Bags with coca paste, a crude extract of the coca leaf, are pictured at a laboratory in a municipality in Nariño department, Colombia, on May 11, 2023. Andrews Buitrago/AFP/Getty Images

The Trump administration’s undeclared war on what it calls “narco-terrorists” in Latin America opens an aggressive new chapter in US history and reignites the war on drugs.

Declared by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, the war on drugs is a decades-long campaign, woven into American foreign, justice and public health policy, to forcefully stop the flow of drugs into the US and harshly punish traffickers, dealers and even users.

It has also recently been regarded — by academics, activists and policymakers — as a failure. Drugs remain a major problem. Their flow into the US has not stopped. The recen

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