Films For Action

"I hated the process of making AI videos, but I couldn't ignore how powerful it was getting. These are the 5 tips I figured out as a filmmaker without surrendering my creative process, and without becoming an AI creator." - Herman Huang

How Filmmakers Should Actually Be Using AI Video | Herman Huang 9 minutes | I hated the process of making AI videos, but I couldn't ignore how powerful it was getting. These are the 5 tips I figured out as a filmmaker without surrendering my creative process, and without becoming an AI creator.

The worst is not the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and private contractors, wielding baseball bats and batons, who flood the parking lot at the end of their shifts and unleash on protesters outside the gates the sa**sm practiced on those incarcerated inside Delaney Hall.

The worst is not the tear gas, the tasers, the pepper spray or the dozens of arrests.

The worst is not the beatings and the riot shields, raised above the heads of New Jersey State Police and Newark police and brought down swiftly on bodies, leaving severe lacerations.

The worst is watching the children.

The ones heaving and sobbing as they leave Delaney Hall, saying goodbye to their mothers, fathers, sisters or brothers who took them to school, who cheered them on at their soccer games, who told them they are beautiful and talented, who woke up before dawn to work menial jobs so they could have a future, who love them in a world where love is a diminishing commodity.

I am seated against a cyclone fence a block from Delaney Hall, New Jersey’s largest ICE jail, with a protester who goes by the name of Basher. He is 41. He has a thick black beard. His nails are dirty. His hands are scarred from clashing with police. His head is wrapped in a green keffiyeh. The stench of the sprawling Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission treatment plant across the street saturates the air. When it comes to the children, the ones ripped from their parents by a nation that is institutionalizing cruelty, even Basher must catch his breath and stop. The scenes are too much to bear.

The savagery at Delaney Hall is the warm-up act. The goons, the ones who attack those demonized on the inside of the ICE jail and those demonized on the streets outside of it, are in training for the rest of us. Delaney Hall, run by a private prison company — The GEO Group — is the template for a world where we will be stripped of our rights; routinely jailed and tortured; denied adequate medical care; fed rancid, expired and moldy food infested with worms and maggots; forced to drink contaminated water and breathe polluted air; and work for poverty wages — in the case of those inside Delaney Hall, a dollar a day.

Some 300 of the roughly 600 people detained at Delaney Hall — which includes teenagers, the elderly and pregnant women — began a hunger and labor strike on May 22.

ICE and GEO Group guards reacted as you would expect. They beat the strikers. They seal vents and toss tear gas and pepper spray into cells. They place suspected leaders of the strike in handcuffs and force them out of the facility to unknown locations, or isolate them, in “punishment units.” They manipulate the heating and cooling systems so prisoners endure extreme heat or cold. They cut telephone and internet access and suspend visitation rights. They sexually harass women.

On May 31, 56 of those held inside Delaney Hall issued their fourth public letter. It was handwritten in Spanish on ruled paper:

“The conditions in this prison are not fit for human beings over such a long period of time: medical neglect, water unfit for consumption, food that is past its expiration date and in poor condition, bathrooms that are unusable, and ventilation systems that have never been maintained and because of this, we are constantly sick,” the latest letter reads. “We demand freedom, a fair trial, and for our rights to be respected. S.O.S.”

On July 24, last year, at around 6:45 a.m., ICE vehicles blocked a van carrying 15 Guatemalan workers, three blocks from my house. I went to see the men at the ICE jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey, because I speak Spanish and because their families, terrified of being targeted, could not. The men told me they were threatened with lengthy prison sentences, followed by certain deportation, if they did not sign papers agreeing to their immediate deportation. They signed. It was my job to inform their families they would not be coming home.

A Guardian analysis of government records found that during the first seven months of Trump’s second term, the parents of at least 27,000 children — 12,000 of whom had U.S. citizenship — were arrested.

These men were my neighbors. Their children attend high school with my children. The kidnapping of parents — often at work or at immigration hearings and ICE check-in appointments — not only traumatizes the children of these families, but the entire community. Every child in the high school wonders if their parents will also one day be seized and disappear. Every child wonders how this cruelty can be inflicted on their friends. Every child wonders what kind of country we live in.

