Trump assembles a new coalition to ‘eradicate’ cartels.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
By ANNIE CORREAL and SHAWN McCREESH
At the first Shield of the Americas summit in Florida on Saturday, President Donald Trump said a new organization of Latin American and Caribbean countries that he called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition would employ military force to defeat drug-trafficking groups.
Speaking at the Trump National Doral Miami, his golf resort outside Miami, Trump said the “brand-new military coalition” would “eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region.”
He said the U.S. military was “knocking the hell out of them where we can, and we’re going to go heavier.”
Addressing the regional leaders, he added, “We need your help; you have to — just tell us where they are.”
The summit, held as the U.S. military is engaged in a war with Iran that is spreading across the Middle East, brought leaders from 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries together with senior officials from the Trump administration. So far, 17 countries have committed to joining the coalition.
U.S. officials said that the group would aggressively target cartels and organized crime across the Western Hemisphere — a central focus for Trump, who has embraced a vision of reasserting U.S. dominance in the region through what has been called the “Donroe Doctrine.”
“Just as we formed a coalition to eradicate ISIS in the Middle East, we must now do the same thing to eradicate the cartels at home,” Trump said.
The one-day summit drew some of Trump’s staunchest allies, such as President Javier Milei of Argentina and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. The leaders of Bolivia, Costa Rica, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay and Trinidad and Tobago also attended. (The Bahamas, Belize, Guatemala, Jamaica and Peru, while part of the coalition, were not represented at the event.)
Several Trump administration heavyweights were also in attendance, among them the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent; the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick; and Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Kristi Noem, the recently dismissed homeland security secretary, was named a special envoy to the summit.
While Trump lavished praise on Rubio and Miller, he said nothing about Noem outside of reading her name.
At a lunch for the leaders, Noem thanked the president for her new role. “Now that America is secure and our borders are secure,” she said, “we want to focus on our neighbors.”
The administration has already deployed U.S. military resources to the region on a scale not seen in decades.
More than a dozen groups in Latin America and the Caribbean have been designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations; the majority of them received the label during Trump’s second term.
Over the last year, the administration has ordered 44 military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that the administration has alleged were carrying illicit drugs. The attacks killed 150 people. (Legal experts have said the strikes are illegal because the military is not permitted to target civilians — even suspected criminals.)
In January, the U.S. military attacked Caracas to remove Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who was subsequently indicted in U.S. federal court on drug-trafficking charges. In February, U.S. intelligence helped Mexican authorities locate the region’s most notorious cartel kingpin, Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho.
This month, the U.S. military launched joint operations with Ecuador. Experts say that Colombian trafficking groups and vicious gangs are exporting large quantities of cocaine from there, in cooperation with cartels from Mexico, Albania and elsewhere.
On the eve of the summit, U.S. officials released a video that showed the bombing of an encampment in rural Ecuador and boasted of the U.S.’ role in the operation. The dramatic footage was similar to videos often released of strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs.
Earlier in the week, Miller told Latin American defense leaders at the U.S. Southern Command headquarters in Doral, Florida, that military force was the only tool that could defeat the cartels and that the traffickers “should be treated just as brutally and just as ruthlessly” as groups such as al-Qaida and the Islamic State.
The United States has a long history of vowing to defeat the cartels, going back two generations to President Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs.” But each effort yielded little, and the trafficking has continued largely unabated.
That history seemed far from mind at the summit.
In his speech, Trump was chummy, often eliciting laughs. Introducing Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, he said, “I love that canal.” (Trump has made threats to reclaim the U.S.-built canal from Panama.) As he welcomed other leaders, he joked about how he had helped some clinch elections with infusions of cash and endorsements.
“I get nothing,” he added. “Is there way I can get paid for that, Marco?”
Some jokes were more pointed.
Trump called Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, a “very good person” with a “beautiful voice.” Then he switched to a high-pitched voice and, appearing to mock Sheinbaum, said, “‘President, president, president.’ I said, ‘Let me eradicate the cartels.’ ‘No, no, no, please, president.’”
Sheinbaum has collaborated extensively with the Trump administration but has refused to allow the United States to conduct unilateral military action on Mexican soil. Trump called Mexico “the epicenter of cartel violence” and said its cartels were “fueling and orchestrating much of the bloodshed and chaos in this hemisphere.”
Left-wing leaders — including from Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, the region’s largest nations — were not invited to the summit. Yet like Sheinbaum, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has engaged closely with the Trump administration on how to combat armed trafficking groups. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil has said he plans to visit the White House to meet Trump in the coming weeks.
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