations and their personnel may argue in court about whether these are Foreign Terrorist Organizations or if their market methods and activities constitute “terrorism”, common sense births common law that they are. This new designation releases the dogs of war from our federal agencies.

That pack of U. S. federal dogs, which includes all investigative and enforcement agencies empowered both domestically and internationally, can attack these organizations not only in our cities and countryside, but now in the organization’s foreign home bases. In the absence of cooperative forceful action by a foreign government, this designation of International Terrorist Organization may embolden our agencies and even our military to eliminate facilities and personnel in their previously protected foreign bases. We currently do this successfully in foreign “failed” states that harbor political and religious terrorists, with obvious diplomatic difficulties. Going after drug cartels as International Terrorist Organizations in other nations that have a solidified, if ineffectual, government will create protest and outrage. The response could be simplistic, in two parts: “Do you truly want to prevent action against these International Terrorist Organizations?”. “If so, does your country wish to be labelled as a State Sponsor of Terrorism?”

Given this new designation of international criminal activity as terrorism, and the resultant removal of those actors from the regular criminal justice system, the expansion of the prison at Guantanamo, Cuba may be for other than serious or violent criminal illegal aliens. As noted above, one logical extension of the new designation of International Terrorist Organizations involves the designation of their government suppliers and enablers as State Sponsors of Terrorism. The second implies severe consequences for the downstream marketers of these organizations.

Section 1189 goes on in great detail defining anyone who aides and abets the activity of such an International Terrorist Organization as a terrorist, also. This means that all the lower levels of distributors and marketers of their drug and human products, even if not aware of or members of these organizations, may well be subject to the same multi-agency jurisdictions and punishments as the ITOs themselves. A kind of international RICO process. Many localities and states have toughened criminal penalties against those who purvey drugs or persons. How many of those who expect, if caught and convicted, to spend a few years in a penitentiary, will suddenly find themselves labelled as terrorists, and possible headed for many decades to a federal maximum security prison or to Guantanamo itself? The security of our nation and its people might be well served if our government made several rapid large enforcement actions against centers of drug cartel activity, domestically and foreign, and simultaneously subjected U. S. citizen allies of these organizations to the full extent of anti-terrorism law. After all, they are the primary local agents who are responsible for the deaths of perhaps one hundred (100) times the number of victims of 9/11. The accountability of foreign and domestic drug terrorists, and state sponsors of this terrorism, is overdue.