The state and the media organs that act as its echo chamber are doing their best to convince the public that those locked up in Delaney Hall are “criminals,” “the worst of the worst.”

But a review of ICE data by Austin Kocher — an assistant research professor at Syracuse University and an immigration data and policy expert — exposes the lie.

Kocher found that 88 percent of immigrants detained at Delaney Hall have no criminal conviction and more than 70 percent have no criminal history. Those with criminal convictions almost universally committed low-level offenses.

The rogue paramilitary forces that pour daily out of the gates of Delaney Hall are unaccountable. They ignore the law. They are the Satanic foundation of our emergent police state. The terror they inflict on those in this small patch of Newark will soon be inflicted on all of us.

New Jersey Senator Andy Kim — who was pepper-sprayed outside Delaney Hall by ICE agents — and Governor Mikie Sherrill were denied entry into the facility. Kim, after an appeal to the Director of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, was eventually given a lightning tour, but forbidden to speak to any detainees. City and state health inspectors have also been blocked from fully accessing the ICE jail.

The message is clear: We will carry out any abuse with immunity.

On Saturday afternoon, after about a dozen protestors blocked cars from driving out of the facility, ICE agents, wearing combat gear and face coverings, charged the protesters with pepper-ball guns, mace and tasers.

“Move back! Get back!” they shouted as they unleashed clouds of pepper spray.

Cars leaving the facility struck at least one protester.

By around 10:00 p.m., some 100 protestors had set up a barricade of barrels filled with sand to block the facility’s exits and entrances. The blockade saw a huge influx of ICE agents, GEO Group guards and Newark police push the protestors several hundred yards down the street.

Police announced a ban on protesters wearing protective gear, including respirators and goggles, although Delaney Hall is located in an industrial area with extensive air and water contamination known as “Chemical Corridor.”

The battle at Delaney Hall is not over. It is a battle not only for justice, for the rights of our neighbors, for a world where all are treated with dignity and respect, for children who should never be separated from their fathers and mothers, but a battle to save our country from galloping fascism.

Join it now.

Soon it may be too late.

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir drew widespread condemnation on Friday when he declared that "all Lebanon must burn" shortly after four Israeli soldiers were killed in a fight with Hezbollah.

In a social media post, Ben-Gvir said that Israel should retaliate for the deaths of the soldiers with a scorched-earth military campaign aimed at killing large numbers of Lebanese people.

"For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep," the far-right Israeli Cabinet member wrote. "Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror."

Ben-Gvir also took a subtle shot at the Trump administration, which has called for Israel to cease its military operations in Lebanon so that the US and Iran can negotiate an end to the illegal war of choice President Donald Trump launched earlier this year.

"With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit," he wrote. "All of Lebanon must burn."

Ben-Gvir's demands for mass slaughter were widely condemned as the ravings of a genocidal maniac.

"You are a psychopath and one of the greatest threats to the security of Israel and of Jewish people around the world," journalist Yashar Ali wrote in response to Ben-Gvir. "You belong in a psychiatric institution, not in a government role."

Humza Yousaf, former first minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, argued that Ben-Gvir's ravings should end any question about the nature of Israel's current government.

"For those who continue to deny Israel has any intention of committing genocide then read this tweet from a minister at the heart of the Israeli government," Yousaf wrote. "He belongs in the Hague, convicted and in a jail cell."

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that Ben-Gvir's post should make Western nations reconsider which nation is the largest obstacle to achieving peace in the Middle East.

"While regional states are intrinsically involved in efforts to bring about peace in the region," Parsi noted, "this Israeli cabinet minister tweets that 'All of Lebanon must burn!' And he repeats that call twice in the post. When will the West ask the question that never gets asked: How is the rest of the region supposed to live in peace and security next to a state that behaves like this?"

British journalist Owen Jones remarked that, in calling for mass killing in Lebanon, Ben-Gvir "sounds like a N**i."

"If this wasn't Israel," Jones added, "everybody would say he sounds like a N**i."

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Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Each day, I reluctantly but inevitably log into my social media accounts to post essays, share important news articles, and generally check out the overall vibe of the country. More often than not, what I see online dovetails with my day-to-day social experiences with the public. The conversations, topics, and ways in which people discuss political, social, and cultural issues are always similar to what’s trending online.

