The jungle has no rulebook by Robert Perez

The most dangerous phrase in Washington's new war on drugs may be the simplest one: “on land.” For decades, the United States has treated Latin America's narcotics trade primarily as a law-enforcement, intelligence and interdiction problem. Now the Trump administration is pushing the military deeper into the region, with hundreds of U.S. troops deployed for training and joint exercises and a stated ambition to take the fight against designated criminal organisations from the sea onto the jungle floor.

That is not merely an expansion of an operation. It is a change of category. And categories matter when people start dying. The argument from Washington is seductive in its simplicity: cartels are dangerous, drugs kill Americans, therefore the military should hunt the people responsible. It sounds tough. It sounds decisive. It sounds like the kind of policy that fits comfortably into a presidential speech about restoring order.

But the drug trade is not an invading army. Criminal organisations are brutal, heavily armed and capable of controlling territory. That does not automatically transform every suspected trafficker, logistics operator, boat crewman or warehouse worker into a lawful military target. The mere fact that soldiers are carrying the weapons does not magically transform a policing operation into a war.

That distinction has already been badly blurred by the administration's maritime campaign. More than 200 people have reportedly been killed in strikes against suspected drug-trafficking vessels, while serious questions remain about the evidence supporting individual targets and the legal basis for using lethal military force.

Now Washington wants to take that model ashore. That should make every democratic government in the Americas nervous. Because the jungle is not an ocean. On a boat intercepted hundreds of kilometres from shore, the Pentagon can create an image of a clean battlefield: target, missile, explosion, mission accomplished. On land, reality becomes considerably messier. Villages exist. Families exist. Informants lie. Intelligence is incomplete. Criminal groups deliberately operate among civilians. Governments have different laws, different courts and different ideas about sovereignty.

There are no neat red circles around the “bad guys.” And once the United States begins conducting lethal operations inside another country's territory, the legal questions multiply violently. Who authorised the strike? Who identified the target? What evidence was available? Was arrest possible? What happens when the intelligence is wrong? Who investigates a civilian death? Which country's courts have jurisdiction? And, perhaps most importantly, what happens when the definition of “terrorist organisation” becomes a convenient replacement for evidence?

This is where the counter-narcotics mission risks becoming something much larger than counter-narcotics. The administration has designated numerous Latin American criminal groups as foreign terrorist organisations and increasingly describes the confrontation in military language. But changing the label does not automatically create an international armed conflict or grant unlimited authority to kill. Human-rights lawyers and international institutions have already challenged the legal theory underpinning the maritime strikes, arguing that suspected criminals cannot simply be converted into military targets by presidential declaration.

Washington may disagree. It is entitled to make that argument. But Latin America has heard this music before. The hemisphere remembers military dictatorships, covert operations, interventions, disappearances and governments claiming that extraordinary threats required extraordinary powers. The United States cannot seriously expect Latin American societies to forget that history simply because today's targets are called cartels instead of communists.

And there is an additional stupidity here: killing people is not the same thing as dismantling a criminal economy. Cartels are businesses. Kill one commander and another appears. Destroy one route and another opens. Bomb a warehouse and the supply chain adapts. Organised crime survives because it has money, corruption networks, political protection, weapons and enormous consumer demand.

A missile cannot arrest corruption. A drone cannot prosecute a banker laundering cartel money. A soldier cannot bomb away the American appetite for cocaine. Yet military power is politically addictive precisely because it creates immediate images of action. Governments can announce strikes. Generals can display maps. Presidents can promise that the enemy is being destroyed.

Meanwhile, the harder work, investigation, prosecution, financial intelligence, anti-corruption operations, border cooperation, judicial reform and reducing demand, looks painfully boring. Democracy has always had this problem: the spectacular solution is often easier to sell than the effective one.

The United States has every legitimate interest in fighting drug trafficking. Latin American governments have every right to seek American intelligence, equipment and training. Joint operations can be lawful and useful when they respect sovereignty, human rights and clear rules of engagement.

But once counter-narcotics becomes a battlefield without a clearly defined war, the distinction between policing and warfare begins to disappear. And when that distinction disappears, so does accountability. The jungle should not become the place where the rules go to die. Because if Washington can redefine criminal suspects as wartime enemies today, another government can copy the formula tomorrow. And once that precedent spreads across the Americas, nobody should be surprised when the next jungle contains not fewer bodies, but fewer rules.