“President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations,” the New York Times reported on August 8. “The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.”
Using U.S. military force overseas against profit-seeking criminal organizations would be a grave mistake. If carried out in other nations’ territories without their governments’ consent, it would be considered a “breach of the peace” or an “act of aggression” under the UN Charter, or an “armed attack” under the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. In Latin America and the Caribbean, where sensitivities about U.S. military intervention are strong and cut across the political spectrum, few would find claims of “self-defense” convincing, and relations could be set back for many years.
International norms, though, are far from the only reason why military interventions against organized crime would be grave mistakes. They don’t make sense either practically or strategically. Here are five reasons why.
- The objective is not clear.
What would be the goal of sending the U.S. armed forces to attack a foreign criminal group, cartel leader, or target like a drug lab? Does the intervention seek to defeat “organized crime” in the target country? Or does it seek more narrowly to defeat the specific criminal group that the Trump administration has decided to add to its list of terrorist organizations?
Even if the goal is to eliminate a specific group, the outcome will be disappointing in addressing violence or reducing the illegal drug trade in the medium and long term. Anyone who has spent any time investigating organized crime in Latin America knows how impermanent and easily replaced individual groups and leaders turn out to be.
There is little doubt that the U.S. military’s overwhelming capacities would allow it to disrupt the activities of a specific criminal group, destroy complexes of drug labs, and capture kingpins. But as any thoughtful military officer or intelligence analyst can tell you, that achieves little toward the larger goal of doing away with organized crime.
New, often more violent, criminal groups spring up to fill vacuums left after top leaders are killed or captured. A new fentanyl lab can be built in Mexico for about $60,000 (roughly the price of a Tesla). If the local mayor, police chief, or banker shares in the profits, the territory remains fertile for newcomers. Even if a specific criminal group does not persist, organized crime does. Ask a longtime resident of Medellín, a city that, since the early 1990s, has lived under the sway of the Medellín cartel, the Office of Envigado, La Terraza, the Cacique Nutibara and Bloque Metro paramilitaries, the Gulf Clan, and various neighborhood “combos.” The names change, but the criminal phenomenon persists.
One cannot shoot and bomb organized crime out of existence, and trying to do so will be a bitter experience for the Trump administration. If it follows through on plans to use the U.S. military to fight organized crime overseas, expect a lot of “Mission Accomplished” moments followed by embarrassing setbacks.
- Fighting organized crime like it’s an anti-government insurgency or terrorist group fundamentally misunderstands the adversary and is a recipe for failure.
Beware politicians and security analysts who talk about “defeating” the Sinaloa Cartel or the Tren de Aragua using the same military methods used to weaken insurgent or terrorist groups in the past, from ISIS to the FARC. Such groups took decades of military offensives before they could be dissolved or brought to the negotiating table, and they are very different adversaries to confront than organized crime.
Criminal groups are less predictable adversaries because they don’t necessarily want to fight their countries’ governments. They want profit, not political power (except where it serves profit). That makes them much harder to fight through military force alone than insurgencies or “terrorists,” and the Trump administration seems to be missing this point completely.
To put this in overly simple terms, consider the Latin American metaphor of “plata o plomo”: silver or lead. An illegal group can influence the government by offering bribes and payoffs (silver) to win acquiescence and even penetrate institutions. When that doesn’t work, groups will resort to lead, as in bullets: using violence to intimidate government representatives or even get them out of entire territories.
An insurgency fights the state with “plomo” but not much “plata.” Though they attacked, ambushed, kidnapped, and assassinated them, groups like Colombia’s FARC, El Salvador’s FMLN (during the civil war), or Peru’s Shining Path rarely worked by enriching state officials. Organized crime, by contrast, prefers not to fight the state and combines its threats with silver.
Combining “plata” with “plomo” makes organized crime far harder to fight than insurgencies or terrorists through military force alone. The “enemy” is so interwoven with the security forces, the justice system, government at all levels, and the legal economy, that it becomes very hard to distinguish friend from foe.
Take out a criminal group’s leader, and the structure’s relationships with the government and the legal economy will remain in place. Undoing those relationships is not a military mission: it is the job of investigators, prosecutors, and judges, who themselves must be subject to rigorous anti-corruption oversight.
