As the world’s attention is focused on the U.S.
and Israeli war on Iran, the United
States has, with little fanfare, opened another
front in its expanding campaign against
so-called “narco-terrorism” in the Western
Hemisphere.
Since this new "war on drugs" began last year,
U.S. military strikes
on alleged drug-smuggling boats, as well as a
direct military intervention in Venezuela,
have claimed the lives of more than 250 people.
Now, Ecuador, a country on the northwestern edge
of South America, has become the latest site of
Washington’s reinvigorated “war on drugs.” This
escalation risks making the United States
complicit in the human rights abuses of a
government that is steadily dismantling its own
country’s democracy, including by suspending the
nation’s largest opposition party.
The new campaign began last week, when SOUTHCOM
announced
that “Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces
launched operations against Designated Terrorist
Organizations in Ecuador.” No further details
were provided, leaving the public to guess at
the scale, location, and target of this
intervention. This move followed a meeting a
day earlier between the head of SOUTHCOM and the
Ecuadorian president, who subsequently announced
a series of “joint operations with our allies in
the region, including the United States.”
Trump stepped up the attacks on the eve of
Washington’s Shield of the
Americas summit on Saturday, which
brought together regional leaders who have
supported U.S. military operations in the
hemisphere. Just before the conference,
Ecuadorian and U.S. forces carried out joint
strikes near the Colombian border against an
encampment allegedly linked to a dissident rebel
group that splintered from the now-dissolved
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or
FARC).
SOUTHCOM described
the action as a series of “lethal kinetic
operations against Designated Terrorist
Organizations,” even though the dissident group
hasn’t been designated as such by the US. As
yet, no deaths have been reported, and videos
shared by a US official appeared to show the
site was empty.
That these “lethal kinetic operations” took
place in Ecuador is no coincidence. Since his
election in 2023, President Daniel Noboa — whose
militarized approach to law enforcement has
failed to stem soaring rates of violent crime —
has sought to strengthen bilateral security ties
with the U.S. and ingratiate himself with the Trump administration
at almost any cost, including his country’s
sovereignty.
In February 2024, Noboa, an heir to Ecuador’s
wealthiest family, ratified a Status of Forces
Agreement that allows U.S. troops to
operate in the country while shielded from local
laws and prosecution. In December of that year,
he issued an order
permitting the U.S. military to station ships
and personnel in the environmentally fragile Galápagos Islands.
Noboa then went a step further: in November
2025, he invited Homeland Security Secretary
Kristi Noem to tour the
site of a former U.S. military base in the city
of Manta. Ecuadorian authorities said they hoped
to reopen the
facility — which had served as a major hub for
Washington’s war on drugs until its closure in
2009 — as a U.S. base.
This push came despite the Ecuadorian
constitution’s prohibition of foreign military
bases on Ecuadorian soil — a ban Noboa attempted
to overturn through a national referendum that
was decisively
rejected by Ecuadorian voters late
last year. Nevertheless, U.S. troops have been
stationed at the same base Noem toured since
December, though officially only on a “temporary”
(yet indefinite) basis until the joint
operations, of which the strikes are a part,
conclude.
More recently, Noboa severed diplomatic ties
with Cuba and
abruptly expelled its diplomats, claiming
without evidence that Havana was interfering
in Ecuador’s domestic affairs. He also cheered
on the U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, declaring
that “all the criminal narco-Chavistas will have
their moment.” Following the U.S. and Israeli
attacks on Iran, Noboa even baselessly alleged
that contingents of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah are operating
out of Venezuela to train Ecuadorian criminal
groups.
Noboa frames security cooperation with
Washington as essential to his own war on
criminal groups and “narco-terrorists”— a term
he began using even before the election of
Donald Trump. For more than two years, Noboa has
governed through a permanent state of emergency,
deploying the military to the streets and
suspending certain rights. A combination of austerity measures
and shifts in global drug trade
dynamics has, since 2021, plunged
Ecuador into a state of daily, deadly violence.
Despite Noboa’s hardline efforts, which are
inspired by those of Salvadoran President Nayib
Bukele, the country’s homicide rate hit a record
high last year, surpassing
50 per 100,000 people — up from
5.8 less than a decade earlier.
Today, the military faces accusations of
widespread human rights
abuses, including torture,
extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, and forced
disappearances. Just this week,
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled that the military was
responsible for the torture and
forced disappearance of four children whose
charred bodies were later found dumped on the
side of a road and whose fate created a national
uproar.
