One year after the U.S. military launched a lethal campaign of airstrikes targeting boats accused of trafficking drugs off Latin America’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that has killed hundreds of people, the second Trump administration is moving to expand this operation onto dry land — negotiating agreements to deploy American ground forces in partner nations across the region, a move that has already ignited fierce debate over national sovereignty and civilian harm.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the announcement last week during an official visit to Panama, revealing that Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras had already signed on to allow joint U.S.-local military operations against organized criminal groups on their territory. Ecuador became the first country to launch such joint missions back in March, but Hegseth’s claim of a Guatemalan agreement has been flatly denied by Guatemala City.
Speaking alongside troops during a jungle military drill in Panama, Hegseth framed the land expansion as a natural extension of the existing at-sea strikes. “Same effect on land,” he said. “And so we’re working with Ecuador. We’re working with Colombia. We’re working with partners to bring the fight to the (designated terrorist organizations) on land.”
This planned expansion marks a definitive new phase of the Trump administration’s broader regional strategy, which aims to pressure Latin American governments to align with U.S. security priorities and cement what the White House describes as “American dominance over the Western Hemisphere.” In recent months, a growing wave of Trump-aligned conservative leaders have won election across the region, giving Washington a cohort of more receptive partners to advance its agenda. But independent analysts and regional observers warn that the widening U.S. military footprint carries severe risks: mounting civilian casualties, and a widespread popular backlash against American intervention that will outlive the current Republican administration.
Michael Shifter, a leading Latin America expert at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, argued the campaign is less about cooperative counter-narcotics efforts and more about projecting American power. “What’s going on is an attempt to legitimize the increased use of the U.S. military in the region,” Shifter explained. “It projects power, demonstrates military superiority and enables Washington to impose its agenda. This is not cooperation, it’s obviously a very asymmetrical relationship.”
The United States has maintained a military presence in Latin America for generations, providing allied governments with weapons, intelligence, and training to counter drug trafficking, but this history is marred by a controversial legacy of U.S. support for military coups and authoritarian dictatorships. Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration has pursued the most interventionist U.S. policy toward the region in decades.
To date, the administration has blacklisted 20 Latin American criminal groups as official “foreign terrorist organizations”, deployed U.S. special forces to Venezuela to capture former president Nicolás Maduro, and embedded CIA agents in drug lab raids across Mexico. The year-long boat strike campaign has killed more than 200 people in over 60 separate attacks across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, but the administration has released little public evidence confirming that those killed were actually “narco-terrorists”, prompting widespread scrutiny of the strikes’ legality and proportionality.
William LeoGrande, a Latin America specialist at American University, noted that sustained frontline combat operations conducted jointly with local forces are a sharp break from past U.S. engagement in the region, and will test long-held regional sensitivities over national sovereignty and foreign military presence on Latin American soil. “This is new and different,” LeoGrande said.
Hegseth released few concrete details about what the planned joint operations in Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras will actually entail, including force levels, rules of engagement, or command structure. In Colombia, where Trump-backed President Abelardo de la Espriella just took office earlier this month, Hegseth raised the prospect of U.S. troops joining direct strikes against the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia’s last remaining large guerrilla group. According to Hegseth, de la Espriella has explicitly requested expanded U.S. military involvement. De la Espriella doubled down on this hardline position Saturday, vowing that ELN rebels would “pay a high price” for a recent drone attack on Colombian government troops.
Hegseth framed the expanded campaign by equating drug trafficking groups with the transnational Islamic extremist networks that dominated U.S. national security strategy for decades after the 9/11 attacks. “Anywhere you traffic drugs or you threaten the American people or our partners, you are a target just like ISIS or al-Qaida,” he said.
Ecuador already offers a clear preview of how joint operations function in practice. The country launched its bilateral raids with the U.S. earlier this year, even after 2025 a national referendum saw an overwhelming majority of Ecuadorian voters reject the establishment of any foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil. A recent investigation by The New York Times found that one March strike targeting an alleged drug camp instead destroyed a working cattle farm, causing unreported civilian damage.
The push for new agreements has made the most progress among the Trump administration’s ideological allies: conservative leaders who won recent elections on promises of aggressive crackdowns on rampant violent crime. Guatemala stands out as a key exception. While its progressive government has maintained close security cooperation with Washington despite political differences, President Bernardo Arévalo has explicitly denied agreeing to joint anti-drug operations, noting that any such agreement would be illegal without formal approval from Guatemala’s congress. Honduras, Colombia and Ecuador have not responded to requests for comment on Hegseth’s recent remarks. Mexico, a critical source and transit hub for fentanyl and other illicit drugs bound for the United States, has remained outside the emerging anti-trafficking alliance. Progressive Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has maintained close security cooperation with Washington, but has repeatedly resisted mounting U.S. pressure to allow American military forces to operate against cartels on Mexican territory.
Adam Isacson, a defense analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, noted that even sympathetic right-leaning governments may ultimately balk at the terms of expanded U.S. military involvement. “Ultimately, the United States will have to define what ‘joint operations’ means in each of these countries. It may discover pretty quickly that this is something most governments — even governments on the right — are quite uncomfortable with,” Isacson said.
Regional and security experts have raised widespread questions about whether a more militarized approach will actually deliver long-term improvements in public security. Shifter argued the campaign is at least partially a public demonstration of U.S. power, coming on the heels of the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, as the Trump administration seeks to offset high-profile foreign policy setbacks in other regions, most notably the Middle East.
Other observers warn the strategy carries a high risk of civilian casualties, particularly in Colombia, where armed groups operate embedded within civilian communities and often function as the de facto ruling authority in remote regions outside government control. Jeremy McDermott, co-director of Bogotá-based investigative outlet InSight Crime, argued that large-scale military strikes are unlikely to eliminate these groups, and will instead push them to adapt in ways that harm local populations. “The U.S. bombs an ELN camp in Colombia or in Venezuela, what is the first thing the ELN are going to do? They’re going to dismantle all their camps and move into the villages and towns,” McDermott explained.
In the long term, experts warn that deeper U.S. military involvement will put regional leaders in a difficult position, forcing them to balance domestic demands for greater security against widespread public anger over the surrender of national sovereignty. This pressure could ultimately constrain even the Trump administration’s closest allies. “All of these presidents, no matter how far right they are, face pressure to do something about security and to make a show of pursuing the ‘bad guys’ who are making people feel unsafe. There is broad agreement on that,” Isacson said. “But they also know there is only so much sovereignty they can cede before public opinion begins turning against them.”
This report was coordinated by DeBre from Buenos Aires, Argentina, with additional reporting from Associated Press journalists based across the region: Sonia Pérez D. in Guatemala City, Marlon González in Tegucigalpa, and Astrid Suárez in Bogotá.
