How do you define a drug trafficker? I define it as someone who traffics in drugs. To the AP, this is a very “nuanced” matter. The AP took a break from embedding with Hamas to embed with drug trafficker and headed over to Venezuela to find some ‘innocent’ victims of President Trump’s air strikes on drug smugglers. You can tell that the AP tried but failed which is why it had to settle for the media fallback buzzword “nuanced“.
Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced – AP
Wow. Nuanced.
Customs should adopt this approach. “Sir, are you smuggling drugs?” “Well officer, it’s pretty nuanced.”
One was a fisherman struggling to eke out a living on $100 a month. Another was a career criminal. A third was a former military cadet. And a fourth was a down-on-his-luck bus driver.
And they all set off together on a three-hour drug smuggling tour.
You have to wade four paragraphs in before the AP finally admits that “residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.”
Obviously not. Cartel leaders don’t smuggle drugs and CEO generally don’t make home deliveries. Were they employed by narcoterrorists or cartels?
This is followed by page after page of sympathetic narratives about the drug smugglers who will no longer be smuggling drugs.
Like Luis.
Luis “Che” Martínez was killed in the first strike. A burly 60-year-old, Martínez was a longtime local crime boss, and he made most of his living smuggling drugs and people across borders, according to several people who knew him. He had been jailed by Venezuelan authorities on human-trafficking charges after a boat he had operated capsized in December 2020, killing about two dozen people, law enforcement officials said at the time
Killing two dozen people is very nuanced. Also being a crime boss.
Several residents said they appreciated how Martínez contributed annually to the town’s festival of the Virgin of the Valley, the patroness of fishermen, and he spent lavishly in local shops and restaurants. He also bet heavily on cockfights, a popular pastime, a bird breeder said.
Journalism, folks. Very nuanced journalism. Sure he was a crime boss who got two dozen people killed, but he also liked roosters killing each other. How dare Trump and Hegseth take out this lovely man who apart from smuggling drugs and illegal aliens, and getting two dozen people killed, also “spent lavishly in local shops and restaurants”?
What would we do without media nuance?
You know what’s not nuanced? Killing drug dealers and traffickers. I’m glad we’re doing that instead of nuance.
