Image: James Bovard.

President Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the U.S. government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen. Trump has boasted of the killings by the U.S. military but claims all the targets were drug smugglers. Trump has threatened to suspend all U.S. government handouts for the Colombian government. Trump warned that Petro that he “better close up” cocaine production “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”

Tapping his own psychiatric expertise, Trump proclaimed that Colombia has “the worst president they’ve ever had – a lunatic with serious mental problems.”

Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? In 1989, President George H.W. Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that they were “no match for an angry America.” But Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of U.S. government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government.

The Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars to deluge Colombia with toxic spray. The New York Times reported that U.S.-financed planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill. Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared in 1999 that the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, “We can’t permanently fumigate the country.”

As I wrote in the American Spectator in 1999: “Colombia has received almost a billion dollars of........

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