Good morning. It’s the third day of a shutdown of the federal government. And President Trump isn’t wasting a crisis. He called it an “unprecedented opportunity” to enact sweeping cuts to agencies and to halt billions of dollars in funds to states run by Democrats. He’s now using federal websites and workers to wage political attacks. Trump is also focused on his enemies abroad. We spent yesterday looking into a confidential notice Trump sent Congress this week saying that the U.S. was formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the administration has labeled terrorist organizations. The notice comes after three military strikes the president ordered on boats in the waters near Venezuela last month, which killed 17 people. More on that is below. But first, the latest news:
War powersHow is it that the U.S. has quietly started a war with Venezuela’s gangs? Let’s look at how we got here. Trump has been building to this for months. In July, he signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels. Around the same time, the administration declared that a Venezuelan criminal group was a terrorist organization and that Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, was its leader, setting up a possible justification for a conflict. By late summer, the U.S. was amassing an armada. At the time, my colleague Eric Schmitt wrote, the military had deployed eight warships, several Navy P-8 surveillance planes and one attack submarine to the southern Caribbean Sea. And in September, the strikes began. The U.S. first destroyed a boat that officials said was carrying 11 gang members, all of whom were killed. Trump posted a video of the explosion on social media. There were two more strikes that month, each of which killed three people. He says he’s targeting Venezuela’s gangs because they bring dangerous drugs into the U.S. Experts say there is some truth to that: Lots of cocaine flows through Venezuela, according to a report by the State Department. But Venezuela is far from the biggest player in the region. Colombia produces much more cocaine. Most of the cocaine entering the U.S. comes through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, my colleague Genevieve Glatsky wrote. And the most destructive drug in the U.S., fentanyl, comes almost entirely from Mexico. Maduro says Trump’s real goal is to force regime change — which Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has openly pushed for. “We’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere,” Rubio told Fox News. Trump campaigned on a platform that rejected the type of aggressive intervention that got the U.S. mired in long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Julie Turkewitz, a Times reporter based in South America, told my colleagues on The World newsletter that the Trump administration might see a distinction between Asian countries and ones in the Americas. The declaration allows Trump to claim extraordinary wartime powers. In an armed conflict, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts, legal specialists told The Times. Still, some experts said that the order crossed a major legal line. It’s illegal for the military to target civilians who are not directly participating in “hostilities” — a legal term signifying an armed conflict. Selling a dangerous product is different from an armed attack, said Geoffrey Corn, who once served as the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues. “This is not stretching the envelope,” Corn told The Times. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
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