By Donald Trump’s account, his campaign of lethal maritime strikes is an attempt to extinguish powerful drug cartels, not a prelude to attempted regime change in Venezuela. But even by that standard, the operation is already proving counterproductive, straining alliances essential to U.S. counter-drug strategy and starving officials of information central to battling criminal groups.
Veterans of U.S. law enforcement and counter-drug operations warn that the administration’s militarized effort—including 21 missile strikes, which have killed more than 80 people, on small boats that the administration claims were trafficking fentanyl and cocaine—will have little to no impact on the Mexican and Colombian cartels responsible for moving billions of dollars’ worth of drugs into the United States each year.
Trump also is casting in anti-narcotics terms his long-standing interest in seeing Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan strongman, driven from power. Five years ago, the U.S. indicted Maduro and several associates, alleging that they were the kingpins of a narcotics organization that permeated the Venezuelan military called “Cartel of the Suns,” a figure of speech among Venezuelans for generals corrupted by drug money and a reference to the sun insignia on their uniform.
The U.S. just classified the organization as a terrorist group. Trump said Saturday that Venezuela’s airspace should be considered closed, a possible prelude to further action. “President Trump is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.
But Venezuela is primarily a transit country for cocaine bound for Europe. Cartels in Colombia and Mexico are responsible for almost all of the shipments of cocaine and fentanyl that arrive in the U.S.—the supply that the White House has repeatedly said it wants to stanch. Three months of deadly boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela and in the eastern Pacific, which many legal experts contend violate international law, have strained U.S. relations with several countries that have worked jointly with Washington for decades against the groups that control most of the illicit-drug trade in America and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.
Canada and Mexico distanced themselves from the U.S. maritime operation, stressing that they had “no involvement” and offering condemnation. France declared that the attacks “disregard international law.” The president of Colombia, whose nation is Washington’s closest security partner in the region (and the world’s chief producer of cocaine), said the boat strikes constitute a “crime against humanity.” So far, no country appears to have significantly curtailed cooperation in the alliance, known as the Joint Interagency Task Force South, based in Key West, Florida. But that may well change if the U.S. missile campaign intensifies.
Operation Southern Spear, as the U.S. military buildup is called, is putting a “short-, medium-, and long-term strain on our counter-narcotics relationships built up over the last 35 years,” says John Feeley, who served as an ambassador to Panama during the first Trump administration. Asked on Thursday when he might escalate to bombing targets in Venezuelan territory, Trump said, “Very soon.”
“We warn them: Stop sending poison to our country,” he added.
In addition to undermining international cooperation in the War on Drugs, the boat strikes also present a more immediate downside to counter-narcotics efforts. Until now, the U.S. Coast Guard has led interdiction in the Caribbean, stopping drug vessels and seizing their cargo, which allows investigators to collect evidence and refer suspected traffickers for prosecution. Those foot soldiers of the international drug trade, in turn, may become witnesses in building cases in U.S. courts against cartel higher-ups. Military force is typically a last resort: The U.S. Coast Guard and its law-enforcement partners used lethal action in their maritime interdictions only three times over the past five years, in instances when a targeted vessel attempted to “ram law enforcement officers with their boat,” a Coast Guard spokesperson said in an email.
The White House has offered little evidence that those targeted in its maritime strikes were drug smugglers. (The only two known survivors were repatriated to their home countries, where one was released after Ecuador’s investigators found no evidence that he had committed a crime.) But even assuming they were, U.S. officials have emphasized that the attacks are designed to kill, and the boats and cargoes are obliterated—and all possible evidence along with them.
“You’re drying up a pipeline of intelligence critical to understanding the criminal network,” Adam Cohen, a former head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, told us. When asked about this concern, Kelly, the White House spokesperson, wrote: “It’s pathetic that The Atlantic is running cover for evil narcoterrorists trying to kill Americans with illicit narcotics.”
Others doubt that killing those low in the pecking order will do much to stop drug trafficking, because the cartels have proved so adaptable in the past. Thomas Padden, another former head of the OCDETF, told us, “This is just whack-a-mole. It’s lethal whack-a-mole, but it’s whack-a-mole.”
Colombia, Venezuela’s neighbor, is a central player in U.S. efforts to stem the flow of cocaine from Latin America. The United States has invested well over $10 billion in battling drugs and rebel violence in Colombia since the late 1990s, embedding U.S. advisers into the country’s security institutions and granting it the bulk of military training and equipment going to Latin America. U.S.-Colombia cooperation has led to extensive drug seizures, extraditions, and convictions in U.S. courts over the past two decades.
But ties between the two countries have grown strained. President Gustavo Petro, a former leftist guerrilla leader, rolled back some of the most aggressive elements of the U.S.-backed counter-drug strategy, suspending forced eradication of coca, the raw material for cocaine. Cocaine production has soared. Petro is now the subject of U.S. sanctions. Trump has called Petro an “illegal drug leader,” and a senior administration official told us by email that U.S. investments in Colombia have been “nothing more than a long-term rip-off of America.”
Yet Colombia was responsible for 85 percent of all the “actionable intelligence” available to the Joint Interagency Task Force South from January 2024 to June 2025, according to a September letter to Trump from a Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In late October, the Colombian navy interdicted 2.8 tons of cocaine based on intelligence from the U.S. Southern Command.