For instance, I’ve discussed Israel with non-politicized Americans more in the past three months than I have over the past two decades. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s, unfortunately, not the result of organizing efforts. In other words, it’s not as if the people I’m having these discussions with have attended antiwar rallies or Palestinian solidarity events. They simply consume information via YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Fortunately, an increasing number of commentators on both sides of the political spectrum, and everywhere in between, are beginning to understand the fundamentally destructive (for both nations) relationship between the U.S. and Israel. That’s a good thing, no doubt. For the first time in 25 years, or since Gallup has been polling the issue, Americans sympathize more with the Palestinians than with the Israelis. Quite the development when you think about it.

And yet, Gaza has been destroyed, and the Israelis are carrying out an ongoing genocide. Palestinians are starving. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children are sleeping in makeshift tents that are prone to flooding during rainstorms. And the situation doesn’t look like it will improve anytime soon. The Israelis continue to act with impunity, which is only possible with the explicit political and military support provided by the U.S. Our tax dollars are paying for this insanity.

But what are we doing about it? Don’t get me wrong, I’m guilty as charged. I haven’t organized any events over the past several years, nor have I initiated any allies, outreach campaigns, or canvassing efforts. I haven’t even made a phone call on behalf of a political campaign, electoral or otherwise. I’ve only attended rallies and shown up to the polls. After almost 20 years of activism and community organizing, I needed a break. It was needed and productive, but enough is enough.

Anyway, let me get back on track. What are we doing? What could we do? And what would it take? Those are the sort of questions I ask myself when it comes to political issues. Israel is ethnically cleansing portions of Palestine and Lebanon with U.S. political, economic, and military support. Currently, we’re not doing much about it. There are, to be fair, Palestinian solidarity groups, student organizations, and unions that are applying pressure in their own ways. But their efforts are isolated.

If we could engage even a fraction of the tens of millions of Americans who sympathize with the Palestinians, we would have millions of Americans involved. At the same time, this would require Americans to prioritize the issue of Palestine at a time when the economy, housing, healthcare, immigration, and threats to democratic institutions take priority in the minds of most people. And even concerning those issues, the vast majority of Americans remain politically disengaged.

Elections, on the one hand, allow for a discussion of virtually every issue. That’s one of the reasons why they resonate with people, whereas it’s very difficult to explain the utility of building social movements. Elections produce clear winners and losers. Votes are cast and tallied. It’s a statistical process, from the precinct, municipal, county, and state boundaries to the final vote count: graphs, pie charts, and illustrated maps explain the process, rules, and results. Elections are quantifiable.

Here, it’s tempting for people to only engage with electoral politics because they can feel that they’re addressing all of their concerns and issues. Of course, this is not the case in the real world, where politicians get bogged down with crises, often self-inflicted, or buried in the minutiae of legislative procedures. Most of the time, we’re lucky if the very best of the best politicians can make significant progress on one specific issue, let alone multiple issues. The system simply doesn’t allow it.

Many social movement activists and theorists would argue that we shouldn’t address one issue at a time, but develop and organize around a vision and framework that challenges the system itself. For me, that’s a tempting approach, but often unarticulated in detail. What does it actually look like to challenge the system? People often answer with a tactic. “A general strike!” Okay, but that doesn’t answer the question of what sort of mechanisms and organizations we’re replacing the system with.

Sometimes, addressing a singular issue is the only viable approach. For instance, a multinational corporate technology company seeks to build a data center in your community. You decide to organize with your neighbors, coworkers, and friends and fight back. While it’s true that engaging in such a campaign allows for educational opportunities, including an examination of power structures, local political networks, and the economic system, there remains one goal: to stop the data center.

Let’s assume the data center fight is successful. You stop it. Then what? Hopefully, people leave such campaigns having built organizations and organizational capacity, expanded their political social networks, and learned valuable skills. Ideally, that single-issue campaign morphs into other campaigns and projects. At least that should be the goal. Plus, we should always leave a campaign stronger than when we entered it. That’s the true test of any campaign’s effectiveness.

