With the Strike on a “Drug-Carrying Boat,” Trump Returns to a Dangerous US Policy for Latin America

On September 2, President Donald Trump announced from the Oval Office that the US Navy had carried out an air strike on a boat in international waters allegedly carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela. “Over the last few minutes, [we] literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat,” Trump told reporters^[3].

He later posted on Truth Social a video of the alleged air strike. The footage is black and white. The post is labeled “unclassified.” A missile hits the boat, and it explodes. The White House said 11 “narcoterrorists” were killed. Trump promised, “There’s more where that came from.”

If Trump’s account of the attack on the vessel is accurate, it marks the first time the United States has launched a unilateral air strike or carried out a deadly military operation on its own in Latin America since the 1989 invasion of Panama.

The Caribbean strike and Trump’s boasting about it indicates an extremely dangerous shift in a US foreign and military policy toward Latin America, which has stood for more than 35 years.

During the last few decades, the United States has backed coups d’état and supported other countries’ military operations, especially in regard to battling drug trafficking. Through Plan Colombia, the United States provided military aid and assistance to Colombia for years to help the country battle drug trafficking. US Special Forces assisted^[4] the Mexican military’s capture of El Chapo. And the Drug Enforcement Administration has often collaborated with local forces, including in a deadly attack^[5] on civilians in Honduras in 2012.

But for three and half decades, the United States has withheld direct unilateral military action in the region.

When the United States last took military action with the 1989 Panama invasion, it was carried out a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it marked a major shift in the justification for US action, away from the Cold War and toward the so-called War on Drugs.

At that time, the United States invaded under the pretext of removing, detaining, and extraditing President Manuel Noriega for alleged drug trafficking. The Trump administration is using the same rhetoric against Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro, without providing any evidence.

On December 21, 1989, 26,000 US troops^[6] descended on Panama. They attacked key locations around the country. They rained down missiles and bombs on the barracks of Noriega’s Panamanian Defense Forces in Panama City and on the surrounding working-class neighborhood of El Chorrillo. US forces destroyed 20,000 homes^[7] and killed hundreds of innocent Panamanians, dumping bodies into mass graves. Victims and their families are still demanding justice.

In my reporting^[8] on the legacy of the US invasion of Panama, I’ve spoken with victims who saw their neighbors killed or trapped in their homes as they were engulfed by flames. I’ve spent hours watching videos from that invasion, and there are disturbing parallels between that footage—shot from above, missiles and gunfire riddling the city below—and the video of the air strike in the Caribbean. They are also reminiscent of the videos of US airstrikes in the Middle East.

In most of these clips, the individuals on the receiving end of the US weapons are blurry dots on a screen. They don’t seem like people; they’re targets—labelled drug traffickers or terrorists—as if in a video game. The US military issues their death sentences without trial or evidence. No due process. No jury. No judge. No conviction. No appeal. In defiance of international law.

That is not an era we should return to in Latin America. Yet Trump seems to have his heart set on it. Trump, after all, signed an executive order changing the name of the US Department of Defense to the Department of War. It’s ironic, but not unexpected, that the supposed “anti-war president” and his administration have become unabashedly bellicose in Latin America.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the air strike is just the beginning. “We’ve got assets in the air, assets in the water, assets on ships, because this is a deadly serious mission for us,” Hegseth told Fox News^[10], “and it won’t stop with just this strike.”

For much of the 20th century, the United States justified its military actions in Latin America with the Monroe Doctrine^[11]—a 200-year-old amorphous foreign policy originally meant to defend the region against European intervention. Countless US invasions and actions were carried out in the name of Monroe, as US forces acted as the so-called police force of the Western Hemisphere.

Despite recent calls^[12] by some lawmakers in Washington to do away with the Monroe Doctrine, it now seems the Trump administration is looking to revive it with vigor.

In August, the United States deployed warships to waters near Venezuela’s coast in one of the most dangerous escalation of tensions between the United States and a Latin American country in years.

Trump has accused Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of being a narco-trafficking kingpin. But the United Nations and even the president’s National Intelligence Council have denied any links^[13] between members of the Venezuelan government and the cartel Tren de Aragua. Nevertheless, in August, Trump doubled a bounty^[14] for the arrest of Maduro to $50 million.