Ecuador’s democratic institutions have not been
spared. When the Constitutional Court struck
down his moves to consolidate power, Noboa
responded with public threats
and pressure campaigns, calling the judges “enemies of the
people.” He has also maneuvered to stack key
independent oversight and electoral bodies with
loyalists. And through the Noboa-aligned
attorney general — whose appointment has been challenged
as illegal — the president secured a judge's
order banning
the country's largest opposition party for nine
months, effectively barring it from competing in
upcoming local elections.
On these issues, the U.S. government has done
more than look the other way; it has rewarded
Noboa by honoring his request for Ecuadorian
gangs to be designated as
“Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” inviting him
to the Shield of the Americas summit, opening an
FBI office
in Quito, and launching joint military
operations and strikes.
Until now, Noboa had only sparingly
utilized airstrikes. But recent signals from
Washington suggest these joint strikes won’t be
the last. In recent days, President Trump
formally notified
the Senate of the strikes, and Defense Secretary
Pete Hegseth boasted that the U.S. is “bombing
narco-terrorists on land as well” and promised
that there would be “Much more to come.”
Further operations are expected this weekend,
with Ecuador’s interior minister announcing a
curfew in several eastern provinces and the launch of
a “major offensive against criminal groups” with
“significant support from U.S. forces.” It is
thus clear that the “new phase against
narcoterrorists” Noboa declared
on the day of the strikes is only the beginning.
For Noboa, this escalation in U.S. support
marks a major victory in his efforts, with joint
operations serving as the next best thing to the
permanent U.S. military base he could not secure
through the ballot box. For the Trump
administration, Noboa’s eagerness to host US
troops and participate in its “war on
narco-terror” allows it to expand the U.S.
military’s operational scope within what
Secretary Hegseth has referred to
as “the immediate security perimeter" of a
“Greater North America” stretching to the
Equator.
In exchange for ceding Ecuadorian sovereignty,
Noboa can expect Washington to be a willing
partner in continued acts of state violence and
to ignore, if not embolden, a further
deterioration of human rights and democracy in
Ecuador.
Pedro Labayen
Herrera is a Research Associate at the Center
for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), where
he covers U.S. foreign policy toward Latin
America. He authors CEPR’s monthly Ecuador
News Round-Up and holds a master’s degree in
International Affairs from Sciences Po Paris.
---------------------------------------
Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin
America Are Just the Beginning
With
“Operation Total Extermination” and
Trump’s threats against Cuba, expect
more U.S. military strikes in the
region.
As the
Trump administration
continues to bombard Iran, a top
Pentagon official revealed that
U.S. wars in the Western
Hemisphere are also expanding,
unveiling an effort dubbed “Operation Total Extermination.”
Attacks on Latin American drug
cartels are “just the beginning”
Joseph Humire, the acting assistant
secretary of war for homeland defense
and Americas security affairs, told
members of the House Armed Services
Committee last week.
Humire indicated that many more
strikes in Latin America are on the
horizon. The comments came a day after
President Donald Trump again teased
American annexation of Cuba. “I do
believe I’ll be the honor of — having
the honor of taking Cuba,” Trump said last week. “Whether I
free it, take it, I think I can do
anything I want with it.”
Humire announced that the Department
of War supported “bilateral kinetic
actions against cartel targets along
the Colombia-Ecuador border” —
Pentagon-speak for March 3 strikes on
unnamed “Designated Terrorist
Organizations” previously reported
by The Intercept. “The joint
effort, named ‘Operation Total
Extermination,’ is the start of a
military offensive by Ecuador against
transnational criminal organizations
with the support of the U.S.,” he
said.
The U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has
already strayed into Colombia
after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March
3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in
Colombia’s border region. In response
to a request for comment, U.S.
Southern Command referred The
Intercept to a statement on X by the Ecuadorian
Ministry of Defense confirming the
bomb landed in Colombia.
Humire referred to the attacks as
“joint land strikes” and said that
America was providing Ecuador with
“capabilities that they otherwise
would not have.” The U.S. has since
conducted at least one more strike
with Ecuador. “Yes — as @POTUS has
said — we are bombing Narco Terrorists
on land as well,” self-styled War
Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on March 6,
announcing the new strike. Days later,
in a war powers report
announcing the introduction of U.S.
armed forces into “hostilities” in
that country, the White House informed
Congress of “military action taken on
March 6, 2026, against the facilities
of narco-terrorists affiliated with a
designated terrorist organization.”
