On November 13, Pete Hegseth, Secretary of the recently renamed Department of War, labeled the latest military actions in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific against alleged drug traffickers as part of Operation Southern Spear. The White House announced that the attacks—which have left more than 80 people dead—are acts of legitimate self-defense and will continue without the need to obtain congressional authorization, since there is no ongoing armed conflict. In other words, the U.S. armed forces are carrying out military operations without defining them as war because the targets do not pose a military threat per se, yet they allegedly threaten the United States by being part of drug-trafficking organizations that, following this logic, directly cause the deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens every year.
Although Trump has repeatedly stated that he plans to extend the attacks to military targets tied to drug trafficking inside Venezuelan territory, it is not yet clear whether such threats will materialize. What is clear is that since late August, the United States has deployed more than 10% of its entire naval forces to the Caribbean, totaling 10,000 troops, including air force units stationed in Puerto Rico, Louisiana, and Florida. This is an excessively large force if the goal is merely to sink drug-trafficking boats. Doubling down, on October 24 the USS Ford aircraft carrier was ordered to sail to the Caribbean, raising the share of deployed naval forces to more than 35%, with over 18,000 navy personnel.
Is an attack on Venezuela coming?
Adding to this, the Trump administration has labeled Maduro and the Bolivarian leadership as heads of the so-called Cartel of the Suns, and several members of Venezuela’s armed forces as leaders of the Tren de Aragua. Both entities have been designated as terrorist organizations by the United States and other Latin American nations. For Trump, the Bolivarian regime is a national security threat—allegedly supporting radical leftist groups, being responsible for the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and sending hundreds of thousands of gang members to commit crimes in U.S. cities.
While Venezuela has indeed become an important corridor for cocaine trafficking—13% of the global flow, mostly bound for Europe—it does not produce fentanyl, the leading cause of overdose deaths in the U.S. The Cartel of the Suns is not an organization but rather a loose network of Venezuelan military and security officials who facilitate logistics, trafficking corridors, transportation, infrastructure, and impunity in exchange for regular bribes. U.S. intelligence itself shares this assessment: elements of the regime have ad hoc links with criminal groups but do not direct them; instead, they use them to obtain revenue.
Leaving aside the potential—but still uncertain—military intervention in Venezuela, the United States has fundamentally transformed its relationship with Latin America. What was once defined by cooperation and multilateralism has shifted to a coercive and unilateral relationship, where Latin American countries are framed either as ideologically aligned with Washington or as sources of insecurity and ideological hostility. This shift is partly due to how the Trump administration translates its worldview into foreign policy toward the region.
Trump admires William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, two early-20th-century U.S. presidents whose foreign policies strengthened U.S. hegemony in the Americas after the Spanish-American War, turning the United States into a global power. The “big-stick diplomacy” and the “Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” cemented Washington’s interventionist principles toward Latin America: demonstrating the political will to use force whenever deemed necessary, intervening in the domestic affairs of countries with regimes considered dangerous, experiencing revolutionary crises, or unable to maintain a legitimate monopoly of force.
A new foreign policy
This renewed ideological drive toward coercive actions in Latin America has taken shape in the new defense and national security strategy, which prioritizes the Western Hemisphere above other regions. This realignment of strategic priorities includes potential territorial expansions such as Greenland; control of commercial routes such as the Panama Canal; the establishment of military bases, such as in El Salvador; the use of commercial, financial, and diplomatic sanctions to pressure non-aligned governments, such as Brazil and Colombia; financial bailouts and trade alliances to assist allied governments, such as Argentina; and possible military intervention to eliminate non-state threats, such as in Mexico.
The new national defense doctrine is based on protecting U.S. borders from transnational organized crime networks, terrorist organizations, migration waves, and illicit trafficking—requiring the absolute securitization of the region.
Ultimately, this securitization turns Latin America into an exclusive sphere of U.S. influence, relocating the tactics, strategies, and normative frameworks of the war on terror into the region. Just as the war in Afghanistan was expanded—with drone strikes, bombings, and special operations—to Pakistan, the Philippines, Yemen, Chad, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia, it is not inconceivable that operations in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific could serve as precedents “legitimizing” similar future actions in Venezuelan territory and later against cartels and other transnational criminal organizations designated as terrorists in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Peru, or Bolivia. A big-stick doctrine for the 21st century.
The unilateral U.S. decision to act in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific—abandoning decades of multilateral cooperation with CARICOM and OAS members—radically alters the principles of regional security governance. The regional fight against drug trafficking was already undergoing militarization, but Washington’s actions have escalated it to a point of breaching international law, disregarding multilateral agreements, and violating sovereignty.
Ideologically or politically aligned leaders in the region, such as Milei and Bukele, would be rewarded for their support and would prevent the formation of a united front against Washington’s actions in regional bodies like the OAS. Likewise, a potential fall of Maduro triggered by Washington could impact the current presidential election cycle in the region—starting perhaps with Chile and then Colombia, Peru, and Brazil in 2026.
A Latin American turn to the far right—led by a hyper-conservative United States—could have devastating effects similar to those seen when the region was governed by authoritarian regimes and military juntas in the 1970s. The democratic and peaceful future of the region depends on institutional and multilateral initiatives—not coercive and unilateral ones.
*Machine translation, proofread by Ricardo Aceves.
Autor
Lawyer. Postdoc at New School For Social Research (N. York). Specialized in international criminal law, constitutional law and human rights. Master in international studies and sociology.