“If you look at how cartels have risen and fallen, 100 percent of those cases were done as a result of cooperation” between the U.S. and Colombia, John Tobon, a former senior Homeland Security Investigations official, who oversaw counter-narcotics strategy and retired in January, told us.
When the U.S. started targeting small boats, Petro announced a suspension of intelligence sharing with U.S. agencies over the maritime strikes, which he said amount to murder. He and others in his government have since softened that stance. The Colombian embassy in Washington, D.C., said in a statement that although “no Colombian intelligence has been or will be shared in relation to the recent boat strikes,” cooperation continues—and a senior Colombian official told us that the country continues to share other kinds of information, including with the Coast Guard.
Colombia’s cartels smuggle the majority of the country’s cocaine via the Pacific to Central America and Mexico, where it is moved overland into the United States. If Petro follows through on his threats to end cooperation, the result could be catastrophic for U.S. counter-narcotics. Diminished intelligence from Colombia would mean “we’re going in even more blind than we perhaps are already,” Todd Robinson, who served as the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement during the Biden administration, told us.
According to Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, the challenge of combatting the narcotics industry in Colombia has grown more formidable as the drug trade has evolved away from the centralized cartels of the Pablo Escobar era. Cooperation with Colombia’s government “is even more important than ever, because the target is much more fragmented and complicated than it used to be,” Himes told us. He and another Democrat on the committee, Joaquin Castro of Texas, appealed to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a letter last month to explain which countries, if any, had dialed back intelligence sharing over the strikes. Lawmakers from both parties have complained about the paucity of information they’ve been provided about the military buildup in the Caribbean.
A senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the government, pointed to recent statements from NATO pushing back on suggestions that its member states had halted information sharing with Washington.
Fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has been the primary cause of an epidemic of fatal overdoses over the past decade, chiefly enters America across the border with Mexico. In a Truth Social post, Trump said without evidence that the first boat destroyed was “loaded up with mostly Fentanyl.” Law-enforcement veterans, the United Nations, and the U.S. government have never asserted that the drug comes from South America. More recent administration announcements have been less specific, usually referencing “narcotics,” and in a House briefing last month, officials acknowledged that they believed it was cocaine, not fentanyl, on the vessels.
Mexico, for decades, has remained in the thrall of powerful criminal syndicates, now led by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, whose power eclipses that of the state in some parts of the country. The groups obtain precursor chemicals from Asia to make fentanyl and methamphetamine in clandestine labs in Mexico and smuggle them northward by land, often in passenger vehicles going through U.S. border crossings.
U.S. counter-narcotics cooperation with Mexico has ebbed and flowed over time, a partnership that has included training by American officials, intelligence sharing with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the provision of military gear. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters last month that Trump has repeatedly offered to send troops; she has declined. “I have always said to him: ‘Thank you very much, President Trump, but no. Mexico is a free, independent, and sovereign country,’” Sheinbaum said.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week that striking or sending troops to Mexico would be “okay with me.” If that happens, Sheinbaum might be forced to reduce or suspend cooperation. Her predecessor and mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, restricted cooperation following the 2020 arrest in Los Angeles of a top military figure on drug-trafficking charges.
Jake Braun, a former Homeland Security official who led counter-fentanyl operations under the Biden administration, told us that he does not have an issue with using the military to combat the fentanyl crisis—a phenomenon he calls a “mass public poisoning.” But he said that “all of our firepower” should be aimed at Mexico’s cartels, not groups in South America. To that end, he said, the cooperation of the Mexican government is irreplaceable. “At the end of the day, we have to have Mexico working with us,” he told us. “How did we get El Chapo? How did we get Gallardo, the former head of Sinaloa, before it was called Sinaloa?” Collaboration between the Mexican military and U.S. intelligence made those high-profile arrests possible, he said.
Trump has used Maduro’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking as part of his rationale for the biggest military buildup in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis. And Trump’s dissatisfaction with anti-drug efforts in Colombia and Mexico could prompt him to escalate with those countries, too.
But he also had made no secret of desiring Maduro’s ouster for a variety of reasons. During a phone call with Maduro last week, Trump gave the Venezuelan president an ultimatum to leave office or face the consequences, The Wall Street Journal reported. And it remains unclear where anti-narcotics enforcement will stand in the list of U.S. priorities for Venezuela if Maduro does cede power. Trump has long shown intense interest in securing U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil wealth and rare-earth deposits. (He also muddied his anti-drug messaging by saying last week that he would pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who is serving a 45-year prison sentence for his role in a trafficking scheme that brought more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. over two decades.)
For now, the administration will continue to target small vessels. After The Washington Post reported on Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the verbal order to “kill everybody” in the first attack, on September 2, Hegseth wrote on X: “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
That doesn’t mean the drugs will stop coming, though. Cartels view the loss of some foot soldiers and drugs at sea as a cost of doing business. They can adapt tactics and shift supply routes to keep their shipments safe. “Blowing up some boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific—these guys are just laughing,” Dan Foote, a former senior official in the State Department’s counter-narcotics bureau, told us. “They build spoilage into their business plans.”
