US military campaign in Latin America enters a new phase after a year of strikes on alleged drug-running boats

A fast boat carrying 11 people huddled aboard was crossing the Caribbean Sea from Venezuela on September 2 of last year. A missile blew it apart. Nine occupants died instantly. Two others survived, clinging to the wreckage of the vessel. Three quarters of an hour later, while the two castaways were still trying to save themselves on the shattered hull, a second air-launched projectile finished them off. The first U.S. military campaign in Latin America in decades had just begun. A year later, that air-and-sea operation now threatens to expand and become the spearhead of an ever-broader U.S. military reach in the region.

It has been a campaign that, under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking, has executed 227 people and sunk 69 vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. It has never identified its victims or provided evidence that those boats trafficked drugs, and it faces accusations of being an opaque machine of illegal and arbitrary killings. Between November 2025 and June of this year it cost $821 million, according to Pentagon data. Its critics say it is being transformed so that it might intensify and broaden into ground operations in several countries across the region, with unpredictable consequences.

“The body the Pentagon originally created to coordinate it, Joint Task Force Southern Spear, has now been folded into a larger body called Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere and is headed by a two-star Marine Corps general. That suggests it will be more than a purely maritime mission,” Adam Isacson, director of the Defense Oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said during a recent videoconference with reporters.

Five countries in the Americas, in addition to the United States, have joined this new initiative, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said: Ecuador, Guatemala (although its participation remains unclear), Honduras, Jamaica, and Colombia (which joined immediately after the inauguration of its new president, Abelardo De la Espriella). All of them, Hegseth said, have agreed to allow some form of joint operations with U.S. forces on their territory. “This could include ground strikes,” Isacson warned.

New alliances

The air campaign against alleged drug-running boats was devised, at least in part, as a tool to squeeze Nicolás Maduro, whom the Trump administration had labeled a “narco-terrorist.” But it went further. It is a central part of the Republican’s policy toward Latin America, dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, which declares the fight against drug trafficking a national security priority and seeks to impose and expand U.S. influence across the continent — either by persuasion, through partnerships with sympathetic governments and figures, or by force.

The Pentagon says the new task force, acronymed JTF-WHEM, will be “the action arm” of U.S. Southern Command, responsible for U.S. military activities in Latin America (excluding Mexico), and will focus on imposing what it describes as “total systemic friction” against perceived threats in the hemisphere, including drug trafficking. General Francis Donovan, head of that command, has said the new entity will unify both tactical and operational command and control and will integrate U.S. military capabilities with the other 18 partner countries of the Shield of the Americas (the coalition launched in March between Washington and right-leaning Latin American governments).

Attacks on drug-running boats had been paused since June 21, when the United States fired on a vessel in the Caribbean and killed two people; six survived. Partly, the pause was because forces assigned to the campaign were redirected to U.S. work on earthquake response operations in Venezuela and Colombia this summer. Partly, it was due to the reorganization around the new entity.

On August 24, Southern Command reported in a brief social media post a new attack against what it described as a drug-running boat in the eastern Pacific, carried out a day earlier. “The operation killed two narco-terrorists,” the message said, accompanied, as has become customary, by a short black-and-white video showing the vessel being struck. The operation was carried out by the new Joint Task Force. Two days later, JTF-WHEM carried out a second attack, this time in the Caribbean, in which four people were killed.

“Washington still sees military force as a permanent tool in its counter-narcotics strategy,” Tiziano Breda of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which analyzes data and maps political violence worldwide, said on X. “Therefore, we are likely to see more actions of this kind in the future. Both at sea and on land, whenever the Trump administration has the opportunity to do so.”

Although it has stated after each incident that it was striking vessels operated by “narco-terrorist” groups, the United States has never identified which specific groups it means. Before Trump’s return to the White House, Washington had designated four cartels as terrorist organizations. Since the Republican’s inauguration in January 2025, that number has quintupled to 24.

A torrent of criticism

Since that first missile strike on September 2, Operation Southern Spear, and by extension its successor, have drawn a torrent of criticism. Legal experts and lawmakers — mostly Democrats in opposition — have denounced its opacity and called the campaign a program of extrajudicial executions. They also note that U.S. law prohibits the armed forces from attacking civilian targets that do not pose an immediate threat, even if they are suspected criminals. None of the crew members, dead or surviving, has been formally charged with any crime.

The Pentagon announced in May that it had opened an investigation. But not into the campaign’s legality; rather, to determine whether commanders had followed the parameters set for the strikes. No conclusions have been reported so far.

One attack in particular provoked special concern: the first. In reporting it, Trump and the Pentagon stated that everyone on board had been killed. Two months later it emerged that there had been two survivors and that a second projectile had finished them off. The White House argued that the second strike occurred “in self-defense” and in accordance with the laws of war.

Although there have been brief pauses and the frequency of strikes dropped markedly after Maduro’s capture on January 3, from the start of Operation Southern Spear through July there had not been a single month without one of these incidents.

Unidentified victims

“The vast majority of the victims remain unidentified,” the non-profit watchdog Airwars notes in a report. The nationalities of a handful are known: 18 Venezuelans; 13 Mexicans; three Colombians and the same number from Ecuador; two from Trinidad and Tobago and two from Saint Lucia. Only 26 of the dead are publicly known by name, despite an investigation by that organization and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism. “Those identified come predominantly from poor communities, and when they are connected to drug-trafficking groups (which is not always the case) they appear on the lowest rungs of those organizations,” the report says.

According to Isacson, “there are many questions about the targets and about the intelligence used to decide whom to kill. It is sufficient for the Department of Defense to consider someone affiliated with a group on a secret list of organizations designated as terrorist that the Pentagon keeps but does not share. You might have a distant connection to a member of one of those groups. So there are plenty of ways people with absolutely nothing to do with a criminal organization could be put in the crosshairs.”

Experts warn this pattern could worsen if the Pentagon continues to extend its military reach in Latin America and the new task force begins launching ground operations. “If Secretary Hegseth and others in those circles of the administration get everything they want from these agreements, there will be U.S. military personnel on the ground taking part in combat, whether kicking in doors or dropping bombs. Always, of course, in coordination and shoulder to shoulder with local forces,” Isacson said.

“It would be different from anything seen before, even during the Cold War,” the expert added. Although there were cases of invasion, such as in the Dominican Republic in 1965 or in Panama in 1989, those were short-lived operations. Assistance to regional armed forces — whether to fight communist regimes or drugs — was mainly indirect. “During the Plan Colombia era there were no U.S. soldiers who opened fire on Colombian citizens. But if this joint operational framework takes the shape Hegseth wants, we will see that happen. We will see them fire their weapons,” Isacson said. “At the end of the day, much will depend on what host nations permit.”

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