ABC News
The Australian Federal Police has declined to reveal its budget or operational expectations for an international taskforce in Colombia aimed at stemming drug flows across the Pacific.
AFP commissioner Krissy Barrett said the team’s officers would work with Colombian, US, Mexican, New Zealand and Pacific law authorities, and also INTERPOL.
Greens senator David Shoebridge and an ex-AFP executive have raised concerns the initiative could contribute to the Trump administration’s strikes on alleged trafficking vessels.
Unanswered questions about the Australian Federal Police’s (AFP’s) new anti-drugs taskforce in Colombia have sparked concerns the initiative could contribute to the Trump administration’s air strikes against alleged trafficking vessels.
In May, commissioner Krissy Barrett announced the AFP and New Zealand Police would fund an international joint investigations team (IJIT) “to gather evidence about illicit drug shipments to help stop it coming to our region”.
“The magnitude and endless maritime trafficking of illicit drugs to, and through the Pacific, has become a serious national security threat for the Pacific and Australia,” Commissioner Barrett said in a statement.
“Our AFP members in Bogota, with Colombian law enforcement, have deployed to remote parts of the Colombian jungle to deliberately destroy cocaine production laboratories.”
The commissioner said, despite the seizure of more than 20 tonnes of cocaine in Colombia in recent years and the AFP’s presence there since 2000, the IJIT was needed because “it is time for us to be bolder and do more”.
IJIT officers would work with Colombia’s attorney-general’s office, national police and navy, as well as “US law enforcement”, INTERPOL, Mexican, New Zealand and Pacific authorities, she said.
Since September last year, the Trump administration has declared the US is in an armed conflict with Latin American drug gangs and launched lethal strikes against alleged “narco-trafficking” vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea.
The strikes have killed at least 221 people and not reduced the flow of cocaine into the US, The Washington Post reported.
Some academics and legal experts call the strikes “extrajudicial executions” that violate US and international law
US military footage appears to show strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific in May.
Greens senator David Shoebridge called for more transparency about the IJIT’s work and said any Australian complicity in aiding the strikes would raise “warning signs”.
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