- Sending out the U.S. military to fight “cartels” won’t achieve anything that the drug war has not already done, repeatedly, with no lasting effect–despite enormous bloodshed.
Look no further than the past half-century of U.S. history in Latin America. The U.S. government, working with specific units within host governments’ security forces, has already had decades of tremendous success taking down the leaders of organized crime groups. From Pablo Escobar to Chapo Guzman, their tenures don’t last very long, and U.S. prisons are full of them. In any case, even the most powerful “drug lords” and their organizations operate within a dynamic global market in which they are replaceable, often by even more capable competitors.
Not only do new leaders keep coming, but illegal drugs remain readily available despite decades of effort to stem production and supply. The purity and inflation-adjusted price of a gram of cocaine on U.S. streets has barely budged in more than 30 years of measurement, and for heroin, the story is similar. The availability of illicitly-manufactured fentanyl has varied by location, but fentanyl’s purity-adjusted price appeared to be falling as well. The latest assessment from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) indicates a drop in fentanyl purity in 2024. But the DEA also notes that the mixture of other substances (such as xylazine, an animal tranquilizer) makes street drugs very dangerous.
The forceful approach does not work. It will defeat specific kingpins and organized crime groups, but it will leave intact “organized crime” because soldiers don’t exist to fight webs of corruption and illicit finance.
- Achieving this “same result” would come at a huge cost. There are significant reasons why the United States has avoided pursuing military operations in non-adversary countries without the host government’s consent.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was very quick to respond to news of the Trump administration’s secret order: “The United States is not going to come to Mexico with their military,” she said on August 8. “We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will be no invasion. It’s off the table, absolutely off the table.”
In Mexico and elsewhere, a non-consensual military operation on foreign soil would do such grave harm to bilateral and region-wide relations that the pursuit of other U.S. interests in that country would become nearly impossible. The foreseeable rupture in relations with Mexico, for instance, would undermine or end cooperation on a wide range of issues, including any potentially productive strategies to address crime and violence. (The loss of cooperation would also directly clash with other Trump administration priorities, notably on migration, an area in which Mexico is cooperating significantly with U.S. efforts to reduce the number of people able to reach, enter, or remain in the United States.)
The harm to relations and to other U.S. interests would be multiplied if the operation came with so-called “collateral damage,” like the loss of civilian life in that country. The cost to U.S. credibility would be hard to calculate.
- If non-consensual military operations were to occur in an adversary country, such as Venezuela, the outcome would be even more complicated.
Venezuela is likely to be contemplated in the Trump administration’s new military directive. The administration just added the “Cartel de los Soles”—a shadowy network of military officers involved in drug trafficking— to the Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT), and included the “Tren de Aragua,” as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), while increasing the reward it is offering for information leading to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Again, it is difficult to discern the objective here. Let’s assume the Trump administration were to deploy U.S. military force against the “Cartel de los Soles”—an amorphous, barely organized, non-hierarchical criminal structure. Would the resulting action be a surgical operation against a few corrupt officers? Or, as the “Soles” is deeply embedded throughout the Maduro regime, would this become the pretext for an all-out invasion of Venezuela? Or, alternatively, is this just a narrative tool for “looking tough” without any intention of really sending troops? (Recent statements from officials indicate that “narrative tool” is the most likely objective.)
In the first scenario, a “surgical strike,” the outcome would be the same as past offensives against criminal organizations: a few “trophy” arrests and extraditions that merely create space that organized crime quickly fills.
In the second scenario, a military operation seeking to topple the Maduro regime, the U.S. military would no doubt succeed within months. But what happens after that would be far more unstable. What Colin Powell used to call the “Pottery Barn Rule” (you break it, you bought it) would go into effect. As in Iraq 20 years ago, the “victorious” U.S. military would likely find itself governing an impoverished country with broken institutions, trying to hand over power to an opposition weakened by repression and exile, and probably facing an insurgency made up of regime diehards, criminal groups, and even Colombian guerrillas. There is no evidence that this approach would lead to a democratic transition in Venezuela.
Because criminal and insurgent violence already transcends borders and illegal economies are flourishing, such as precious-metals mining and human trafficking, one must wonder about the role those networks would play in the aftermath of a military operation and how they will transform. Violence would spill over – even more – into Colombia, enmeshing the U.S. in a regional conflict. Even if the “Soles” and “Tren de Aragua” no longer exist in their present form, the networks and financial flows will outlast them.
