WASHINGTON (AP) — Under President Donald Trump, the drug war is looking a lot like the war on terror.

To support strikes against Latin American gangs and drug cartels, the Trump administration is relying on a legal argument that gained traction after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which allowed U.S. authorities to use lethal force against al-Qaida combatants who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The criminal groups now being targeted by U.S. strikes are a very different foe, however, spawned in the prisons of Venezuela, and fueled not by anti-Western ideology but by drug trafficking and other illicit enterprises.

Trump’s use of overwhelming military force to combat such groups and authorization of covert action inside Venezuela, possibly to oust President Nicolás Maduro, s

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