It is unclear what the Trump administration hopes to achieve by ramping up the pressure and the rhetoric against Venezuela. An invasion of Venezuela by the United States would be disastrous. Venezuela has a substantial military force and hundreds of thousands of members in the reserve. In recent weeks, videos have been shared widely of long lines^[15] of people signing up to join the reserves to defend Venezuela against a possible US threat. In August, Maduro said he had deployed 4.5 million militiamen^[16] around the country.

Venezuela is not a drug-trafficking haven nor a threat to the United States. A report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime detail that most of the routes for cocaine trafficking^[17] into the United States go through Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador—not Venezuela. The UNODC says^[18], “The majority of Colombian cocaine is being trafficked north along the Pacific coast.” And in 2024, Cocaine originating in Colombia accounted for more than 80 percent of seizures^[19] of cocaine in the United States, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

It is ironic that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has continued to point the finger at Maduro, while he’s currently visiting Ecuador, where he’s met with Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa.

Noboa is one of Trump’s top allies in Latin America, alongside El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei. Trump invited Noboa to his inauguration in January. that Noboa and his family have ties to drug trafficking.

According to a March investigation^[20] published by the Colombian magazine Revista Raya, multiple shipments of cocaine were seized between 2020 and 2022 from containers belonging to the Noboa family’s banana export business, Noboa Trading. Not surprisingly, this reporting has been ignored by Trump administration officials while they continue to rail against Maduro and Venezuela.

“There’s no real credible evidence of serious drug trafficking, not only coming from Venezuela, but even less so having any ties to high-ranking Venezuelan officials,” said Ricardo Vaz, a longtime reporter with the independent news outlet Venezuelanalysis^[21]. “So it’s really a matter of how much the US wants to escalate.”

The United States has long used Latin America as a training ground for military attacks elsewhere around the world. The 1989 Panama invasion, for instance, preceded the Iraq wars. “The attack on a boat and murder of 11 people in international waters off of Venezuela is another example of this,” said John Lindsay-Poland, the author of the book Emperors in the Jungle, about the history of US intervention in Panama and the 1989 invasion. “A trial run—destructive of life in itself—but also a trial for further attacks to see what kind of political resistance there will be within the United States, as well as internationally.”

He added that “if the Trump administration is successful in this attack without paying political consequences, it is free to do so in other parts of the world or on other actors.”

Given Trump’s record of sharing dubious claims, inaccurate information, and lies, there is no reason we should take his assertion at face value that the boat hit by the air strike was, as he said^[22], “a drug-carrying boat.” But even if it was, the United States has protocols in place for drug interdictions. This year, alone, the US Coast Guard has seized $2.2 billion^[23] in illicit drugs on open waters, as of August 25.

Instead, the United States is turning to violent attacks, and by describing those killed by the air strike as “narcoterrorists,” the Trump administration is blending the War on Terror with the War on Drugs. Trump is “creating a forever enemy,” researcher Chris Dalby^[24] told The World^[25]. “He can now justify without due process. Without showing too much evidence. It starts with destroying go-fast boats. But it can be snatch-and-grab operations on Venezuelan soil, and it can escalate all the way up to a prolonged military intervention in the likes of Mexico.”

It should shock the country that the United States would carry out an illegal targeted assassination of 11 people in international waters, and that the president would share a video of it freely over his social media account. In particular, we should worry about an act that rewrites US policy for Latin America, where Trump has carte blanche to take whatever measure he deems necessary without regard for international law, the sovereignty of other nations, or people’s lives. Such a move could have disastrous implications for the region. More missile strikes. Loss of innocent lives. And even wrapping the United States into war close to home.

But Trump clearly feels emboldened to do whatever he wants. And after decades of the so-called War on Terror and the genocide in Gaza, people in the United States have become desensitized to images of violence like this—and the US role in perpetrating them.

“This is just nuts, because they’re doing it out in the open,” said Alexander Main^[26], the director of International Policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “They’re proud of it. And it doesn’t matter if these people are guilty or not.”

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