Terrance C. Cole, or Terry Cole as everyone calls him, is Donald Trump’s choice to head the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), despite not having enough experience to lead the agency. Former agents have complained in recent days, pointing out that he would be the only director who has never led any of the 23 national divisions, particularly for his role in two massacres during his missions in Colombia and Mexico, the first in Bogotá in 2006 and the second in Allende, Coahuila, in 2011.
Last February, Trump nominated Cole to head the Drug Enforcement Administration, highlighting him as a DEA “veteran” with “experience in Colombia, Afghanistan, and Mexico City.” The truth is that within the US corporation itself, there are doubts about the role this figure could play.
Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the DEA, told SinEmbargo that he is actually a “puppet” installed by Donald Trump to impose his decisions and avoid the same situation as during his first administration, where he encountered resistance to the measures he took on certain issues.
Mike Vigil recalled that there was also a situation in Colombia “where several members of the National Police were killed, but the former DEA members who wrote the letter say it’s curious and that it’s not a coincidence that he was linked to those two situations in two countries.”
The former head of international operations for the DEA mentioned that although Harrison Fields, White House spokesman, maintains that Cole is the right person for the position, his track record speaks otherwise. “If he hasn’t run a division, how is he going to run the entire DEA agency? Fields says that if people don’t support Terry Cole, that they don’t agree with combating drugs, that’s a lie; it’s the other way around. I think the public wants someone with significant experience as a supervisor and not just as a group leader. Most of his career, including in Mexico, but that’s very little. He’s never developed any major strategies to combat drug trafficking.”
