Latin American allies are going all in on Trump’s drug war

LIMA, Peru—The U.S. military has helped Ecuador bomb suspected drug traffickers along its border with Colombia. Peru says it is eager to deepen military cooperation with American antidrug efforts.

And last week, Colombia used U.S. intelligence to hunt down and kill an alleged leader of a narcotics-smuggling syndicate. A few hours later, Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella gave a speech beside the bodies of the dead man, his girlfriend and associates stuffed in white bags.

A sprawling military alliance that reaches from the Caribbean across the Andes to the Pacific is taking shape a year after the Trump administration began bombing alleged drug-smuggling boats in the region. The tactics are sometimes unapologetically and intentionally brutal, like President Trump’s drug-boat campaign , designed to send a message that narcotics traffickers now face local forces backed by U.S. firepower.

The emerging coalition is a bloc of largely right-wing governments across the region that could receive U.S. intelligence, equipment and surveillance technology. Sometimes they work jointly with American troops. Regional security forces are bombing jungle encampments, capturing drug kingpins and killing drug couriers with U.S. help, American officials said.

On a swing through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru that ended Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighted the campaign alongside a trio of Trump-friendly leaders. In Lima, Peru’s new President Keiko Fujimori announced to applause that her country was joining the Shield of the Americas, a U.S.-led coalition of over a dozen countries that has adopted the Trump administration’s hard-line playbook for taking on drug traffickers and armed groups.

“God willing, it will expand to even more countries,” Rubio said at the presidential palace. “There are criminal groups today that have more money and better military equipment than the military forces of a state.”

Increasingly, he said, these countries could take the lead on the front lines.

“We’ll still blow up ships if need be,” Rubio said Wednesday in the Ecuadorean capital of Quito, but “our elite forces are operating alongside one another.”

On Tuesday, Rubio met with de la Espriella at a military compound that the Colombian president has turned into a presidential headquarters in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla. He ticked off his wishlist for American firepower: upgraded aircraft, drones, radars, air defenses, cyber defenses and special-forces capabilities.

“The threats of the 21st Century require new capabilities,” the Colombian leader told reporters. “Criminals who don’t submit will be taken down.”

The embrace of a more muscular U.S. role in Latin America—long controversial in a region shaped by U.S. interventions and military coups—comes as a surge of violence has benefited leaders who promise a hard-line response to organized crime.