With this week’s unprecedented deadly military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in the Caribbean, it’s clear that the US plans to use tactics it has long employed against terrorist groups against Latin American criminal organizations — up to and including threats of regime change against governments accused of backing the “terrorists.”
This has been a long time coming. President Donald Trump has talked about firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico as far back as 2020, according to former aides, and discussed the idea of using military force against cartels on the campaign trail. In February, shortly after taking office, the Trump administration designated several criminal groups, including the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and specially designated global terrorists (SDGTs), putting them in the same legal category as al-Qaida and ISIS. Last month, the New York Times reported that the president had signed a secret directive instructing the Pentagon to start using military force against these designated organizations.
Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced that the US had carried out a “kinetic strike” against “Tren de Aragua narcoterrorists,” killing 11 on board. The strikes came soon after the US deployed eight warships to the Caribbean and Pacific around South and Central America, an unusually large surge of military force to the region.
Trump administration officials have suggested that there may be more strikes to come. The administration has also accused President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela of controlling Tren de Aragua, a highly contested claim.
For his part, Maduro, a longtime US adversary, has accused the US of seeking “regime change” in Venezuela. US officials haven’t exactly denied this, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth calling it a “presidential decision” and one Trump official telling Axios, “This is 105% about narco-terrorism, but if Maduro winds up no longer in power, no one will be crying.”
Taken together, the Trump administration’s new approach could mark a major shift in the more than 50-year history of America’s “war on drugs,” its relationship with Latin America, and the increasing militarization of a wide range of policy.
Questions surrounding the strike
Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that emerged as a prison gang in the 2010s before morphing into a larger criminal organization, has been a major target of Trump’s rhetoric since his 2024 campaign, typically in the context of immigration policy and his administration mass deportation campaign.
The group is primarily known for crimes like extortion and human trafficking, and while it has been involved in selling drugs at the local level and in some cases smuggling small amounts across borders, experts are skeptical about US accusations that it is bringing drugs in large quantities into the US.
“Tren de Aragua and MS-13 [a Salvadoran gang also now listed as a terrorist organization] are what you could call poor organized crime groups,” said Adam Isacson, a defense and drug policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America. “They make their money extorting people in the neighborhoods they control. If they were actually operating a boat carrying many kilos of cocaine, that would be something new.”
The administration has not yet presented evidence of how it knew who was on the boat, though Trump did say, “We have tapes of them speaking.”
Whoever was at the helm, it’s not unusual for the US military — generally the Coast Guard or Navy — to interdict boats suspected of carrying drugs. But using deadly force against these ships is more unusual, particularly when — as it appears in the video shared by the Trump administration — there was no effort to warn the vessel or take it into custody.
According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US forces did have the opportunity to stop the boat, but Trump chose to destroy it in order to send a deterrent message to traffickers. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Rubio said.
This, to put it mildly, raises some legal issues. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement that the strike was taken in “defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations,” which the Washington Post interpreted as a reference to the authorization for the use of military force against terrorists passed after the 9/11 attacks.
Even for the remarkably malleable Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution of 2001, this would be a reach. The administration is more likely to rely on the president’s powers as commander-in-chief under Article II of the Constitution. Though there’s wide agreement that the constitution gives the president the power to use military force without congressional authorization in response to imminent threats, recent administrations have pushed the limits of this authority. The White House is expected to lay out its rationale to Congress soon.
Though the president and other officials have referred to Tren de Argua as “narcoterrorists” and officially listed it as a terrorist group, this is not actually a death warrant, notes Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser now with the International Crisis Group. The FTO and SDGT listings authorize an array of sanctions and criminalize legal support to these groups, but do not authorize military force against them, though, as Finucane notes, “it is widely misunderstood within the US executive branch to do so, and bureaucratically it can help pave the way for military action.”
Finucane notes that the terrorist designations played a similar role in the first Trump administration when the listing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards preceded the drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
“It helps further this narrative of theirs where the US is engaged in a war on terror in Latin America,” Finucane said.
Was this the first shot in a wider war?
