Last Wednesday came and went as if it was an ordinary day. But the date held significance: It marked the one-year anniversary of Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration’s military campaign against drug trafficking organizations based in Latin America.

That campaign, which includes airstrikes against alleged drug-carrying vessels on the high seas and the occasional deployment of U.S. special operations forces, continues to this day. The results have been far less impressive than the White House claims.

As the White House tells it, Operation Southern Spear is meant to tackle drug trafficking in a different way. President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio spent the months before the operations began making the case about why the old way of fighting the so-called war on drugs was grossly ineffective.

There was so much cocaine and fentanyl pouring into the country, they said, that business as usual was not only a poor prescription for the problem but also akin to enabling the very national emergency — drug addiction — that continues to kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. Simply interdicting drugs and arresting the perpetrators, Rubio alleged, didn’t work.

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” he declared.

The Trump administration has spent the last year trying to make good on that statement. Cartels in Mexico and gangs in Ecuador are now considered to be in the same league as al-Qaida........

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