President Donald Trump is escalating his administration’s de facto war on Latin American drug cartels.
New anti-drug trafficking operations are underway in Ecuador and critics worry that the administration’s strategy and tactics may worsen a decades-old conflict.
At the first Shield of the Americas summit earlier this month, Trump urged leaders from select South American and Caribbean countries to take action against what he called an “unacceptable threat” posed by cartels and international gangs.
“The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” Trump said. “We have to use our military. You have to use your military.”
At the summit, Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller similarly advocated for using “hard power” against cartels.
“Cartels that operate in this hemisphere are the ISIS and al-Qaida of this hemisphere,” Miller said.
A U.S.-Ecuadorian operation against a “narco-terrorist supply complex” was conducted the day prior, which was called “successful” by the Pentagon.
“At the request of Ecuador, the Department of War executed targeted action to advance our shared objective of dismantling narco-terrorist networks,” Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said on X. “Narco-terrorist networks will not find refuge in our hemisphere.”
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa said the raid was “only the beginning.”
The Trump administration has previously conducted similar operations on suspected “narco-terrorists.” 157 people have been killed in strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific that the administration believed were carrying drugs.
Sahno Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, thinks Trump’s approach is highly flawed. He told Salon that equating drug traffickers with terrorist is meant to “stigmatize and terrify people.”
“It’s there to impose a one-size-fits-all, highly kinetic solution: blow things up. It unfortunately takes two very complicated problems that have different roots and tries to combine them with a one-size-fits-all solution that makes both phenomena worse,” he said.
Tree said there are notable differences between terrorists and cartel members and that conflating the two is intentionally confusing. He added that combatting the drug shipments without addressing the root causes of drug use in the United States was a losing battle.
Tree explained that drug cartels are “Darwinian,” saying they “evolve” over time to negate the tactics used against them. Attacking the cartels directly only makes them more efficient. Tree pointed to a 2010 report from the Department of Homeland Security, which found that targeting cartel kingpins does not negatively affect the flow of drugs into the country.
“We spent probably about $2 trillion in my lifetime by now on this drug war, and the drugs are winning,” he said. “It’s only the policies of prohibition… that make this beast churn, decade after decade, and it only gets bigger and more powerful.”
Tree criticized what he saw as a lack of an overall plan from the Trump administration and worried that a war on drugs in Latin America would turn into another endless foreign entanglement. He called the operations in Ecuador a “giant mess with no exit strategy.”
“At what point do you declare a victory and come home?” he said. “Is it when you’ve wiped out 50% of the drugs? Does it have to be 100%? You’ll never get to 100%.”
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Daniel Noroña, the Americas Advocacy director for Amnesty International USA,, agreed.
“These types of actions have already been tried by not only the US government, but many governments across the region for decades and years,” he told Salon.
In addition to the risk of a foreign boondoggle, Noroña the increasingly authoritarian Noboa could use a drug crackdown to attack dissenters. He warned of human rights abuses against the most vulnerable Ecuadorians.
“What you will see is that the general policy is ‘shoot first, ask questions later’,” Noroña said, pointing to a 2025 report from Amnesty International on dozens of “enforced disappearances” and “extrajudicial executions” in Ecuador that was tied to an increase in militarized law enforcement.
“If you want to tackle the issue, you have to tackle the issue from the root, and the root, basically, is inequality,” Noroña said, calling for the need for more social programs, wealth redistribution, and a comprehensive criminal policy from the government.
The Department of Defense did not respond to Salon’s request for comment on the strategy in Ecuador.
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