In the third scenario – no military intervention but waves of “narrative bombast”- there is no guarantee of change in Venezuela. Maduro now has a basis to bring together ideological allies under the threat of the use of force, and he keeps partially using U.S. policies to justify repression and human rights violations. With no foreseeable change in Venezuela and a region less willing to stand strong against a dictator facing a military threat, this contributes to international fatigue concerning the long crisis.
What to do instead?
The Trump administration is correct that organized crime in Latin America is a formidable adversary. It is weakening democracy, ending innocent lives, harming women and children, displacing communities, destroying the environment, and spreading fear and dread throughout the continent. The administration is fundamentally wrong, though, in believing that military force should be at the center of the strategy, or that the outcome would be different than past frustrations just because the soldiers’ uniforms bear “U.S. Army” patches this time.
Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines can play supporting and marginal roles. But the real work of defeating organized crime falls to other sectors, and the U.S. government must partner with them (rather than slash aid to them, as this administration’s State Department did so hastily at the beginning of the year).
Key elements of a more effective strategy include:
- Help break the corrupt links between organized crime and government, and between organized crime and the legal economy, that provide criminal groups with the oxygen they breathe.
Criminal groups derive much of their strength from their “plata o plomo” relationships with the government and “legal” economies. Without those relationships, drug shipments don’t get waved through checkpoints, kidnappers’ safe houses get raided more readily, and it becomes impossible to carry out such out-in-the-open activities as felling square miles of forest or digging open-pit gold mines.
Breaking these corrupt links is vital. Instead of drones and Special Forces raids, it is urgent to pour resources into prosecutors, investigators, financial flow analysts, witness and whistleblower protection efforts, well-protected and trained judges, civil society watchdogs, and a free press, both in the U.S. and abroad.
The objective is to increase the probability that choosing to collude with organized crime will bring discovery and punishment. If, as a result of this objective, organized crime loses friends in government, politics, and the “legal” economy, it still won’t be easy to fight—but it will be weaker. Without ties to government and power, organized crime will more closely resemble an insurgency, and those have been defeated in the past.
- Build a comprehensive security sector that is able to uproot organized crime while protecting people who feel unsafe.
Instead of “trophies” like extradited kingpins or seizures, a more successful approach would focus on everything that makes people feel unsafe in Latin America: unprofessional police, unpunished corruption, terrible prisons, lack of oversight and accountability, and lack of the technology (hotspot policing, for instance) and community relations that have reduced “everyday” crime and weakened organized crime in the U.S.
Without the infrastructure of a more comprehensive security sector with heavy civilian buy-in, soldiers deployed to an organized crime hotspot are little more than scarecrows inserted into a territory that they don’t know. Strategies fail when they leave out the judicial branch, civilian police, experts, and community leaders, along with watchdogs and reformers in the legislature, civil society, and the free press. Efforts to tackle structural inequality and multidimensional poverty also result in fewer incentives for actors at all levels to become part of organized criminal groups, corruption networks, and illicit economies.
- Rethink the prohibition policies that make plants and chemicals into obscenely profitable income streams.
Cocaine is produced by chemically extracting trace amounts of the alkaloid found in leaves of the coca bush, which has been cultivated in the Andean-Amazonian region for millennia. Heroin is made from morphine, derived from the opium poppy, a plant that grows wild in temperate regions. Fentanyl is made from cheap, easily obtained chemicals. The profits criminal groups gain from these and other substances are inflated by our fateful policy choice—declaring them illegal—that makes them artificially scarce. This policy choice has created large, violent, unregulated, and dangerous markets. For over 50 years, it has utterly failed to reduce addiction and social harms.
Ending prohibition won’t end organized crime: there’s always illegal mining, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, timber harvesting, extortion, and much else. But it would make the fight easier and free up resources for all of the elements of the “security sector” working to protect people and break links between criminals and those in political and economic power.
An “easier” fight is one for which plans to send U.S. soldiers overseas would make even less sense. We implore the Trump administration to back away from the brink of a grave mistake: it would be tragic to commit the lives of U.S. personnel and billions of dollars to confront an adversary that it does not understand, for outcomes that would be fleeting at best. It is not too late to consider smarter approaches using more appropriate tools.
