The Trump administration pressed its case for using more military force to take on drug smugglers as defense officials from across Latin America and the Caribbean met on Tuesday to review a wide-ranging plan to dismantle transnational trafficking networks.
The leaders gathered in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, for a forum of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, a group of 19 nations led by the United States that underscores the administration’s increasing focus on security issues in the Western Hemisphere.
The coalition is part of a new U.S. military effort to disrupt and combat drug-trafficking organizations that officials have compared to the campaign against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
“Make no mistake about the nature of our enemy,” Eric J. Geressy, a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said in opening remarks. “Transnational cartels are violent extremist organizations.”
The meeting of the coalition, its first since August, comes as the Trump administration is pressing leaders across the region to increase their military offensives against trafficking groups, and to permit joint operations with the United States.
The top U.S. military commander for most of Latin America, Gen. Francis L. Donovan, who attended the event, has said the United States plans to expand operations from strikes on boats to strikes on land.
The Pentagon has recently moved several MQ-9 Reaper drones from Africa to Colombia and Ecuador, and is deploying several hundred Army soldiers to train and conduct exercises with local forces in Colombia, Honduras and other countries in Latin America.
Mr. Geressy’s remarks focused on denouncing challenges to the U.S. military strategy in Latin America under President Trump, and defending the military’s recent track record in adhering to the law of war. He painted concerns about the administration’s strategy — which have been voiced by legal experts and members of Congress — as originating from the cartels themselves.
“The cartels understand they cannot outgun our combined surface action groups or outmaneuver our air and interdiction assets. So instead they attempt to paralyze our decision cycle,” said Mr. Geressy, a retired Army command sergeant major with extensive experience in Latin America. “They finance, run N.G.O.s,” he added, referring to nongovernmental organizations. “They file spurious human rights petitions.”
He went on: “They want to collapse our operational tempo from the courtroom because they cannot survive it in the battle space.”
The U.S. military has faced stiff criticism over its campaign to bomb boats it says were trafficking drugs, conducting 72 strikes that have killed at least 244 people in waters around the region. The most recent strike took place in the Eastern Pacific on Tuesday, killing five people, the U.S. military’s Southern Command said in a social media post.
The Trump administration has not provided evidence showing the boats were carrying drugs, and a broad range of lawyers have called the strikes illegal because the military cannot deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities, even if they are breaking the law. Trafficking drugs, they say, does not rise to the standard of hostilities.
A New York Times investigation also found that the Ecuadorean military, in a joint operation with the United States in March, had actually attacked a dairy farm rather than a drug trafficker’s training camp.
Mr. Geressy said the United States operates “with disciplined rules of engagement, precise target verification and absolute command accountability.” He assured the nations present that the State Department was establishing “robust bilateral legal safeguards” to protect them from legal challenges over military operations.
Since August, American and regional officials have committed to working more closely together to target criminals who conduct financial, logistical and other activities that cartels rely on.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the military leaders took the next concrete step. They reviewed, in preparation for final approval, a detailed military plan that General Donovan, a Marine Corps general with extensive experience combating the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and his staff have developed.
This so-called campaign plan, a classified document that military leaders did not describe in detail, outlines a long-term operational strategy and a blueprint for how coalition members will organize and assign responsibilities, Southern Command said in a statement announcing the forum.
The Dominican Republic’s defense minister, Carlos Antonio Fernández Onofre, said in remarks that the plan would run through 2031.
Latin American leaders in the coalition face competing pressures — to cooperate with the Trump administration on one side and to protect their citizens and sovereignty on the other, in a region scarred by a long and bloody history of U.S. intervention.
President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic addressed both concerns in his opening remarks. “Organized crime has long since ceased to be an exclusively national problem,” he said. “Its networks cross borders.”
Describing the Dominican Republic as a nation whose security was closely bound with that of its neighbors, he said his government was committed to taking part in the international effort, but underlined its benefit to his citizens.
“Behind each of these threats lies a deeply human reality,” he said. “There are families who lose their children to drugs. There are communities living with fear.”
He continued: “That is why defending security is not only about combating crime. It is above all about defending our people’s freedom to live without fear.”
While a handful of countries have agreed to allow joint strikes on their soil — including Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras — the Dominican Republic has not officially announced that it will permit such operations.
Last year, Dominican officials agreed to let U.S. forces to operate in restricted areas, including allowing aircraft on a base connected to the international airport, as part of U.S. counternarcotics efforts.
Leah F. Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, said in remarks at the forum that each coalition member would act in accordance with its own laws and priorities. “We are not asking any country to surrender its sovereignty,” she added. “We are asking each country to defend it — and to do so together.”
Reporting was contributed by Prior Beharry, Lucía Cholakian Herrera, Jody García, Simón Posada and Mitra Taj.
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