President Trump vowed to put US military might toward dismantling drug cartels and foreign terrorists operating within the Western Hemisphere by signing the Americans Counter Cartel Coalition alongside seventeen other nations.
“The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” Trump said Saturday.
“We have to use our military. You have to use your military,” he told representatives from 17 countries.
Prior to signing the proclamation at the Shield of Americas summit today in Doral, Florida, Trump lauded that the Coalition is “a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks,” and hailed the U.S. military’s “amazing weaponry” — and said that Latin American countries only need to identify the location of cartel operatives.”
“We need your help,” Trump said to Latin American nations at the summit. “You have to just tell us where they are.”
Secretary Pete Hegseth affirmed Trump’s position at Doral and said that the “Action Coalition of like minded countries who are going to bring their capabilities to bear with American leadership at the forefront to ensure we attack and get after this cartel challenge, which for far too long we have accepted as some new normal in our own countries.”
“President Trump and the American people rejected that [on] our own we don’t have to live with communities flooded with drugs or violence or cartels and gangs. We can seal our border and we have to for our citizens, we share a hemisphere and geography,” he said.
Trump, in a White House statement, proclaimed that criminal cartels and foreign terrorist organizations operating within the Western Hemisphere “should be demolished to the fullest extent possible consistent with applicable law,” and that the U.S. alongside its allies should coordinate to “deprive these organizations of any control of territory and access to financing or resources necessary to conduct their campaigns of violence.”
“I look at our region — if I can call it that — as being very important. It’s been abandoned by the United States for so many years. You know, they went so far away they went to these far away places where they weren’t even wanted,” the President said at the sumit.
The Coalition will “train and mobilize partner nation militaries to achieve the most effective fighting force necessary to dismantle cartels and their ability to export violence and pursue influence through organized intimidation,” and keep external threats at bay, Trump said in the statement.
Though he didn’t name China directly, Trump wrote in the statement that the proclamation is determined to “malign foreign influences from outside the Western Hemisphere,” a pointed reference to Beijing’s ongoing economic and military presence in Latin America.
The newly-established commitment to continuing dismantling cartels in more than a dozen Latin American countries comes after Trump ordered the U.S. military into Ecuador this week, targeting narco-terrorist groups.
The U.S. Southern Command announced that U.S. and Ecuadorian forces launched a joint operation against suspected narco-terrorists in the country on Tuesday, saying it was taking “decisive action” against designated terrorist groups.
“The operations are a powerful example of the commitment of partners in Latin America and the Caribbean to to combat the scourge of narco-terrorism,” SOUTHCOM posted on X.
Just last month, SOUTHCOM announced it had carried out three strikes targeting narco-terrosits, killing 11 people in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
To date, the U.S. has conducted at least 43 strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels within the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing 150 people.
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