This past month, the United States has quietly stepped up its military actions in South America, in operations that haven’t received much, if any, media attention. Two warships have been deployed to Ecuador in recent weeks, as Green Berets have been confirmed to be carrying out joint operations with local forces against drug cartels in the country.
Since regaining power last year, Donald Trump has been clear on his intent to establish military dominance in the Western Hemisphere. That has ranged from demanding favorable trade arrangements from regional partners to expressing the desire to either control or annex territories and whole nations. Along the way, he has revealed a steady fixation with combating drug traffickers, and has unleashed the full weight of U.S. military power to pursue those ends. But it’s only in recent days that this has turned into a clear policy framework. These actions in Ecuador are a preview of a wider campaign that looks poised to quickly grow in the coming weeks.
It wasn’t until late August that the full extent of military involvement in the region started coming into view. Juan Jaramillo, the governor of Ecuador’s Esmeraldas province, located near the Colombian border, revealed that Green Berets from the 7th Special Forces Group were conducting joint operations against cartels with Ecuadorian troops. Soon after, two ships—an American destroyer and an amphibious transport dock carrying Marines sent to the region explicitly to fight drug traffickers—arrived in Ecuador’s waters. These maneuvers coincided with fresh sanctions against various individuals alleged to be involved in drug trafficking.
The U.S. military has largely remained quiet about the matter, not publicizing deployments; the news of its involvement broke via Ecuadorian officials. But U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, has since issued triumphant statements about recent attacks. An airstrike on a small boat in the eastern Pacific, the first in two months without such an attack, was the first indication from SOUTHCOM of renewed actions. Soon after, the USS San Antonio and its embarked Marines stopped, boarded, and sank a ship alleged to be a “floating refueling station” used by drug traffickers. The Pentagon has suggested that other nations in the region governed by Trump-friendly leaders are amenable to joining these joint operations.
The Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, also known as the Shield of the Americas, was set up in March 2026, after the January 3 raid in Venezuela that captured Nicolás Maduro under the auspices of his involvement in the drug trade. For most of the year it was just a semiformal political organization, but last month—following earlier elections favorable to the Trump administration and shifting geopolitics abroad—the U.S. laid out the full intent of the coalition in practice.
Speaking at a gathering in Panama in August, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth outlined the coalition’s goals: “To degrade, dismantle, and destroy narco-terrorist networks,” using the term the administration has for traffickers. Soon after, he outlined a new mission for U.S. forces in the area, operating under SOUTHCOM, saying that the U.S. is using “military capabilities against real threats who need to be deterred and defeated.”
Much of what the Trump administration is doing has been built on a long-standing foundation: The U.S. has sent forces to Latin America to fight drug traffickers in the past, and the 7th Special Forces Group has considerable experience operating in the region. What is new, however, is the call for expanded action: The administration has, for all intents and purposes, found a way to further weaponize the post-9/11 security state by labeling drug traffickers as “narco-terrorists” and designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. In so doing, the administration has the legal path for the full weight of military power to be brought to bear. And like in the global war on terror, that is manifesting in everything from targeted strikes on oceangoing vessels alleged to be manned by traffickers to less-trumpeted ground campaigns with regional partners. “That’s going after the enemies of our country—designated terrorist organizations—unabashedly,” Hegseth said last month.
Backing the regional, U.S.-led coalition is a new military task force. In August, the U.S. set up Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, replacing Joint Task Force Southern Spear, which oversaw the blockades of Venezuelan oil ships and, eventually, the raid on Caracas last January. The new command serves as the U.S. arm of the new security coalition, with deployed ships as well as a Marine Corps force sent to the region explicitly to fight traffickers. There are many questions about this new effort, including how many forces are actually being sent to the region and what objectives they have been assigned to pursue. There are also valid concerns over human rights abuses. But what is even more concerning is the way the administration has a free hand to rapidly scale up these operations under this new framework.
It’s a strategy for expanded military action that fits both the Trump administration’s stated agendas as well as the real-world situation in which the administration has become mired. Whether an unintended consequence of the war in Iran or not, that operation has pulled resources from the military’s strategy in the Pacific, with canceled drills and redirected warships. The Iran war has not yielded the easy victory Trump sought; he is now six months into the conflict with no end in sight. Troops sent to the Middle East are exhausted from long deployments. But in Latin America, the U.S. can operate with a relatively small footprint and work with partners to expand its forces, while waging a war against its stated enemies in a campaign that might offer better P.R. At a time when Trump’s Iran quagmire is draining munitions stockpiles, single strikes in Latin America can provide news of victories and shareable social media content—as the past year of boat attacks or the previous airstrikes this year inside Ecuador and Venezuela demonstrate.
Rather than a hostile intervention like Venezuela in January, or large-scale war like Iran, Washington has found a way to insert itself into these countries through partnerships with friendly governments, opening the door for military action. And now, this new anti-cartel coalition, with more than a dozen nations involved, seems poised to aid or at the very least allow the U.S. to expand its reach across the hemisphere. The campaign is just getting started, unchecked and largely unnoticed. If the current strategy in Ecuador is as robust as Washington says it is, it will only grow from here as the administration plots a bloody distraction from its other military misadventures.