The attacks in Ecuador are also part
of, and an expansion of, Operation
Southern Spear: the U.S.
military’s illegal
campaign of strikes on boats in
the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific
Ocean. The U.S. has conducted 46
attacks since September 2025, destroying 48 vessels and
killing
almost 160 civilians. The latest
strike, on March 19 in the Pacific,
killed two more people and left one
survivor. The Trump administration
claims its victims are members of at
least one of 24 or more cartels and
criminal gangs with whom it claims to
be at war but refuses
to name.
“Rushing to war on one man’s
whims is the exact opposite of
what the Constitution demands.”
“This Administration is barely paying
lip service to the constitutional or
international law governing the use of
force. But we have these rules for a
reason,” said Rebecca Ingber, a former
State Department lawyer and now a law
professor at Cardozo Law School in New
York. “Rushing to war on one man’s
whims is the exact opposite of what
the Constitution demands.”
Gen. Francis Donovan, the SOUTHCOM
commander, told lawmakers last week
that “boat strikes are not the
answer,” but teased an even larger
campaign. “What we’re moving for right
now might be an extension of Southern
Spear, but really a counter-cartel
campaign process that puts total
systemic friction across this
network,” he told members of the Senate
Armed Services Committee. “I believe
these kinetic [boat] strikes are just
one small part of that.”
Humire could not say how many land
strikes were being conducted across
almost 20 Latin American and Caribbean
nations. “I don’t have an exact
number,” he replied to a question. But
when asked by Rep. Adam Smith,
D-Wash., the ranking member of the
House Armed Services Committee, if the
War Department would “be moving to a
lot more terrestrial strikes,” Humire
replied, “Yes, ranking member.”
The Office of the Secretary of War
did not respond to a request to
clarify how great that increase might
be.
Humire said the U.S.–Ecuadorian
campaign was “setting the pace for
regional, deterrence-focused
operations against cartel
infrastructure throughout Latin
America and the Caribbean.” The word
“deterrence” has become a popular
Pentagon euphemism for the use of
lethal strikes, in contrast to
previous efforts to U.S. government
efforts to marshal economic,
diplomatic, and military means to convince
adversaries to abandon a
specific course of action. “Deterrence
has a signaling effect on
narco-terrorists, and raises the risks
with their movements,” Humire claimed.
In January, the U.S. attacked
Venezuela and abducted
the country’s president, Nicolás
Maduro. It now rules the country
through a puppet regime. Federal
prosecutors have reportedly drafted a
criminal indictment
against Venezuelan Interim President
Delcy Rodriguez, threatening her with
corruption and money laundering
charges if she does not continue to do
the bidding of the Trump
administration. Trump also recently teased the possibility of
making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state.
The Trump administration is
reportedly undertaking a regime-change
operation in Cuba, attempting to push out President Miguel
Díaz-Canel as a requirement for
negotiations between the U.S. and that
island nation. U.S. officials are said
to favor Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez
Castro, the grandson of
94-year-old Raúl Castro, the former
Cuban president and brother to Fidel,
the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008.
Díaz-Canel referenced U.S. plans to
“seize the country” on X late Tuesday and said
the U.S. would be met with
“impregnable resistance.”
“I am holding Cuba,” Trump said recently, noting his
costly
regime-change war in the Middle East
takes precedence at the moment. “We’re
going to do Iran before Cuba.” Trump
imposed an oil blockade on Cuba in
January, plunging the country into a
humanitarian crisis. The island’s
national electrical grid has already
collapsed three times this month,
with one blackout lasting more than 29 hours. U.N. human
rights experts have condemned Trump’s fuel
blockade on Cuba as “a serious
violation of international law and a
grave threat to a democratic and
equitable international order.”
Trump, who has repeatedly spoken of “taking” Cuba, is the
latest in a long line of U.S.
presidents who have attempted to
overthrow the Cuban government.
During the Cold War, the CIA
launched the disastrous 1961 Bay of
Pigs invasion. The agency also tried
to assassinate Fidel Castro at least
eight times. The U.S. also
conducted a covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among
other acts of sabotage.
In the wake of the Bay of Pigs
debacle, the Pentagon prepared
top-secret plans to pave the way for
an attack on the island. In the spring
of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
circulated a top-secret memorandum
titled “Justification for U.S.
Military Intervention in Cuba.” It
described numerous false-flag
operations that could be employed to
justify a U.S. invasion, including a
plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban
refugees (real or simulated)”
and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine”
incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in
Cuban waters and blaming the incident
on Cuba. Other U.S. plans for covert action
on the island specifically prioritized
attacking Cuba’s electrical grid.
