As the Trump administration tries to turn attention back to the Western Hemisphere after months of war in Iran, officials are seeking to intensify the fight against Latin American cartels.<\/p>\n
At the United Nations General Assembly this week, State Department officials are expected to announce that 14 Latin American and Caribbean nations are labeling 25 criminal groups as terrorist organizations, according to U.S. and Latin American officials. The groups have already been labeled foreign terrorist organizations by Washington.<\/p>\n
\u201cUpon taking office, I designated the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and unleashed the United States armed forces to eliminate them,\u201d President Trump said in remarks at the General Assembly on Tuesday. \u201cThe cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere \u2014 not good people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having Latin American leaders designate the same groups as terrorists, analysts say, further lays the groundwork for potential military strikes against criminal groups accused of drug trafficking.<\/p>\n
The joint statement will be announced on the sidelines of the General Assembly, according to two U.S. officials, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.<\/p>\n
The formal mechanism for the designation is the Rio Treaty, the officials said, a 1947 defense pact among more than a dozen nations in the Western Hemisphere that holds an attack on one member to be an attack on all.<\/p>\n
The move would mark the first time that a group of Latin American governments has collectively signed a sweeping terrorism designation alongside Washington.<\/p>\n
The countries signing the statement \u2014 which belong to the Shield of the Americas, an alliance of nations with conservative governments that was formed by the Trump administration \u2014 are Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago.<\/p>\n
Peru and Paraguay confirmed that they had signed the joint statement. The State Department and the governments of the other countries did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Former U.S. officials and experts said the move could have sweeping effects in the region. \u201cThey\u2019re doing it at U.N.G.A. to try to give it legitimacy,\u201d said Todd Robinson, an assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement at the State Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. \u201cBut I think the strategy is basically wrong. Criminal organizations are not terrorist organizations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Robinson said the United States had made more headway fighting traffickers in Latin America by focusing on the \u201ccivilian security apparatus that is trained to go after these organizations \u2014 to go after their money, to collect evidence, to indict and prosecute and to, under the rule of law, bring these people to justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
A militarized approach, by contrast, has not succeeded in curbing the flow of drugs<\/a> to the United States and could result in extrajudicial killings, Mr. Robinson said. \u201cIt already has,\u201d he said, citing lethal strikes on boats that the Trump administration, without providing evidence, said were carrying drugs.<\/p>\n Those attacks, which have killed more than 220 people, violate international law and could constitute crimes against humanity, a U.N. legal expert wrote<\/a> this week.<\/p>\n