Mexico City • In 1982, when gunmen attacked a police station in rural Peru, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry blamed guerrillas from the Shining Path and called the crime an act of “narco-terrorism — the union of the vice of narcotics with the violence of terrorism.” With that, he coined a term that fused two major nemeses of the United States — drugs and terrorism — into a single battle cry.
President Trump revived this idea in an interview last week with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. “Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them with drones and things like that?