The Trump administration’s chaos in the Caribbean

In a federal courtroom in New York City last year, the ringleader of Honduras’ most notorious drug cartel took the stand to testify against Juan Orlando Hernandez, the country’s former president. “They had to try to get us,” he said, referring to the Honduran government, which Hernandez led from 2014 to 2022. Instead, they “allied with us.” The former president was found to be responsible for more than four hundred tons of cocaine that reached the United States. The Department of Justice has been working on the case against several of his family members and associates for years, most notably during Donald Trump’s first term.

On November 28, two days before national elections in Honduras, President Trump announced that he would pardon Hernandez, who was just one year into his 45-year sentence serving in a federal prison in West Virginia. “It was a setup for Biden,” Trump said. “I looked at the facts.” Although the White House denied it, such facts apparently came via political operative Roger Stone, who delivered the president a letter from Hernandez in which the former president called Trump “Your Excellency” and compared his plight to Trump’s “persecution.” Clearly, the two men’s shared dissatisfaction with Joe Biden was more important than Hernandez’s trump card. Trump does not appear to be bothered by the fact that combating the flow of drugs into the United States is his administration’s main justification for launching a series of boat attacks in the Caribbean. These attacks, in which US forces have, without evidence, targeted alleged drug traffickers and killed at least 87 people so far, appear to violate national and international law.

On the same day that Trump announced the pardon of Washington mail It ran a story that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given a verbal order to kill two survivors of a September raid in the Caribbean. Killing any surrendering or helpless person is a war crime. Hegseth, who watched the operation from afar, immediately turned responsibility over to Admiral Frank M. Bradley, the commanding officer in charge of the operation. “I personally saw no survivors,” Hegseth said. “This is called the fog of war.”

On Thursday, Bradley briefed lawmakers in a closed session at the Capitol, where he denied an order to kill the survivors and justified the second strike on the grounds that the undestructed cocaine on the boat posed a “danger.” As expected, the vast majority of Republicans were ready to move on, but lawmakers who watched the footage described two survivors clinging to part of the boat. Senator Chris Coons, D-Del., asked about the strikes: “How is this legal, if President Trump can pardon a convicted drug dealer?” By that evening, Hegseth was facing another scandal: The Defense Department’s inspector general had just released his report to Congress that he had “created an operational security risk” by sharing classified details about an attack in Yemen in a group chat on his phone. “Total vindication,” Hegseth wrote on X.

Hegseth’s behavior is a case study of how the administration’s growing sense of neglect and lack of accountability constitutes disastrous policy. Because the president has designated several drug cartels as “terrorist organizations” in a series of executive orders, the government has simply asserted that suspected traffickers are “unlawful combatants” and can be summarily killed. Trump, citing deaths from drug overdoses in the United States, claimed that the boat attacks were a form of national self-defense. But the drug largely responsible for such deaths in the United States is fentanyl, and it does not come from South America.

The idea that these attacks were aimed at stopping drugs was never credible; Instead, they reflect the president’s increasing focus on Venezuela and the belief within the administration that its authoritarian leader, Nicolas Maduro, needs to be removed from office. Few outside Maduro’s circle of loyalists and agitators deny that he is a repressive, corrupt leader who has collapsed the economy and brutally punished his critics. Last summer, he declared victory in the elections, which he appears to have lost badly. How to deal with the Maduro regime is a legitimately pressing issue. But the case for his ouster includes all of Trump’s most dangerous tendencies, including his anti-immigrant sentiments and his disregard for laws that limit his power.