Abelardo de la Espriella ran a platform built around taking down drug-laden aircraft and vessels departing from Colombia. Twenty-five years of U.S.-backed counternarcotics efforts suggest this tactic may not yield the desired results.
The Trump administration is widening the scope of its war on drugs across Latin America.
Last Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia would join the “Shield of the Americas” initiative. When the multinational security alliance of the U.S. and Latin American nations formed in March, President Donald Trump stated that the group was united by a pledge to deploy deadly force to wipe out the ruthless drug cartels and the terrorist networks behind them once and for all.
Hegseth explained that members of the Shield, also known as the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, would take “concrete steps—sometimes risky steps, courageous steps—in partnership” toward its aim of “dismantling the drug cartels that threaten safety, security and sovereignty in the Western Hemisphere.”
As of now, at least 19 countries in the region have endorsed the coalition, including the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago, and Ecuador, each of which has faced fatalities among its citizens attributed to Trump administration-backed extrajudicial maritime strikes, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights research and advocacy group.
Colombia’s entry came at the urging of its new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, who during the campaign pledged to mobilize the “air force, the army, and the police” to neutralize every plane and boat “loaded with drugs that leaves Colombia.” Moments after assuming office last week, the president intensified the vow, pledging to “relentlessly defeat narcoterrorism and every criminal organization that threatens Colombia’s freedom,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
He has acted promptly on his promise. Over the weekend, Colombian forces killed four remnants of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and two members of the country’s largest drug cartel in two nationwide operations, per the Miami Herald.
In a sense, Espriella is continuing the same unsuccessful policies as his predecessors. Since the launch of Plan Colombia in 2000—a counternarcotics initiative to train, equip, and assist the Colombian military financed by the U.S.—the United States has provided Colombia with billions in foreign aid, yet results have been minimal.
Last September, the Trump administration concluded that Colombia had “failed demonstrably to meet its drug control obligations.” It certified Colombia as a “major drug transit” country and one of the “major illicit drug producing countries,” a designation it has carried for more than four decades. Cocaine production in Colombia has reached record levels—”nearly nine times what United Nations researchers say was produced in 2012,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
Clearly, employing the military to combat drug trafficking has never proven especially effective, for the U.S. or for other nations in the region.
In 2025, Ecuador—which has waged a yearslong war against cartels using military force—recorded its highest number of violent deaths in its history, according to Latinoamérica21. Yet, the flow of illegal drugs remains steady. Approximately 70 percent of the cocaine produced in Colombia and Peru now moves through Ecuador’s ports, according to The Guardian. The country also plays a central role in importing, processing, and redistributing precursors used for synthetic opioids.
The security coalition has yet to yield tangible security gains for Ecuador, but it has exacted a real toll on its people.
In January, the CIA targeted several Ecuadorian fishing vessels near the Galápagos Islands as part of a “covert action” separate from Southern Command’s boat strikes, according to The Washington Post. The CIA strikes led to the disappearance of eight Ecuadorian nationals and formed part of the agency’s expanded footprint in Latin America, sanctioned by Trump. In March, a joint U.S.-Ecuador operation struck a dairy farm in rural San Martín, destroying cows instead of cocaine, according to The New York Times.
Despite Hegseth’s swagger and the troubling manner in which the Trump administration commends its maritime strikes, the approach has done little more than raise the death toll across Latin America while barely denting the amount of drugs entering the United States.
Apparently, Colombia has yet to learn the lesson about militarizing the war on drugs, even after decades of interdiction and prohibition failing.
