After Killing Hundreds in Boat Strikes, the US Military Expands Its Anti-Cartel Campaign Onto Land in Latin America as Hegseth Announces Joint Operations With Colombia, Honduras and Guatemala
In the year since the US military began bombing boats it accused of carrying drugs off Latin America's Caribbean and Pacific coasts, it has killed more than 200 people in over 60 strikes, offering little public evidence that those killed were the "narco-terrorists" the administration says they were. On August 17, 2026, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration is now extending that lethal campaign from the sea to land, pursuing arrangements that would put US forces on the ground in allied nations across the region. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the expansion during a trip to Panama. At the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition meeting in Panama City on August 12, 2026, he said Colombia's newly inaugurated president, Abelardo de la Espriella, had requested that the US join Colombia's fight against narco-terrorism and had authorized joint military operations; Colombia became the 19th member of the administration's "Shield of the Americas" initiative. Hegseth said Honduras and Guatemala had agreed to joint operations as well, following Ecuador, which launched joint missions with US forces in March 2026. Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo publicly denied reaching any such agreement, saying it would be illegal without his congress's approval. The following day, August 13, at a jungle warfare drill in Panama, Hegseth described what the land phase would look like: the same effect as the boat strikes, applied ashore, with traffickers treated as targets on par with ISIS or al-Qaida. The administration has designated 20 Latin American criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations, and the campaign has already included the January 2026 US operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Congress has never authorized force in the campaign. Sen. Tim Kaine, who has repeatedly forced war powers votes, wrote to President Trump on August 3, 2026 that more than 65 kinetic operations had killed more than 220 people and urged him to halt what Kaine called an illegal operation. In May 2026, Reps. Greg Casar, Jesús "Chuy" García and Sara Jacobs led 17 colleagues in demanding the Pentagon suspend the joint US-Ecuador operations after reporting that a bombed site was a civilian dairy farm. Republicans including Rep. Maria Salazar have defended the joint operations as legally grounded in existing bilateral security agreements. Analysts warn the ground campaign risks civilian casualties and a sovereignty backlash in partner countries that could outlast the administration.
“Taken together, the interventions conducted under the banner of the “Donroe” Doctrine appear to follow a partisan playbook: the endorsement of favored candidates, the placement of political allies, the weaponization of tariffs and sanctions, and, where those fail, the application of direct military force.”