The quantum shift in US security policy in Latin America and the Caribbean under President Donald Trump in 2025 has moved towards a militarized and repressive model and is forsaking the most successful elements of the fight against transnational organized crime: cooperation and intelligence sharing.
For the last two decades prior to Trump’s second term, the United States had been thinking strategically about fighting transnational organized crime (TOC) across Latin America and the Caribbean. Using generous funding, cooperation, and occasional intimidation, Washington cajoled different nations in the region to pull together in the fight against TOC.
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Language had also changed, moving away from the notion of a war on drugs and towards a more nuanced strategy that emphasized strengthening justice systems and the capacity of financial intelligence units. Through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), it worked with communities forced to live with organized crime and involved in the lower rungs of the drug trade, and it increasingly framed drug demand and addiction in health policy terms. This strategy was expensive and slow to show results, but it had won several important victories.
Colombia, historically the most unwavering US ally in the region, is one of the most obvious examples of the success of previous Washington strategy. In the late 1990s, when we both arrived in Colombia, there was a real fear that the country was about to be taken over by the left-wing rebels or that it was on the verge of becoming a narco-state. A new right-wing illegal army had been born, and cocaine fueled the bloodiest chapter of the civil conflict. The state had often become little more than a spectator in the fighting.
In 1999, US President Bill Clinton signed Plan Colombia, which was to deliver some $15 billion to Colombia. That assistance and commitment contributed in no small part to the signing of the historic 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — FARC), it helped build the most capable security forces in the region, a robust justice system, a strong civil society, and a vibrant democracy.
Trump Targets Colombia
Relations with Colombia are now dire. Much of the aid has been cut. The country, which has fought hardest against the cocaine trade, has been decertified by Washington in the war on drugs. Its president, Gustavo Petro, and some of his family have been sanctioned by the US Department of the Treasury, their US visas pulled on the grounds that Petro has “allowed drug cartels to flourish.”
On December 10, 2025, Trump directly threatened Petro in the context of US military actions against Venezuela and its president, Nicolás Maduro.
“Colombia is producing a lot of drugs,” Trump said. “So [Petro] better wise up, or he’ll be next. He’ll be next soon. I hope he’s listening, he’s going to be next.”
Talking to senior members of the Colombian military and police force, none authorized to speak on the record, the replies were remarkably uniform. The bond built between the Colombian security forces and the United States over decades has been broken.
“President Petro is not popular in the security forces, that is no secret,” said a police colonel, “but he is not a drug trafficker. The US broke agreements that had been signed, withdrew money that had been promised, humiliated our country and president, and then pardoned convicted drug traffickers for political reasons. The US is no longer a partner we can trust, and this hurts me deeply to say it.”
Without Colombia as a trusted and enthusiastic partner, there is no viable strategy against the cocaine trade. Petro has ordered the suspension of intelligence-sharing with the United States, which in the long term could cripple US efforts in Colombia to fight drug trafficking organizations, build cases for extradition, and maintain effective interdiction strategies.
It is not just Colombia. Both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands stopped sharing intelligence in the Caribbean that could result in the targeting of boats by the US military. Relations with Brazil and Mexico are also fraught, and without the close cooperation of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, there is no chance of building an effective regional response to TOC in the region.
“The best way to fight transnational organized crime is cooperation. Every time. Always,” insisted James B. Story, the former US ambassador to Venezuela. Story, who has been at the forefront of US engagement in Latin America for decades, also served in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.
“All of these [criminal] organizations are transnational, of course, meaning that one nation can’t possibly do the job. The criminals don’t recognize borders,” he added.
In an interview with The Economist in November 2025, John Bolton, the national security adviser in Trump’s first term, lamented the end of the emphasis on cooperation.
“In the way he (Trump) behaves, region by region, case by case, he doesn’t understand the meaning of alliances, he doesn’t value anything he can’t judge by dollar and cents terms. So many of his actions have shredded decades of American effort to build trust, faith, reliance on goodwill with our allies and show determination to our friends,” he said.
Washington’s Militaristic Strategy
Trump has designated a series of criminal groups (Mexican, Colombian, and Venezuelan) as terrorist organizations, effectively fusing the war on drugs with the war on terror.
The snatch operation against Maduro and the strikes against maritime vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific have been the most obvious examples of this. The military is now the lead in the fight against TOC in the region.
SEE ALSO: How Maduro’s Ouster Will Shift Criminal Dynamics in Venezuela
For Juanita Goebertus, the Director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, the strikes on the boats allegedly carrying drugs mark a decided shift in US policy.
“These are extrajudicial executions. It’s just a complete disregard for international law. We have seen this disregard by the Russians in Ukraine, by the Israelis in Gaza. For the US, this is quite unprecedented,” she said.
For his part, Trump claimed in the wake of Maduro’s arrest that his maritime strikes have led to a 97% drop in drugs entering the US by sea, but this is not supported. In fact, evidence gathered by InSight Crime suggests that while drug routes from the north coast of Venezuela have been affected by the US strikes, this has not stopped the flow of drugs; it simply forced traffickers to use different routes and modus operandi. The removal of Maduro is also unlikely to affect drug flows.
“It just moves drug smuggling from one mechanism to another. That’s it. There’s a thousand other ways to do this. It will have a big impact on the go-fast trade. It will not have a big impact on the total amount of cocaine going north to the United States,” said Story.
The militarization of the fight against TOC is nothing new in Latin America. Colombia has long deployed its military against drug trafficking organizations in the civil conflict. Mexico unleashed its military in 2006 under President Felipe Calderón, and President Daniel Noboa in Ecuador designated 22 criminal gangs as terrorist groups and sent soldiers onto the streets in 2024.
Yet the military has proven itself a blunt weapon. Trained to fight uniformed foes on a clearly defined battlefield, there have been repeated human rights abuses by the military across the region, often strengthening community support for the illegal actors who see the state as the aggressor.
Fighting TOC in Latin America and the Caribbean is not the same as tackling traditional terrorist groups like the Islamic State or the Taliban. There are few conventional military targets. The drug cartels not only hide among the civilian population but, in many cases, are the civilian population. And as Petro in Colombia has found, any air strikes almost inevitably result in the deaths of minors who form much of the cannon fodder of the criminal groups.
Drug trafficking organizations do not have ideology; they do not want to overthrow governments. They want to corrupt them, penetrate them, bend them to their will, ensure they ignore criminal activity, or, in the best case, protect and facilitate that activity.
Venezuela is the most extreme case of this. With the designation of the Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization, and its application to the entire Maduro regime justifying the January 3 snatch operation, the United States has effectively declared war on the country. But removing Maduro, corrupt and criminal though he is, will not stop the exportation of drugs or remove criminality from the country. In fact, it might actually result in chaos and criminal opportunity, or worse still, a civil conflict. The fact that Trump has left the Chavista regime in control shows that he sees the potential risk of chaos.
The Trump administration’s order to ensure the “total elimination of cartel and transnational criminal organizations” is doomed to failure. The experience of the last 40 years shows that there is no end of the war on drugs as long as demand remains steady. There are no quick fixes.
Yet close cooperation between different nations, the sharing of intelligence and the building of trust, has shown that every criminal structure, starting with the Medellín Cartel, can be gradually dismantled and that even presidents can be convicted of drug trafficking — even if they are later granted a pardon by Trump. What the last four decades have also proven is that a strong democracy, clear checks and balances, a healthy and free press, and transparency are the best defenders against transnational organized crime. And where due process is ignored, the rule of law weakened, transparency reduced, and civil society diminished, corruption flourishes and organized crime strengthens.