These are the sort of questions and issues that matter. These are the sort of things we have the power to control. We can’t dictate what Trump says or does tomorrow. We can’t change what Bush or Obama did in the past. We can’t command Congress, and we can’t direct the Supreme Court. We cannot control the media or multinational corporations. All we can do is control the things we can control. And in the political world, that means whether we decide to act or not act.

It’s really that simple. The only thing that matters is what we do, not what we say, or what we write, or what we think, or how we feel. None of that matters in the political world. Oh, you’re upset and sad about what Israel is doing in Gaza? Your emotions have no bearing on the situation. Netanyahu couldn’t care less about your feelings. Oh, you’ve expressed your displeasure on Facebook? The government couldn’t give a s**t less. Doing so has no bearing on the decisions of those in power.

The only thing that matters is whether or not we decide to fight. Participating in civic life, social movements, workplace organizing, campus organizing, and expanding political horizons is all that matters in the political world. No one cares about your half-baked theories unless they’re directly connected to existing political projects and efforts. No one cares about your moral superiority. Virtue won’t save the children of Gaza. Only committed political organizing and mobilizing will.

What Trump posted on X, Truth Social, or said to the media today doesn’t matter. What we do to stop Trump from further degrading our country does. The construction of a ballroom or featuring a mixed martial arts fight at the White House doesn’t matter. What we do to stop Trump’s ICE policies does. Posting memes and expressing our anger online doesn’t matter. Mobilizing the many millions of people who agree that we can do better as a country, or who remain on the fence, does.

As the old saying goes, money walks, and bulls**t talks. In the end, we have the power and ability to understand our collective predicament and respond accordingly. Human beings created the institutions, laws, technology, and economic systems that dictate and dominate our lives. And that means human beings can reconstruct, dismantle, and create new forms of government, economic relations, and cultural norms. There is no natural law that exists dictating otherwise.

In this increasingly frantic and disorienting digital landscape, we must always remember our priorities. Human beings, animals, and ecosystems matter. Computers and robots do not. Our families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and romantic partners matter. Unknown, faceless, digital profiles do not. Books, art, and culture matter. Celebrities, influencers, and elites do not. Let’s constantly remind ourselves of the things that matter and things that don’t.

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Vincent Emanuele Vincent Emanuele is a combat veteran, writer, and activist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Vincent testified to U.S. Congress in 2008 about war crimes and atrocities after refusing a third deployment to Iraq with the United States Marine Corps. Since then, he has worked with a wide range of social movements, community organizations, and labor unions. His writings and interviews have been featured in ZNet, CounterPunch, Alternet, TruthOut, and Verso. Vincent is also a contributor to the anthology ‘Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars’ (Metropolitan, 2022).

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This Juneteenth arrives at a moment when many of the hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement feel undeniably fragile. The Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision gave state lawmakers the green light to reduce Black voting power by redrawing congressional maps. Meanwhile, the SAVE America Act and other proof-of-citizenship efforts propose new burdens for millions of eligible voters—especially voters of color who are more likely to face difficulty accessing required records.

As Black Americans, this should concern us deeply. For years after the ratification of the 15th Amendment, our ancestors had to overcome poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and constant threats of violence to participate in our democracy. When Fannie Lou Hamer attempted to register to vote in Mississippi, she was fired from her job and forced from her home; Amzie Moore endured years of harassment and retaliation for helping Black Mississippians register to vote and build political power. But despite these hardships, they persevered.

Which is why one question continues to trouble me as a Black pastor and grassroots organizer: How did we move from a generation willing to risk everything for political participation to an overwhelming number of people believing participation doesn't matter?

Research shows that most Americans feel political leaders are out-of-touch with ordinary people, reflecting a deep and widespread sense that politics is reserved for an elite few. But we must remember that politics is simply the process of shaping the world around us—and by that definition, we are all politicians.

At my organization, Live Free Illinois, we embrace our identities as politicians in our own right. For instance, in January, we successfully organized Gov. JB Pritzker to sign the Clean Slate Act, a transformational public safety bill that removes barriers to employment, housing, and education opportunities for people with past convictions. It took nearly five years of tireless organizing, but our bill crossed the finish line—and became a law with $5.6 million in funding to implement it. This victory makes clear that politics does not only belong to some unreachable class of leaders; it belongs to the people willing to organize and demand change.

