Now he does feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.
—Macbeth, Act V, Scene 2
When tyrants feel they are losing their grip on power, they resort to dramatic gestures. And sometimes carry them out. Since 1984, the so-called War on Drugs, embodied in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of that year, has devastated the human and civil rights of millions, stuffed our jails with people who are, for the most part, poor and brown or black. But for all its cruelty and social damage, the “war” was a desperate metaphor. No longer.
A once-metaphorical war now involves deployment of the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group (nicknamed Southern Lance), including 12,000 to 15,000 troops and a numbing array of weapons, purportedly “to support the President’s directive to dismantle transnational criminal organizations and counter narco-terrorism in defense of the homeland.” 1The “homeland” is being attacked! Only the Executive can save us from “narco-terrorism” which, in the view of the Secretary of War and his President, has its home in Venezuela and is embodied in its President.
Operation Southern Spear has untold consequences. We will soon know whether it will result in an invasion/occupation of Venezuela in pursuit of a regime change its citizens have been unwilling to make. We already know that at least eighty-three families mourn civilian victims of targeted killings carried out on the high seas. These victims were killed solely because they happened to be where they were. There is no evidence that would have been used at trial to prove that they were or were not, knowingly or not, carrying drugs that may, or may not, have been destined for the United States. So far, their families have all been too poor, too distant, and too terrorized to be seen in the court of public opinion.
Our Tyrannus Rex, pushed into uncomfortable corners by a deflating economy and a still feeble opposition that seems to be waking from its slumber—dramatically so, in the city he once called his hometown—wields not a scepter, but a virtual lance. Far from his arm’s reach, but in what his coterie likes to call his “neighborhood,” Puerto Rico (closer in geography, history, and culture to Venezuela than it is to Washington), is being remilitarized. Not just to accommodate the nuclear-powered fleet now cooling its heels in the Caribbean, nor the airspace alerts and closures announced to last until at least February 2026, but to retake Roosevelt Roads—once the Navy’s largest military base and home to the Southern Command (now in charge of Southern Spear), shuttered in response to the Navy’s eviction from Vieques by the people of Puerto Rico in 2003. Those with long memories, or who read history, see a sequel to the invasions of the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (Operation Urgent Fury, 1983), Panamá (Operation Just Cause, 1989), and Haiti (Operation Uphold Democracy, 1994–95, reprised in 2004 and carried out from Roosevelt Roads).
Silent leges enim inter arma.
[Roughly translated: “Above the din of war, you can’t hear the law.”]
—Marcus Tulio Cicero, De Legibus, III, iii 8