In more than three decades in the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), retired agent Mike Vigil spent a lot of time identifying, tracking and boarding drug boats.

He’s done everything from chasing go-fast boats straight out of Miami Vice to intercepting cargo ships containing tons of cocaine and marijuana. Few in his field can match Vigil’s experience, whether as a street agent or head of the DEA’s International Operations. His range included the entire Caribbean, Barranquilla on the north coast of Colombia and the coast of Mexico in interdiction operations that produced the largest seizures in the world at the time.

That’s a lot of boats.

In all that time, not once did he feel the need to blow one up.

Doing so would have violated the rule of law and caused an international incident, not to mention end his career. It also would have been a stone-stupid method of investigation.

But that, Americans continue to be assured by President Donald Trump and his minions, has been a praiseworthy practice in the bombing of suspected Venezuelan drug boats in the effort to stop the flow of dangerous drugs from reaching the United States — the world’s largest consumer of them. Since Sept. 2, 36 boats have been destroyed with a death toll of 123. That includes the vicious double-tap strike on two survivors of one blast that violated military rules of engagement.

The unprovoked violence has played out in pyrotechnic video bites on the nightly news. That deception was a pretext for what came next, the extraction by the U.S. military of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, officially as part of a DEA drug investigation. For his part, Vigil has spent months in media interviews with reporters from the U.S. and Latin America speaking his truth to the distortion of the facts coming from the White House.

Trump’s lies are stacked even higher than the body count.

Remember when those sinister boats with Tren de Aragua gang members at the wheel were transporting deadly fentanyl to America?

Those were lies to stoke fear in the U.S. The gangbangers sell drugs, Vigil says, but they’re not in the shipping business. Venezuela doesn’t produce fentanyl or transport it, and those boats don’t have the range to reach anywhere near American waters.

In a world where cartels move loads measured in the tons, Vigil asks, does anyone really think it was wise to use a fleet to sink a flotilla of boats powered by outboard motors?

“It was a massive deployment of ships, including the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, to the Caribbean from areas that are much more dangerous around the world,” Vigil tells me, asking aloud whether all the effort to snatch Maduro to face cocaine trafficking charges in the United States outweighs the damage done to our nation’s already fractured reputation. 

“Was it worth killing all of these innocent people to capture Nicolás Maduro? No question about it, Nicolás Maduro was a brutal dictator that violated human rights, arrested individuals without any justification,” Vigil says. “He was also involved in drug trafficking, but was it worth it?”

Only if you count the cost in barrels of Venezuelan oil.

As a proud former agent who risked his life many times, Vigil says attempting to mask an illegal military action by sprinkling in a few agents in DEA jackets is just another attempt to disguise the true mission in Venezuela.

“This is another example of Donald Trump not respecting and having contempt for the U.S. Constitution and also the rule of law,” he says. “He can’t unilaterally take military action or attack another country without the authorization of Congress. But what he did to circumvent that was, he sent a few DEA agents with that force that went into Caracas so that he could later say, which he’s doing now, that this was not a military action, this was a police action — trying to justify the fact he didn’t coordinate with Congress.

“When you send all that military force and you’re shooting missiles and bombardments and what-have-you, it’s a military action. This was not a police action by any stretch of the imagination.”

Trump’s deadly charade under the flag of foreign policy has generated unexpected pushback from members of his own party. On Jan. 8, five Senate Republicans joined the Democrats to advance a resolution that would limit future military force against Venezuela without congressional approval. The Republicans immediately received threats to their careers from Trump on social media.

Approval of the final resolution is far from a sure thing, but it does show that at least a few congressional Republicans are perhaps tired of swallowing the latest lies Trump is selling to the American people.

They’d better hurry. Their fearless leader is already threatening the leaders of Colombia and Mexico.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.