By Simon Lewis
UNITED NATIONS, Sept 22 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump vowed on Tuesday to reassert US dominance in the Western Hemisphere and to use “unmatched military might” against threats in the region as he gathered allies behind an expanding campaign against drug cartels.
Speaking to world leaders at the UN General Assembly, Trump cast drug cartels as “the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere” and urged a tougher response to transnational crime.
Later at UN headquarters, Trump met with leaders and foreign ministers from 14 Latin American and Caribbean countries that have signed up to the Shield of the Americas, an anti-cartel coalition launched by his administration. He called on the group to join the US in designating 24 narcotrafficking groups as threats to stability and impose sanctions on them.
The countries later issued a statement pledging to take steps toward such joint sanctions.
The US raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and a subsequent oil deal with the interim government underscored the US willingness to act in the region, Trump told world leaders at the General Assembly.
“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, and if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States,” he said.
Trump’s National Security Strategy late last year set out plans for a revamped Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century policy asserting US primacy across the Americas that critics have long associated with decades of American intervention. Trump himself has taken to calling it the “Donroe Doctrine,” a play on his own name, after the phrase gained currency in conservative media.
Trump has also spoken, often in vague terms, of retaking the Panama Canal and annexing Greenland and Canada. On Tuesday, he signed an agreement on Greenland that stops short of his demand that the island become US territory to head off the growing Arctic presence of Russia and China.
Still, Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere has raised concerns of a neo-colonial project.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in his UN speech bristled at the approach, warning Latin America and the Caribbean countries of “renewed hegemonic temptations.” “Brazil is nobody’s backyard,” Lula said.
SHIELD OF THE AMERICAS
The Shield of the Americas gathering was the latest US effort to rally Latin American nations behind a more aggressive approach that has included US military strikes on drug boats since last fall and greater cooperation with Latin American countries.
Trump launched the group in March, gathering more than a dozen regional leaders in Florida.
The coalition includes governments closely aligned with Trump, including countries like Argentina, Ecuador and El Salvador whose leaders Trump has either praised or endorsed as candidates. Colombia and Peru joined after Trump-aligned presidents took power in recent months.
Brazil and Mexico are among the countries that have not joined.
Since returning to power early last year, Trump has designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and launched dozens of deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that US officials say are carrying narcotics bound for the US. Rights groups have said the strikes, which have killed more than 220 people, amount to extrajudicial killings.
“For decades, other administrations allowed much of this region to be dominated by vicious gangs and bloodthirsty drug cartels, destabilized by uncontrolled migration, and infiltrated by hostile foreign adversaries – foreign sick, demented adversaries – but not anymore,” Trump told the UN, adding that he was “reasserting American power” to make the region safer by taking out cartels.
“Like ISIS, they should be killed, exiled or detained as enemy combatants without the possibility of release,” Trump said, “which is what we’re doing.”
Trump also touted his administration’s pressure campaign on Communist-run Cuba, accused its leaders of seeding “subversive and radical” left-wing groups in the United States, and said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was “deep into negotiations with Cuba.”
Drug cartels controlling territory in US neighbor Mexico were “unacceptable,” he said, insisting that the government there “must reclaim control of its soil from the enemies of humanity.”
(Reporting by Simon Lewis; Editing by Don Durfee and Howard Goller)
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