Since President Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971, US policies of mass incarceration at home and interdiction and enforcement abroad have failed to achieve their stated aims. Instead, they have accelerated violence across the hemisphere. As the historian Alexander Aviña has pointed out, the ‘war on drugs’ is best understood as a ‘war on poor people’. It has recently entered a deadly new phase. Over the last month, the US government has launched at least eleven strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The Trump administration has claimed, without providing evidence, that the boats were transporting illegal drugs. The strikes have killed at least 57 people. These are summary executions without trial. Amnesty International has called it a ‘murder spree’.
The proposal to remove Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi came after decades of war and illegal settlement. Settlers pushed farther west, often violating existing treaties with Native nations. In our traditional lands in what is now the US south-east, the Cotton Revolution drove demand for Native territory. As with Trump’s fantasies of turning Gaza into ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’, crass economic greed drove Native dispossession. As in the West Bank, settlers sometimes acted in co-ordination with state officials, while at other times they operated outside US law, putting pressure on the state to follow them and provide security. Talk of ‘empty land’ and ‘handfuls of wandering Indians’ was used to justify the expulsion of my people.
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