America's campaign against drug trafficking has historically been a matter of law enforcement. Under Donald Trump's second term, the armed forces have been thrown at it on a scale not seen since President George H.W. Bush sent 20,000 troops to Panama in 1989 to arrest Manuel Noriega on drug-trafficking charges.
On his first day back in office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order branding drug gangs as "foreign terrorist organisations" and calling for their "total elimination." He told Congress in March that "the cartels are waging war in America. And it's time for America to wage war on the cartels." An assessment published the same month by 18 American intelligence agencies elevated the threat of drug gangs above that of jihadists.
Derek Maltz, who led the Drug Enforcement Administration from January to May 2025, said "the government is finally using all the tools of national power to go after our greatest threat. The handcuffs are off." Michael Ellis, the CIA's deputy director, explained: "We've built a finely tuned machine since 9/11 to find, fix and finish terrorist targets. Now we're turning it to the cartels—it might mean the Arabic speakers need to learn Spanish."
Roosevelt Roads, a sprawling American naval base in Puerto Rico that had stood abandoned for two decades, is being revived as a staging ground. Air-force personnel are restoring its airstrip's control tower. In August 2025 the administration moved major assets to the Caribbean: three destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, an attack submarine and amphibious assault ships now sit off the coast of Venezuela. F-35 fighter jets, MQ-9 Reaper drones and advanced spy-planes have been deployed to nearby air bases.
Drone strikes in the southern Caribbean blasted five speedboats, killing at least 27 people. American officials allege all were "narco-terrorists" from Venezuela. The logistical cost of maintaining the navy flotilla runs about $7m per day.
More than 80,000 American citizens died of overdoses in the past year, and polls show about half of Americans would support military action against gangs in Mexico. Yet America's deadliest drug problem is fentanyl, almost all of which is synthesised in Mexico and trafficked north over land. Blowing up boats in the southern Caribbean does nothing to reduce opioid overdoses. Over three-quarters of Latin America's cocaine is shipped through the Pacific, not the Caribbean.
James Storey, a former American ambassador to Venezuela, compared using Reapers and Hellfire missiles on drug boats to "trying to cook an egg with a blowtorch." U-2 spy planes and RC-135 Rivet Joints never proved particularly effective in tracking drug labs or leaders in past operations. Narcos are already adapting to the show of military force, using stealthier delivery methods such as unmanned submarines and stashing drugs on container ships. Even strikes on land targets may fail: gangs would probably hunker down, dispersing facilities into cities or literally going underground with their extensive tunnelling experience.
Jack Devine, who led the CIA's counternarcotics programme in the early 1990s, said strikes could make it "really, really difficult for the cartels" but "may not completely solve the supply problem."
Trump has taken a less bombastic approach to Mexico, the main source of the drug threat, than to the Caribbean. He has pressed President Claudia Sheinbaum to step up action against drug gangs and break collusion between officials and narcos. Sheinbaum has been broadly a willing partner: Mexico is seizing more fentanyl on its side of the border, has dispatched 55 alleged kingpins to America, and has permitted American surveillance drones to operate over Mexican territory. Bilateral co-operation is often tense, however. Joint intelligence-gathering is helping map financial and logistics networks, and a string of arrests have netted mid-level gang members.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s America supported Colombian efforts to eradicate coca by providing signals-intelligence and offering Black Hawk helicopter ride-alongs. A Reuters investigation found the CIA has for years helped run covert operations with Mexican military units to hunt down drug bosses. During his first term Trump mused more than once about firing missiles at Mexican drug labs. The Pentagon is reportedly now drawing up strike options on targets inside Venezuela, including drug labs and gang leaders.
During America's counter-terrorism wars, operatives were killed when local governments could not arrest them. Drug gangs are different: it is generally better to capture traffickers and question or recruit them to prosecute bosses. Killing potential informants destroys valuable intelligence.
By late October 2025 at least 34 people had been killed in eight strikes since September 2nd. Two people survived an American strike on October 16th; the navy plucked them from the water. The administration immediately deported them—one to Ecuador and the other to Colombia—for "detention and prosecution". Their quick deportation spared the administration the risk of a habeas corpus petition that could have opened the strikes to judicial review. Trump called the survivors "terrorists" on social media and labelled Colombia's president, Gustavo Petro, an "illegal drug leader" the following day.
After beginning its strikes, the administration told Congress that America was in a "non-international armed conflict" against "non-state armed groups" engaged in "an armed attack against the United States"—all signifiers of obeisance to international law meant to govern the use of lethal force as a first resort. The administration released no evidence to support claims the ships carried fentanyl, which comes mainly by land from Mexico. It has not told Congress what "armed groups" are responsible and has dismissed claims that fishermen from Colombia and Trinidad were among those killed.
Unlike the Obama administration's lawyers who struggled to define when drones could kill certain accused terrorists, this administration has not specified a "limiting principle" to a president's exercise of lethal force against drug cartels. Stephen Pomper, chief of policy at the International Crisis Group and a former senior director of the National Security Council under Barack Obama, said: "You're just using metaphors to turn something into what it isn't." Peter Feaver, a political scientist at Duke University, said: "This administration is going further, and going further with less public, detailed defence of what they're doing." He added: "I think the biggest difference is that Congress is not holding this administration to account in the way that they did even to Trump 1.0, let alone to Biden and to Bush."
On October 16th the admiral leading American forces in Latin America abruptly announced he would step down in December, two years ahead of schedule.
The first strike of the boat campaign, on September 2nd 2025, left two survivors clinging to the wreckage. Commanders watching over a live-video feed spotted the men. Admiral Frank Bradley, the special-operations commander in charge and head of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), ordered a second strike that killed them. Legal experts say striking people hors de combat—incapacitated by shipwreck—is "literally the textbook definition of an unlawful order", in the words of Steven Lepper, the air force's second-highest-ranking former lawyer. The Pentagon's own manual on the law of armed conflict states it is "dishonourable and inhumane" to attack people incapacitated by shipwreck. The administration justified the follow-on strike as removing a navigation hazard, but lawyers argue that care for the wounded, a function of international treaty law, takes priority.
By early December 2025, 21 confirmed strikes had killed at least 83 people, many of them apparently civilian smugglers. Few legal scholars accept the administration's claim that blowing up drug boats constitutes an "armed conflict". Pete Hegseth has fired a multitude of senior JAGs and installed lawyers who, according to a former senior judge advocate-general, "spend all their time trying to figure out what the administration wants and then reverse-engineer how to get to it."
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