Miami, US, Mar 5 (EFE).- The White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, urged Latin American governments on Thursday to fight drug cartels as if they were terrorist groups like “ISIS (the Islamic State) or Al-Qaeda.”
“The cartels that operate in this hemisphere are the ISIS and the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere and should be treated just as brutally and just as ruthlessly as we treat those organizations,” Miller said at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference at the US Southern Command Headquarters in Doral, South Florida.
United States President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff maintained that “these organizations can only be defeated with military power” in his address to the guests, military and security representatives from most countries in the region, with exceptions such as Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.
Furthermore, he asserted that “organizations that deal drugs, deal violence, assassinate, extort, blackmail, and also traffic illegally in human beings. That is a form of terrorism, too. Illegal immigration facilitated by criminal networks is a form of terrorism.”
The US government has already designated several drug trafficking organizations, such as terrorist organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), the Northeast Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the United Cartels, and the New Michoacán Family, as well as gangs like Tren de Aragua, MS-13, and Barrio 18.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth opened the conference, reaffirming that President Donald Trump’s new Monroe Doctrine, or “Donroe Doctrine,” justifies military attacks against drug traffickers in Latin America.
Hegseth warned that Washington is ready to launch a unilateral military “offensive” against the cartels, and therefore called on Latin Americans to fight “narco-terrorists.”
The conference comes days after the first joint US-Ecuador military operation against “narco-terrorist” organizations, following a visit by Francis Donovan, commander of Southcom.
In addition, the Trump Administration has bombed 44 boats, which it allegedly linked to drug trafficking operations in the Pacific and the Caribbean since September, killing at least 150 people, under Operation Southern Spear. EFE
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