President Trump’s targeting of boats in Latin American waters has kicked off a dramatic shift in the U.S. approach to the region, one that threatens to upend many partnerships long relied on by the White House.
The Trump administration has authorized military strikes on boats they claim are ferrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela and in the Pacific Ocean, resulting in at least 43 deaths.
The strikes have been highly criticized, and the actions prompted Gustavo Petro, president of neighboring Colombia, to accuse the U.S. of murder.
Trump responded by slashing security aid to Petro’s country, one of the closest U.S. partners on drug enforcement, and on Friday issued sanctions against Petro personally, accusing him of failing to clamp down on cocaine production.
“To see this kind of treatment of Latin America, this sort of very colonial way of treating the region, threatening military intervention, sending 10,000 troops to the Caribbean – I mean, these are things that we just don’t have any real parallels in the last 100 years,” said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit that advocates for human rights in the region.
It’s also a massive shift from former President Biden’s “root causes” approach, which sought to stem migration in the region through investments in local economies, education and stemming violence and corruption.
Rebecca Bill Chavez, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, said that while the Trump administration is giving appreciated attention to an area often overlooked by other administrations, they risk jeopardizing relationships with allies while unwinding decades of strategy meant to counter growing Chinese influence.
“The approach leans more on coercion than cooperation, heavy on sticks and light on carrots. It emphasizes the region’s problems instead of its potential,” she said, all things that could undercut U.S. efforts to be the “partner of choice” in Latin America.
The Trump administration claims it is taking out the boats to stop drugs that would otherwise flow to the U.S., but at the same time, Trump has said he approved covert CIA action in Venezuela and dedicated 10,000 troops to support counternarcotics operations, raising the specter the U.S. might seek to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The killings have raised numerous legal and practical questions.
Petro said a strike in Colombian waters killed a “lifelong fisherman.” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who noted the U.S. Coast Guard fails to find drugs in about a quarter of interdicted boats, saying “we can’t have a policy where we just blow up ships where we don’t even know the people’s names,” or whether they actually are transporting drugs.
Others have argued the small boats simply aren’t large enough to reach the U.S. or to carry enough drugs to back Trump’s claims the narcotics could kill thousands of people.
“It all comes down to President Trump understanding what no other president has really understood before. He says that we’re at war with the drug cartels,” said Melissa Ford Maldonado, director of the western hemisphere initiative at the America First Policy Institute.
“And so I think that the president believes that acting decisively in Venezuela sends a very powerful signal to all of them. So it’s like a, ‘Hey, shape up. Because we’re changing course when it comes to our national security.’”
Critics say the actions are not really aimed at drugs but regime change and confronting disfavored leaders — efforts they don’t think will be successful and instead will upend U.S. credibility in the region.
“I think a major component of their Venezuela policy is a naive but politically very, very sexy idea that if we take down Maduro in Venezuela, Cuba will then immediately collapse right behind it,” said Fulton Armstrong, an American University professor and director of Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
“They’ve done at least one operation off on the Pacific side to make it look like it’s not just regime change in Venezuela. It is ‘protect the motherland from poison drugs’ … but with Petro it’s now a personal pissing match,” he told The Hill.
The tensions have caused anxiety in Cuba, which has strongly condemned the actions.
“The pretexts for this extraordinary and irrational military deployment by the United States are groundless and rooted in deception. It is legally and morally unacceptable to use such claims as grounds for perpetrating a military aggression against a sovereign state. The threats to peace, security, and stability in Our America are real and imminent,” Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said earlier this month.
Confusion and concern over how to handle the Trump administration are widespread in Latin America, particularly amid a number of threats.
Since taking office, Trump has threatened to take military action in Mexico as a response to drug cartels. And the U.S. policy in Colombia is a notable reversal.
Colombia was one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid in the region. Most of it as associated with Plan Colombia, a 15-year effort that funneled billions to bolster the country’s security and combat drug production.
To the Trump administration, Plan Colombia was a failure.
Ford Maldonado called the situation disappointing given years of hard work by Colombia, efforts she said have eroded since Plan Colombia ended in 2015.
“Colombia worked really, really hard and earned its place as a very trusted ally, honestly through decades of a lot of sacrifice and a lot of death and a lot of violence. But they were able to stand firm against cartels so that they could be in Washington’s good graces,” she said.
“So I think a lot of the talk now that the U.S. is walking away from Colombia needs to be reframed, because it’s really the other way around. Colombia was our closest partner in the drug war, and that partnership has completely eroded, not on our side, but under their government right now.”
Many see the boat strikes as a way to confront governments that have frustrated the Trump administration, but critics fear it will end poorly for the U.S.
Isacson said the Trump administration would need far more troops to carry out regime change in Venezuela, and he raised doubts the U.S. will invade that country even as the Pentagon on Friday ordered its largest aircraft carrier to the region.
“I don’t think they’re going to invade. So where are they going? They’re going to keep escalating, escalating. If you do keep escalating, putting the screws on Maduro because you want him to leave, do you have to offer some kind of exit? … Meanwhile you’re treating Colombia in a way that they’re not going to collaborate with whatever the pressure strategy is.”
Others said Trump’s public acknowledgment he’d authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela was meant to put pressure on that country.
“It’s psychological warfare. It’s psyops,” Armstrong said. “It’s basically to try to spook Maduro and to give a signal to the people in the military that now’s the time to rise up.”
The U.S. has a poor track record when it comes to intervention in Latin America, including past efforts to remove leaders.
“It’s a reason the region is poor, it’s a reason it hasn’t made as much progress on education innovation. It’s a reason why even issues like corruption remain difficult to tackle, and, yeah, the United States’s role in picking and choosing dictatorships because they’re anti-communist at the time was … a huge reason,” Isacson said.
Armstrong said the U.S. has intervened to oust multiple leaders, only to leave countries in chaos.
“We are sort of good at kicking people out. We’re very good at tearing down systems. We’re not very good at doing it with people that can credibly set up a new system,” he said.
Chavez said the U.S. public would also have no appetite for U.S. deaths in Venezuela, particularly if any military action went from sea to land.
“There’s so many reasons that would be bad,” she said.
“Venezuela is a super big country. It’s there’s so many armed groups. The U.S. would be stuck there, right? It would not be something where the U.S. could come in easily and then get out easily.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Trump is uninterested in any de-escalation with Colombia and the same appears to be true for Venezuela.
Armstrong said the U.S. may do so to its own detriment.
“Having watched how we work, knowing the limitations of our intelligence capabilities, the residual strengths of governments that we’re now digging our heels in against, like Venezuela and Cuba, we’re looking at a lot of showmanship that at some point – so that he doesn’t look like TACO – he’s going to have to do something or lose face,” he said, using an acronym for Trump always chickens out.
“What I’m not convinced is that it will be successful for the U.S. national interest, but it will be successful for their political interest, which is basically go ahead and just blow everything up.”