The question now is what that war might look like. WOLA’s Isacson suggested that the strike, taken in international waters, could be a means of “turning up the dial” toward more provocative actions, such as striking alleged cartel targets on the sovereign territory of other countries, or against governments accused of backing them.
The idea of taking military action against cartels in Mexico is popular among Republican members of Congress, and the boat strike overshadowed a highly anticipated visit by Rubio to Mexico this week. A literal brawl broke out in the Mexican Senate last week during a heated debate on the topic of US military intervention in the country.
For now, that appears to have been forestalled. After a meeting between Rubio and President Claudia Sheinbaum, the two countries agreed to expand cooperation to combat drug cartels while respecting each other’s “sovereignty.” There’s certainly a possibility the idea could return.
As for Venezuela, the US last month offered a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro. One US official told Axios, “This could be Noriega part 2,” referring to the US military operation that ousted and arrested Panamanian dictator and narcotrafficker Manuel Noriega in 1990.
Venezuela is a much larger country, and given Trump’s penchant for avoiding long, drawn-out military deployments, a Panama-style invasion seems pretty unlikely. “Precision” strikes on Venezuelan territory, however, certainly don’t seem out of the realm of possibility. Rubio suggested as a senator that he was open to using military force to “restore democracy” in Venezuela.
During the first Trump administration, the US backed opposition leader Juan Guaidó and recognized him as Venezuela’s legitimate president after the disputed 2019 presidential election, even after it became clear that despite hopes in Washington, Maduro had the support of his military and Guaidó had little hope of taking power.
Michael Shifter, professor of Latin American studies at Georgetown University, was skeptical of the notion, advanced by some analysts and Venezuelan opposition figures, that the regime could collapse in the face of escalating US pressure.
“We’ve always underestimated Maduro and his capacity to hold things together,” he said.
What is clear is that the speculation early in the Trump administration that the US and Venezuela could be headed for a rapprochement, particularly after a negotiated hostage release in January, was premature.
While experts, including US intelligence agencies, have cast doubt on the Trump administration’s claims that Maduro directly controls Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan regime’s links to organized crime are well documented.
That may be one reason why, with the notable exception of Colombia’s left-wing president Gustavo Petro, who called the boat strike a “murder,” reaction in the region has been pretty muted, even from governments normally quick to raise alarm about US intervention. (On the other extreme, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, where the boat may have been headed, praised the strike and called on the US military to kill drug traffickers “violently.”)
Early in the Trump administration, when the president was publicly feuding with Petro and demanding the return of the Panama Canal to US control, it appeared that Latin America was going to be an unusually large focus of American foreign policy, leading to speculation about a “Monroe Doctrine 2.0.” That hasn’t quite panned out, as attention has shifted to events in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. But given the focus on crime and immigration, it does appear that the region is taking on a greater role in America’s military priorities.
A memo from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to military commanders earlier this month referred to “the President’s determination to restore our neglected position in the Western Hemisphere.” It also listed “sealing our borders” and counternarcotics as priorities for the Pentagon above deterring China, which has for several years now been considered the department’s overarching “pacing challenge.”
Whatever their feelings about drug gangs or Venezuela’s corrupt and dictatorial regime, that’s likely to make leaders in the region nervous.
“There’s no solidarity with Maduro,” said Shifter. However, he added, “there is nervousness about it and trepidation. They’re all wondering, what is this guy doing, and are we next?”
Ghosts of GWOTs past
In addition to a greater emphasis on Latin America, the strike suggests a willingness by this administration to expand the scope of what military force can be used for. The strike was announced the same week that Trump is publicly discussing sending the National Guard to more cities, including Chicago and New Orleans, following their deployment to Washington, DC, last month — another dramatic application of the military to what has traditionally been civilian law enforcement.
Though the US has, over several administrations, wound down what was once called the “Global War on Terror,” many of the legal authorities and institutions that emerged as part of that conflict remain. To take one example, the agency known as ICE was created in its current form out of the post-9/11 reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security. Trump once threatened in his first term to resume sending terrorist suspects to Guantanamo Bay. That never happened, but in his second term, the government has spent millions deporting migrants there.
This week’s strike in the Caribbean is just the latest example of how the spirit of the post-9/11 war on terror is very much still alive.
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