The Trump administration is framing its boat strikes against drug cartels in the Caribbean in part as a collective self-defense effort on behalf of US allies in the region, according to three people directly familiar with the administration’s internal legal argument.
The legal analysis rests on a premise – for which there is no immediate public evidence – that the cartels are waging armed violence against the security forces of allies such as Mexico, and that the violence is financed by cocaine shipments.
