“’Bombing boats’ to stop drugs isn’t just cruel and illegal—it’s futile,” said one expert.
Brad Reed for Common Dreams
The Washington Post reported on Monday that a Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) analysis has concluded that the boat-bombing campaign,
which many legal experts and human rights groups consider acts
of murder, has not “reduced the amount of cocaine entering”
the country.
“DEA analysts found the strikes had failed to affect the
supply or price of cocaine in the United States,”
reported the Post, “and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats
and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming
close to coastlines, where US forces are less likely to open fire.”
The Post added that US Department of Defense (DOD) officials
last month gave a closed-door briefing toe members of Congress where they
acknowledged the strikes had not reduced the purity of cocaine entering the US
from Latin America.
In an interview with the Post, a DEA official said that drug
cartels had several options in addition to smuggling contraband by boats and
simply switched tactics to avoid being hit by US strikes, which so far have
killed at least 221 people.
“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” the official said. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.”
Journalist Alex Horton, one of the authors of the Post
report, described the boat-bombing campaign as what happens
“when you merge the failures of the war on terror and
the failures of the war
on drugs.”
The Post’s report on the effectiveness of boat strikes came
days after the Washington Office
on Latin America (WOLA) released a lengthy report that similarly found that the boat strikes’
“impact on the trafficking of cocaine, the main drug flowing from South
America, has been slight to non-existent.”
Adam Isaacson, director of the Defense Oversight program at
WOLA, explained the pointlessness of the boat-bombing spree in a Saturday social media post.
“All cocaine produced in a year could fit on just over 1% of
a single container ship,” Isaacson wrote.
“Imagine that scattered worldwide across innumerable boats, planes, vehicles,
and people. ‘Bombing boats’ to stop drugs isn’t just cruel and illegal—it’s
futile.”
Georgetown University Law School professor Marty Lederman
noted in a Monday social media post that the boat-bombing spree would be
unjustified even if it were successful at reducing the flow of cocaine into the
US.
“Another reminder, since no one in Congress appears to
care,” wrote Lederman. “These strikes are a campaign of
unlawful murders, and the administration hasn’t offered any plausible argument
to the contrary.”