Our ancestors did not organize because they believed the government was perfect. They organized because they understood that power would not listen unless it was confronted. They built churches, mutual aid networks, civic organizations, and political movements because they knew that liberation required disciplined collective action. That lesson is just as relevant today. The authoritarian forces seeking to diminish our democratic participation are counting on our exhaustion, our cynicism, and our disengagement. We cannot afford to give them any of those things.

That responsibility does not begin and end at the ballot box. It lives in church fellowship halls where neighbors gather to address violence in their communities, in voter registration drives after Sabbath, and in the courage of ordinary people who demand better from those in power. This may not look like the politics we’ve been taught to disdain, but they are among the most powerful political acts we can undertake. It is how our communities can transform shared concerns into lasting change.

I have spoken with many parishioners who have felt overwhelmed by the challenges facing our community. But when I encourage them to organize—to gather their neighbors, advance shared priorities, and demand accountability—something shifts. They begin to recognize that the power they were searching for was already in their hands. Organizing reminds people that change has always come from ordinary people deciding they have a stake in their own future.

Juneteenth is a timely reminder that our democracy demands more than participation; it demands organization. As corrupt leaders advance efforts to weaken democratic oversight and centralize power, we must activate our own agenda—and hold elected officials accountable to it. The future of our communities depends on whether we are willing to embrace that responsibility.

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Rev. Ciera Bates-Chamberlain is the executive director at Live Free Illinois.

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For the past year, the Trump administration has undertaken a lethal campaign of strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 200 people. It could soon gain a major new ally in this fight in Colombia, where the leading candidate in Sunday's presidential elections has promised to break with his dovish predecessor and wage an all-out war on drug trafficking.

As a regional war on drugs takes shape, there is no better time to ask the question: is a military campaign really the most effective way to stop the flow of narcotics from Latin America?

My new Quincy Institute brief addresses this question head-on, finding that the White House’s militarized “war on narco-terror” across the hemisphere is unlikely to produce durable results. In its place, I recommend a concrete road map for sustainably reducing Colombian coca production and co***ne trafficking to the US.

An analysis of 25 years of evidence since the the passage of the multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia aid package reveals that a winning strategy for fighting drug trafficking must bolster state presence, rural development, and the rule of law in drug-producing areas; sequence manual eradication campaigns alongside legally enforceable negotiations with some armed groups; and tackle more profitable nodes of drug supply chains while countering illicit financial flows.

Colombia—where over two-thirds of the world’s co***ne, and 90% of co***ne that enters the US, is produced—forms the nucleus of the Andean drug trade and is by far Washington’s’ most important counternarcotics partner in the Western Hemisphere. Yet nearly $15 billion in US security, counternarcotics and development assistance over the past quarter century has largely failed to curtail Colombia’s co***ne economy, which is now witnessing all-time highs in hectares under cultivation and potential production.

Past strategies, such as aerial fumigation with glyphosate, which was banned in Colombia in 2015, significantly reduced coca crop coverage in the early 2000s but failed to halt production. As farmers became more productive and adaptive, cultivation shifted to Peru, and the chemicals sprayed left indelible harm on the environment and public health.

Surges in US military aid, particularly under the aegis of Plan Patriota, led to the professionalization of Colombian security forces, improved their aerial and intelligence capabilities, and brought the FARC guerillas to the negotiating table. But this approach also fueled instability near military bases — as extrajudicial killings by security forces and paramilitary violence rose to unprecedented levels — and failed to meet its counternarcotics objectives.

The “kingpin strategy,” meanwhile, focused on extraditions of drug bosses. This tactic, which soared under President Alvaro Uribe as he sought to demobilize Colombia’s largest paramilitary organization and has continued to this day, has produced the fragmentation, expansion and specialization of newer criminal outfits, contributing to increased co***ne production as groups devised new trafficking routes and illicit rents to exploit, from gold mining to extortion, kidnapping, wildlife trafficking, and human smuggling.

Other approaches, however, have proved more successful and are correlated with modest declines in coca cultivation, potential co***ne production, and trafficking to the US, particularly in the late 2000s and following the signing of the 2016 peace accords between the government and the FARC.

