Back in February, a former U.S. military official with the Defense Intelligence Agency – sometimes described as a “mini CIA” under the Pentagon’s control – helped organize a war game exercise.
The simulation was prescient: In it, the White House launched a drone strike on the leader of a powerful Mexican drug cartel.
A version of that scenario came to pass in real life last week when the United States carried out an airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean that President Donald Trump said was operated by a cartel with ties to Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. It killed 11 people who were members, the administration said, of the Tren de Aragua gang.
Why We Wrote This
A missile attack against an alleged crime boat symbolizes how the Trump administration is using new and controversial tactics to erode the power of drug cartels in the Americas. U.S. military assets are formidable, but so are the challenges.
The strike appears to be part of a new type of military-led backdoor war on drug cartels, serving as a warning that old rules no longer apply. It carries risks of U.S. and civilian casualties, as well as unintended consequences if gangs are disrupted only to make room for others. At a minimum, bombing a ship rather than seizing one could put U.S. troops at risk of prosecution. But the administration argues that this new military effort is an opportunity to weaken drug gangs that have grown in power across the region.
“We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told Fox News. “It won’t stop with just this strike.”
It was a step widely described on both sides of the political aisle as unprecedented.
Criminal drug gangs in Latin America have “morphed into really almost armed insurgencies that in some cases are able to challenge the power of the state,” says Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So the United States taking a strong stand and reprioritizing national security in that light is not a bad thing.”
Latin America’s drug cartels, which evolved since the mid-20th century from small smuggling groups into influential criminal organizations, have long evaded U.S. law enforcement. After Colombia’s Cali and Medellín cocaine cartels fell in the 1980s, Mexico’s Sinaloa and Gulf cartels filled the gap, feeding increased US demand. Since the 2010s, the profit-seeking cartels have moved beyond drugs to include migrant smuggling, kidnapping, and extortion, experts say. Estimates put cartel profits as high as $29 billion from drug sales in the U.S. in recent years, which have been marked by heightened violence and territorial disputes.
But the Trump administration’s legal underpinnings for its attack on the Venezuelan vessel and for other such plans remain shrouded in mystery, adds Mr. Ziemer.
As with previous administrations that declared common enemies, such as Al Qaeda, as subject to attack, the Trump administration, on Day 1 of its second term, designated the Tren de Aragua cartel out of Venezuela – the target of last week’s strike – a terrorist group. To date, the administration has designated over a dozen groups – about half of them Mexican – as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).
Donald Trump/Truth Social/Reuters
The impact on U.S. forces, stretched thin and just beginning to rebound from a sizable drop in recruiting, remains to be seen.
“This administration seems to deem it enough to simply call somebody a terrorist and then you can use the military to assassinate them,” says Harrison Mann, a former Army officer who helped organize the original simulation exercise. Mr. Mann is now a senior fellow at Win Without War, a network of progressive activist organizations, which published the results of last February’s original war game exercise.
That apparent lack of due process is new, and it potentially exposes U.S. troops to prosecution, he adds.
“Trump and his Cabinet are pushing the limits of how they can deploy the military in ways that traditionally both were not normative and not understood as fully legal.”
Vice President JD Vance over the weekend pushed back against critics who called the strike a war crime.
“Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” he wrote on the social platform X.
Standard procedure, shifting tactics, and escalation
When Mark Nevitt was a junior U.S. naval officer during the drug wars of the 1990s, he worked on a warship that deployed with Coast Guard detachments aboard.
When they encountered a suspected drug vessel, the Coast Guard team would spring into action “to stop, board, search, and take follow-on law enforcement actions,” Mr. Nevitt recounts in a recent legal analysis for Just Security, a nonpartisan digital law and policy journal based at New York University School of Law.
During that time, the Navy warship shifted tactical control to the Coast Guard unit. To signal the shift in tactical control, the Navy warship flew the Coast Guard’s law enforcement flag until the completion of the operation.
He was struck by their professionalism, he says. “The Coast Guard takes the mission seriously, and they have all the legal authorities to conduct it,” adds Mr. Nevitt, now an associate professor at Emory University School of Law, in an interview Monday.
