Operation Southern Spear, or how to mistake a radar for a roadway

OPERATION Southern Spear, the Trump administration’s war on narco-terrorism in the Western Hemisphere that is indistinguishable from a campaign to effect regime change in Venezuela, continues to amaze.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been treated to a succession of incidents and revelations that speak to an operation that increasingly appears modelled on its haphazard and incoherent commander-in-chief.

First, there was the news that US Marines had carelessly installed a military-grade radar in Tobago when PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar was quite certain they’d only been tasked with helping build a roadway. Mistakes can happen. Let he who has never confused a state-of-the-art missile defence system with tarmac cast the first stone.

Next, we learned that self-styled US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth may have committed a war crime, instructing his navy to “double tap” the wreckage of a bombed boat in the Caribbean Sea with the express intention of killing shipwrecked survivors.

The USA doesn’t recognise the International Criminal Court, so there’s no danger of Hegseth or any subordinates ending up on trial in the Hague. But “no quarter” killing of disabled enemies on the battlefield is a well-established war crime, explicitly forbidden by most conceptions of the rules of military engagement, including the US Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual.

And to cap it all, Donald Trump demonstrated his unwavering commitment to holding drug traffickers and their associates accountable by pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted on drug trafficking charges in 2024.

The US government’s prosecution – argued in court, supported by evidence — described a long-running programme that turned parts of the Honduran state into agents of protection for its transiting the country en route to the USA.

Trump’s counter-argument, presented without evidence in an impromptu chat with reporters, was that “(The Biden administration) basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”

Perhaps they did, but they did so in open court, in accordance with due process and the law, to the satisfaction of a judge. As it happens, “saying he’s a drug dealer because he’s the president of the country” is a pretty good summation of the US case against Nicolás Maduro.

Few impartial observers doubt that Maduro presides over a corrupt regime that has thwarted the democratic will and rights of free expression of the Venezuelan people to keep itself in power. But the “Cartel of the Suns” that the US government insists Maduro is fronting almost certainly does not exist.

The name was coined by Venezuelan journalists as shorthand for the involvement of high-ranking Venezuelan military officers in a drug-trafficking scandal in the 1990s. The rank insignia of generals in the Venezuelan army includes sun emblems – hence “Cartel of the Suns” to describe a conspiracy among the generals.

Perhaps the Trump administration is saving all the evidence of the existence of an actual, bona fide Cartel del los Soles for the prosecution of Nicolás Maduro.

But don’t hold your breath. An administration that was interested in prosecuting drug traffickers would have fished missile-strike survivors out of the sea and put them in jail, not bombed them a second time. And an administration interested in making examples of those who abuse their authority for profit from the drug trade wouldn’t randomly pardon high-profile offenders convicted in a US court.

Almost everything we hear about Trump’s war on narco-terrorism seems to contradict the claim that it’s a war on narco-terrorism. From failing to observe its own rules of war to releasing exactly the type of criminal they claim to have mobilised half the US Navy to try to defeat, very little about Operation Southern Spear lives up to its promotional rhetoric. And no one seems to want to take responsibility for it.

Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned from his position as head of US Southern Command (therefore, the officer in charge of US naval operations in the Caribbean Sea) in mid-October. The Secretary of War is accused of a heinous crime and is defending himself by saying he wasn’t in the room when it happened. And the only narco-trafficking president in an American jail has just been set free by the US president.

If you’re a head of state who recently confused a radar for a roadway, frustrated that nitpickers and naysayers seize on these trivial mistakes to question and undermine your fight against drug traffickers – consider the possibility that the call is coming from inside the house.