A decade before President Donald Trump boasted of “hunting” alleged “narcoterrorists” on boats off the coast of Venezuela, the Defense Department was looking for new ways to get involved in the war on drugs.
In a major report quietly issued by the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses, researchers working for the Pentagon presented their findings, based on interviews with dozens of top drug traffickers incarcerated in the United States, on how to better disrupt transnational organized crime.
One top-line prescription: More “direct military action.”
The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks.
An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.
Where is the quote “direct military action” from? The closest I see in the report itself is:
One example of a successful US Government campaign against a TCO occurred in the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. During this period, the US Government decided the Cali Cartel was a national security threat because the cartel had created a criminal enclave in Cali, Colombia and had captured the state of Colombia through its corruption, which put at risk Latin America’s oldest democracy. Before the Cartel’s takedown, the US Government mounted a campaign that dismantled the Medellin Cartel. The Medellin Cartel takedown was impressive and led to many lessons learned; however, analysts and practitioners agree, the Cali Cartel was a far more sophisticated organization and a much harder target to dismantle.
What ensued from the US Government was a concerted campaign to break the noose of corruption the Cali Cartel had around the neck of the Colombian government. As one cartel member said during his interview, “at this point, when the entire US Government coalesced around defeating us, we knew our demise was imminent.” Once the US Government decided the Cali Cartel was a threat to national security, the resources and agency priorities converged on dismantling the Cali Cartel. The campaign plan had four general lines of effort: diplomacy, building partner capacity, counter threat finance, and direct action. The campaign succeeded because it had the full support of the President of the United States and US Congress as well as an effective partner in the Colombian National Police, which was willing to take aggressive action against the cartel’s command and control. This combined effort resulted in law enforcement action in more than a dozen countries and dismantled a TCO that one DEA official referred to as the “McDonalds of cocaine trafficking” because it had transformed drug trafficking into a global corporate enterprise on par with any licit multinational corporation.