The Trump administration’s strike, he says, appears to be a violation of international and domestic law and a “sweeping escalation” in the U.S. military’s approach to drug interdiction by turning counternarcotics missions into counterterrorism operations.
“Instead of interdicting [the vessel], on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday. “And it’ll happen again.”
At the same time, the U.S. military’s current supporting role in drug interdiction makes sense, Mr. Nevitt adds, since the Coast Guard already has broad authorities under domestic law “as well as the requisite expertise in the nuances of evidence collection and boarding boats.”
While the U.S. Navy has historically played a “critical role in assisting with detection and monitoring drug activity,” Mr. Nevitt notes, “they certainly have not preemptively attacked alleged drug vessels.”
The military’s law of naval operations prescribes “in great detail” the use-of-force policy for Coast Guard personnel, including firing warning shots, writes Mr. Nevitt in the Just Security piece.
But, analysts say, no such shots appeared to have been fired. One week later, the Pentagon has not offered any details on the strike.
Presidents and precedents
President Trump in August directed the Pentagon to begin using military force against Latin American drug cartels that were earlier designated terrorist organizations, The New York Times reported last month.
This is not without precedent. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush sent some 20,000 U.S. troops into Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega, who was facing charges of drug trafficking in the U.S. The move was criticized domestically and internationally, and by most counts, it was the last U.S. invasion in the region, where standing up to U.S. intervention became a rallying cry for many Latin American leaders.
And in the 1990s, the U.S. military shared intelligence about flights suspected of carrying drugs with Colombian and Peruvian authorities, which then shot down those flights. This in turn raised the risk of U.S. military officials being prosecuted for providing the intelligence, U.S. government lawyers concluded – a risk comparable to what U.S. military forces may now be taking on with the Trump administration’s latest strike, Mr. Mann says.
The tabletop exercise that he helped organize concluded that while U.S. military strikes weakened some cartels, they failed to address the U.S. narcotics demand that helped fuel the drug trade. They also empowered rivals among the targeted cartels, sparking internecine conflicts and spreading violence.
These findings are borne out by the range of experiences that Latin American countries have had using their own militaries to fight the problem.
In much of the region, including Mexico, which has put its military on the front lines of fighting cartels since 2006, the presence of troops has not decreased the reach of drug trafficking organizations. It has, however, led to an increase in reports of human rights abuses.
In El Salvador, the involvement of the country’s armed forces was “remarkably effective. The gangs laid low and more or less didn’t resist,” Mr. Ziemer says. The military was deployed as part of a larger policy that suspends civil liberties, called the “State of Exception,” which has facilitated the mass incarceration of suspected gang members.
In Ecuador, which has gone from being one of the region’s most peaceful countries to being one of the most violent because of drug trafficking by transnational criminal groups, gangs responded by attacking military and police targets “at a much greater level.”
This could happen if the U.S. military intervenes by sending troops to Latin American countries, Mr. Ziemer adds. “I don’t think the cartels are 10 feet tall. But I also don’t think they’re 1 foot tall.”
Other options
The U.S. military can best offer support by intelligence-sharing and partnering with allies in the region, he adds. At Mexico’s request, the U.S. has been stepping up drone reconnaissance flights along the border, for example.
The U.S. and Latin American governments might also consider options for joint military coordination against cartels in some countries, Mr. Ziemer argues in a recent Small Wars Journal analysis. The security crisis, he writes in his piece, “Five questions to ask before declaring war on cartels,” has grown “beyond the capability of traditional law enforcement action alone to deal with.”
The U.S. military could, in cases where countries are interested in cooperating, grant countries access to resources they lack, including advanced drones and the airlift capacity to surge domestic forces to hot spots of criminal activity.
Still, cartels are adaptable. Individual strikes against drug traffickers may have something of a deterrent effect, but they won’t have lasting impact when they leave the organizational backbone of the cartels in place, Mr. Ziemer says.
This summer saw the first instance of a narco-submarine that was remotely controlled through a Starlink terminal.
“If the U.S. suddenly begins to do more strikes on these boats, well, what that’s going to do is drive up demand for remote-controlled drug trafficking boats,” he adds. “It’s a constant game of cat and mouse.”