The strongest recipe for slowing the drug trade has focused on incentivizing viable economic alternatives to coca and reducing the power and influence of illicit armed actors. Under initiatives like the Plan de Consolidación Integral de la Macarena, Familias Guardabosques, and Colombia Transforma, Colombian authorities have boosted state presence, invested in rural development, and bolstered rule of law in drug-producing areas, all while maintaining a credible security posture focused on improving public safety.

A complementary approach involves manual coca eradication campaigns. While time consuming and sometimes risky for communities and security forces alike, these efforts have proven effective when sequenced by first establishing police presence and investing in productive infrastructure and services before forcibly — or, ideally, voluntarily — uprooting coca plants. When combined with strategically designed and legally binding, enforceable negotiations with some armed actors in localized settings — as the administration of President Gustavo Petro has pursued more recently as its Total Peace plan flounders — this approach can incentivize armed groups to pursue industrial-scale eradication themselves. They do this by tying non-compliance to credible threats of targeted offensives.

Lastly, later-stage drug interdictions, increased inspections of larger vessels, and enhanced regulatory integration and coordination against money laundering and other illicit financial flows are essential for stemming co***ne trafficking to the US and disrupting the global networks underpinning it. Fortunately, this approach continues to occur alongside the expensive, legally questionable, and likely ineffective boat strike campaign, which could explain why even top administration officials admit it’s “not the answer … [or] the most effective tool."

These lessons have clear implications for Colombia’s next president and US drug policy moving forward. A balanced strategy is bound to yield more favorable outcomes for both left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda, who seeks to follow Petro’s negotiations with armed actors and voluntary illicit crop substitution programs, and right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who seeks to accelerate low-level arrests and increase the military’s role in targeting drug production and trafficking.

To date, neither the left’s hesitation to implement a credible supply-side counternarcotics agenda nor the right’s militarized approach to curbing coca cultivation has led to durable results. In fact, the lack of a viable, well-articulated strategy strengthens the hand of irregular armed actors, exacerbates a deteriorating security landscape across the country, and gives the Trump administration greater leverage to dictate its preferred approaches, regardless of their empirically poor outcomes.

Despite the US administration’s insistence on applying “systemic friction” to designated foreign terrorist organizations across the hemisphere, this overly militarized strategy is already leading groups to adapt to new illicit industries, divert trafficking routes, diversify economic portfolios, and expand operations to new subregions, resorting to more covert and asymmetrical forms of violence against states and competitors, as a recent surge in drone activity in Colombia has shown.

Aside from proving woefully ineffective at reducing drug production and trafficking, Washington’s militarized campaign, carried out in conjunction with regional governments, also risks increasing extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians, fueling insurrectionary and anti-US sentiment, undermining the rule of law across the hemisphere, and reversing years of progress in Latin America’s fraught civil-military relations.

Ultimately, without credible government presence, viable economic opportunities, and even rudimentary judicial institutions in drug-producing subregions throughout Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, illicit economies and the irregular armed actors feeding off them will persist, regardless of military pressure.

Raiding artisanal drug labs, fumigating small-scale farmers or extraditing kingpins have not proved particularly significant in advancing durable policy outcomes. And there’s little evidence to show that bombing alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean or Eastern Pacific will work either, despite some Trump administration officials’ claims.

Assisting our Colombian partners in formulating a credible security posture against armed non-state actors is crucial to US counternarcotics goals. But in tandem with this approach, we must seek to safeguard development assistance for coca-growing communities; sequence manual eradication campaigns with prior investment in infrastructure; boost interdictions of more valuable drug supply; and counter impunity and corruption by political and business elites.

Colombia’s high-stakes presidential elections could well accelerate a remilitarization of the regional drug war. It is therefore urgent that analysts and officials evaluate the effectiveness of diverse counternarcotics strategies in Colombia over the past quarter century. If reducing the flow of drugs to the US is truly the Trump administration’s objective, then US officials must learn from decades of failure and chart a new course.

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Lee Schlenker is a research associate with the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He received his MA in Latin American Studies at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

© 2023 Responsible Statecraft

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