Asked if the Joint Chiefs of Staff
were involved in analogous actions
today, spokesperson Maj. Annabel
Monroe referred The Intercept to
Southern Command, who then referred
The Intercept to the State Department,
which did not respond to a request for
comment.
Humire said that the War Department
was “currently focused on partner-led
deterrence operations,” but would not
rule out unilateral U.S. strikes
across Latin America. He said that, in
addition to Ecuador, the U.S. had
forged agreements with 17
partner-nations in the Western
Hemisphere, as part of the so-called Americas Counter Cartel
Coalition. This international
body, formally announced by Trump at
his Shield of the Americas
summit earlier this month, will focus
on “bi-lateral and multi-lateral
operations against cartels and
terrorist organizations.”
Humire was asked if any of the 18
nations were concerned about issues of
sovereignty regarding the U.S.
potentially conducting attacks in
their countries. “Members of the
coalition specifically signed a joint
security declaration mentioning that
they want this support and most of
them all are looking for this,” he
replied. But the barebones statement they
signed is astonishingly vague and
offers little of substance on the
subject.
Humire indicated that the U.S. had
leveraged gunboat diplomacy in
Venezuela to strong-arm Cuba and
assist in “gaining compliance from
Nicaragua,” as well as “shifting the
Caribbean in a favorable direction
toward U.S. interests.”
Recent official leaks about the potential
U.S. indictment of President Gustavo
Petro of Colombia on drug charges —
the official reason for Maduro’s
kidnapping, and the means reportedly
used to keep his successor, Rodriguez,
in line — suggest the U.S. may employ
that tactic as leverage or an eventual
pretext for military action. (Petro
has denied ties to drug traffickers.)
“It sounds as if Petro is potentially
on the chopping block,” a former
defense official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity due to his
current employment, told The
Intercept. The source said leaks about
the potential indictment of Petro,
coupled with the U.S.–Ecuadorian
attack, which has stirred up tensions
along the South American nations’
border, increasingly look like a
coordinated campaign to foment
“discord” if not conflict. Asked in
January about attacking Colombia,
Trump responded: “It sounds good to
me.”
The U.S. attacks on the
Colombia–Ecuador border come as
America has recently established a “permanent FBI presence in
Ecuador,” joining agents from
the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration and the Department of
Homeland Security. Just before the
U.S. began attacks on the
Ecuador–Colombia border, Donovan traveled to Quito,
Ecuador’s capital, to meet with
President Daniel Noboa and senior
Ecuadorian defense officials.
Last August, Lt. Col. Phillip Vaughn —
the commander of an Expeditionary Task
Group overseeing Air Force Special
Operations in the Caribbean and South
America — coordinated meetings to
increase “interoperability between
U.S. and Ecuadorian forces” to
“counter illicit actors operating
along Ecuador’s northern border” with
Colombia including “operational
planning scenarios, execution of close
air support procedures,” and “multiple
topics on Joint Terminal Attack
Controller support,” which relates to
targeting and airstrikes.
America’s Western hemisphere blitz is
part of what Trump and others have
called the “Donroe Doctrine”: a
bastardization of the 1823 Monroe
Doctrine. While President James
Monroe’s policy sought to prevent
Europe from colonizing and meddling in
the Western Hemisphere, Trump has
wielded his variant as a license
for America to do exactly that.
The National Security Strategy,
released late last year, decrees the
“Trump Corollary” to the Monroe
Doctrine a “potent restoration of
American power and priorities,” rooted
in the “readjustment of our global
military presence to address urgent
threats in our Hemisphere.” Humire
defined “America’s immediate security
perimeter” as “Alaska to Greenland in
the Arctic to the Gulf of America and
the Panama Canal and surrounding
countries.” Trump has also threatened
to annex Greenland
(and possibly Iceland),
turn Canada into a U.S. state,
and conduct military strikes in Mexico.
Humire also detailed efforts to
strong-arm Panama to cut ties with
China to ensure access to the Panamanian-owned canal
that he nonetheless called a U.S.
“national asset.”
In addition to his wars in the
Western hemisphere, Trump has also
launched attacks on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen
during his second term — most of them
sites of U.S. conflicts during the war on terror.
Smith, the House Armed Services
Committee ranking member, told Humire
that Trump’s wars in the Americas also
appeared to be morphing into a new
“forever conflict” with no clear goal
or “end point.” Asked what “level of
achievement” would be necessary to
“stop kinetic action,” Humire
responded with a wall of words about
border security, terrorism, and
cartels. When Smith interrupted to
clarify if the boat strikes would
continue unabated, Humire confusingly
replied: “No, correct.”
