Everything Is ‘the Caribbean’
According to the oversimplified view of the Trump administration, this is an exotic region full of poor immigrants and drug cartels.
It doesn’t matter if cocaine is produced in Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela or Peru. Nor does it matter if it is transported through strategic corridors, from inland jungles to the Pacific Ocean, where it may then be taken to a neighboring port by boat, or shipped to another continent by submarine. According to the oversimplified view of the Trump administration (and those that preceded him), this can all be filed under “the Caribbean,” an exotic region full of poor immigrants and drug cartels. Here, the “elites” can count on a group of servile allies to pull strings in Miami.
I recall listening to U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claim on CNN that there are also certain rules in the Caribbean. He referenced the war on drugs, today being waged against small boats, and added that, because one in four intercepted vessels did not actually carry cocaine, they had to first interrogate their captains (before killing them, I believe he said).
Recently, I’ve witnessed a lot of dubious decisions that, just a few years ago, would’ve been considered politically unviable. The U.S. just moved its largest aircraft carrier into the Caribbean Sea. It has also, through the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — known as the “Clinton List” — imposed sanctions on Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his wife for supposed involvement in drug trafficking. These actions are an attempt to find those responsible for the increase in drug production and consumption that is harming American citizens.
In the past, many world leaders, such as Mexico’s Vicente Fox, Colombia’s César Gaviria and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the prohibitionist approach to tackling drug production and demand. They proposed a change in focus, whereby the issue would instead be considered a complex public health emergency that warrants alternative measures.
The World Drug Report 2025, conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, lays bare the failures of prohibitionism and presents conclusive statistics. “In 2023, the global number of people who used a drug in the past year was estimated at 316 million people, or 6% of the global population aged between 15 and 64.”
It also highlights that this is an increase of 5.2% from a decade ago, and that there has been an exponential rise in drug-related violence, corruption and the number of drug-trafficking organizations. Instead of just a few cartels with high-profile leaders, we are now talking about a constellation of criminal groups that operate as part of a global network and who are squeezing higher value out of every gram of drugs — due to prohibition.
This political back-and-forth between “good" and “evil” (as if it were an episode of the Netflix series “Narcos”), in which an elected president is being labeled a communist and sanctioned for supposedly being a drug kingpin, is both opportunistic and disingenuous. Drug abuse is a global pandemic that simultaneously contributes to and is exacerbated by a global order that blames poor people for their own mental health conditions and ruins their lives.
We must not ignore the responsibility Colombia has in designing the legal framework and unequal conditions that contribute to an increase in cocaine production, as well as a surge in its value, reported by national and international authorities that have to seize the drug by “buying” it off the street. Yet the finger-pointing and accusations we have witnessed recently distract us from the urgent need to recognize decades of failure associated with the war on drugs and to collaborate to consider other options.
In the background, we can also see evidence of a breakdown in mutual cooperation, a sign that aspirations of political solidarity have been left behind in favor of segregation, expulsion and blacklists.
It doesn’t matter if cocaine is produced in Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela or Peru. Nor does it matter if it is transported through strategic corridors, from inland jungles to the Pacific Ocean, where it may then be taken to a neighboring port by boat, or shipped to another continent by submarine. According to the oversimplified view of the Trump administration (and those that preceded him), this can all be filed under “the Caribbean,” an exotic region full of poor immigrants and drug cartels. Here, the “elites” can count on a group of servile allies to pull strings in Miami.
I recall listening to U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claim on CNN that there are also certain rules in the Caribbean. He referenced the war on drugs, today being waged against small boats, and added that, because one in four intercepted vessels did not actually carry cocaine, they had to first interrogate their captains (before killing them, I believe he said).
Recently, I’ve witnessed a lot of dubious decisions that, just a few years ago, would’ve been considered politically unviable. The U.S. just moved its largest aircraft carrier into the Caribbean Sea. It has also, through the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control — known as the “Clinton List” — imposed sanctions on Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his wife for supposed involvement in drug trafficking. These actions are an attempt to find those responsible for the increase in drug production and consumption that is harming American citizens.
In the past, many world leaders, such as Mexico’s Vicente Fox, Colombia’s César Gaviria and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the prohibitionist approach to tackling drug production and demand. They proposed a change in focus, whereby the issue would instead be considered a complex public health emergency that warrants alternative measures.
The World Drug Report 2025, conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, lays bare the failures of prohibitionism and presents conclusive statistics. “In 2023, the global number of people who used a drug in the past year was estimated at 316 million people, or 6% of the global population aged between 15 and 64.”
It also highlights that this is an increase of 5.2% from a decade ago, and that there has been an exponential rise in drug-related violence, corruption and the number of drug-trafficking organizations. Instead of just a few cartels with high-profile leaders, we are now talking about a constellation of criminal groups that operate as part of a global network and who are squeezing higher value out of every gram of drugs — due to prohibition.
This political back-and-forth between “good" and “evil” (as if it were an episode of the Netflix series “Narcos”), in which an elected president is being labeled a communist and sanctioned for supposedly being a drug kingpin, is both opportunistic and disingenuous. Drug abuse is a global pandemic that simultaneously contributes to and is exacerbated by a global order that blames poor people for their own mental health conditions and ruins their lives.
We must not ignore the responsibility Colombia has in designing the legal framework and unequal conditions that contribute to an increase in cocaine production, as well as a surge in its value, reported by national and international authorities that have to seize the drug by “buying” it off the street. Yet the finger-pointing and accusations we have witnessed recently distract us from the urgent need to recognize decades of failure associated with the war on drugs and to collaborate to consider other options.
In the background, we can also see evidence of a breakdown in mutual cooperation, a sign that aspirations of political solidarity have been left behind in favor of segregation, expulsion and blacklists.
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