Trump’s war in Ecuador is about elite control, not about drugs

US president Donald Trump wants the world to think his regime cares about drug trafficking. But in reality, he’s just using the issue as a weak pretext to intensify his country’s regional stranglehold. And Ecuador’s repressive right-wing government seems all too happy to enable that.

Trump pushes for more ‘drug’ wars

Giving few details, the US revealed on 4 March that it had launched a joint military operation in Ecuador against “narco-terrorism“. International law sees drug trafficking as a crime rather than an act of war, with experts calling at least 150 US murders of unknown victims for unknown charges extrajudicial executions.

On 5 March, meanwhile, the US brought a number of Latin American and Caribbean nations to Miami for an ‘Americas against the Cartels’ conference. The left-leaning governments of Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia didn’t attend.

In January, the US used the term ‘narco-terrorist’ to try and justify its illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president, even though Venezuela is not a major player in the global drug trade. It has gone on to intensify its brutal blockade on Cuba, again using absurd arguments about links to drug trafficking.

Recent decades, however, have shown that increasing militarisation does not end drug trafficking. If anything, in fact, it makes it worse.

The failure of drug militarism in Latin America

In Colombia, for example, the US pushed ‘Plan Colombia‘ in 2000 as a way to deal with the drug trade. It funded destruction of crops, along with military and intelligence training. Experts broadly agree that it failed. It simply increased violence, deaths, displacement, human rights abuses, and illegal mining.

Perhaps one of the only things the US and its elite allies in Colombia could claim as a success was the weakening of left-wing rebels, which led them to sign a peace deal. It’s almost as if Plan Colombia wasn’t really about fighting the drug trade.

Mexico, meanwhile, had a similar story. In 2006, a right-wing government launched a military assault against drug cartels that made things much, much worse in the country. Since then, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths and disappearances.

Just like Colombians, Mexicans faced mass displacement and increasing human rights abuses. And as big cartels split into many smaller ones, violence increased as criminals diversified into areas like extortion, illegal mining, migration trafficking, and fuel theft.

The first left–leaning Mexican president in decades sought to break away from this war on drugs from 2018 onwards. And while his successor has shifted strategies slightly, she’s still insisting on an independent path from the type of military escalation the US is pushing.

Ecuador’s right-wing president dances to Trump’s tune anyway

Ecuador had particularly low murder rates under a left–wing government in the early 2010s. But that changed amid a dramatic shift to the right at the end of the decade. And under the current right-wing president, it rose to having the highest homicide rate in South America. It’s now “a crucial zone for transnational organized crime“.

Ecuadorean president Daniel Noboa has pushed through ‘urgent’ neoliberal reforms, cutting public spending while clamping down on civil liberties, workers’ rights, and indigenous environmental activism against mining and fossil fuel extraction.

As part of Ecuador’s current military operations, it claims to have seized a “narco submarine” in a nature reserve. It said it found a camp too and came under attack. But it mentioned no arrests or drug seizures.

This coincides with the government ignoring a popular referendum opposing extractivism in one of the world’s most diverse natural areas and going after activists who campaigned for it.

Noboa isn’t just an elitist politician in the style of Trump. He’s also a willing lackey for the US leader. He has already expelled Cuban diplomats from Ecuador and suggested the US launch a “friendly takeover” of Cuba. And he has begun a tariff war with neighbouring Colombia.

The real solution?

It’s not just left-wing governments, activists, or experts who think waging war on the drug trade is not the way to go. It’s religious figures too. Because Ecuador’s most prominent Catholic figure, Luis Gerardo Cabrera Herrera, has spoken out against military escalation, saying:

The root of the violence is poverty, but not just material poverty. There is also cultural poverty – poverty of education, of healthcare, of opportunities… the state has failed to meet people’s needs for housing and work. When a person wants to work but cannot, when a child has no school or food, the perfect conditions for despair are created. And despair pushes people toward crime…

But repression does not solve the problem. The country does not need more bullets, more soldiers, prisons, or repression. The solution is not found there… The real solution lies in education, work, and human development… If we do not commit to that, violence will not disappear.

A key cause of poverty in Latin America, meanwhile, is decades of brutal imperialist intervention that have hindered just development.

The highly destructive drug trade, meanwhile, is also largely a result of demand from the US and other countries in the Global North. So the best way to really fix the drug problems in the US is to actually address health and economic inequalities that lead people there to use and abuse drugs.

But the US won’t do that. Because this military escalation isn’t really about drugs. It’s about the resources that the US wants and that other countries have. And it’s about making sure governments submit to what the US wants.

Featured image via PeoplesDispatch