President Trump’s vow to intervene against drug smugglers in Colombia sharpened questions about a widening U.S. counternarcotics campaign in Latin America that began with military strikes on oceangoing boats but is increasingly focused on threatening governments in the region.
His broadside against Colombia came in a social-media post Sunday morning that branded its president, Gustavo Petro, an “illegal drug leader,” vowing to halt U.S. aid to Bogotá, and to take unilateral action unless Petro closed “these killing fields immediately.”
The threats turned one of Washington’s most critical security partners into a target, adding to a U.S. offensive that has included attacks on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and increasing pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—an effort that drug experts and former officials say is blurring the line between counternarcotics and regime change.
The Trump administration believes its campaign against Maduro is working, and that increased U.S. military pressure in the region will convince him he can’t remain in power. “The idea is to make him miserable enough to go away,” a senior administration official said, conceding it could take time.
Maduro has denounced the deployment of Pentagon assets off the coast of Venezuela as a provocation that is part of a larger effort to drive him from power. Yet in a letter to Trump last month, Maduro promised to produce data showing his country doesn’t traffic drugs. Trump on Friday said that Maduro is willing to give “everything” to ease tensions, adding “he doesn’t want to f— around with the United States.”
Trump earlier this week said he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela.
Strikes inside Venezuela are an option—and Trump has publicly raised the possibility—but they aren’t currently being contemplated, the administration official said. More broadly, the U.S. plan has been to close the southern border, then attack drug flows on the water, and then potentially shift to combating air transport.
The new focus on Colombia’s Petro, a former leftist guerrilla who frequently criticizes U.S. policy, comes in the midst of seven weeks of operations by U.S. forces in the Caribbean in which airstrikes have blasted seven vessels out of the water. At least 32 people have been killed in the strikes, according to U.S. officials.
The White House has described the people manning the vessels as “narco-terrorists,” in some cases linking them to Venezuelan and Colombian criminal groups they have designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday “these cartels are the al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.”
But the unprecedented use of U.S. lethal force against small drug boats, which was initially targeting vessels from Venezuela, has quickly expanded to include nationals of other countries in the region in recent weeks.
Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago say citizens of their countries have been killed in the strikes. Two crew members the U.S. said survived an airstrike last week—a Colombian and an Ecuadorean—were to be repatriated to their homelands.
“The U.S. is pushing the boundary of international law,” said Sergio Guzmán, who heads Colombia Risk Analysis, a consultancy that studies U.S.-Colombia policy. “Essentially, the U.S. has now cut all of its foreign assistance to Colombia and it is also looking for regime change in Venezuela—two things that eight months ago or 10 months ago were not fathomable.”
Trump accused Colombia’s president of doing nothing to stop drug production and having “a fresh mouth toward America.”
Petro has responded defiantly. On his X account, he said that one airstrike—which Colombian state television said was in mid-September—killed a Colombian fisherman, Alejandro Carranza, and “violated our sovereignty in territorial waters.” He said that Colombia “has never been rude with the U.S.” and called the American leader “ignorant with Colombia.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pressed the White House for a legal explanation and clarification about the administration’s objectives. In a confidential notice to Congress, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Trump declared the U.S. is in a “noninternational armed conflict” with the cartels.
“They had a very hard time explaining to us the legal rationale for doing this and the constitutionality of doing it,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
“So all these people have been blown up without us knowing their name without any evidence of a crime,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Paul said that he thinks some members of his administration “have been agitating for war with Venezuela for a long, long period of time.”
Earlier this month, Paul sided with Senate Democrats in unsuccessfully pushing for a measure that would have required Trump to seek congressional approval before further U.S. military action in the Caribbean.
The U.S. strikes are happening amid the largest U.S. military buildup in Latin America in more than three decades. This campaign is now colliding with Colombia, which has depended on American Black Hawk helicopters, U.S. intelligence and military training to battle cocaine and armed groups.
Behind the scenes, Colombian and U.S. diplomats and defense officials have been working for months to keep the security cooperation between the two countries from unraveling.
Bogotá has received more than $14 billion in U.S. aid since 2000. After dramatically cutting cocaine production by 2012 with U.S. help, then-President Juan Manuel Santos ended the aerial spraying of coca with herbicides. Colombia’s cocaine production has skyrocketed since to the highest levels on record, reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime show.
Last month, the Trump administration decertified Colombia for the first time in nearly three decades, saying the country had “failed demonstrably” to meet international counternarcotics obligations. But most of the aid continued through congressional and national interest waivers, underscoring how critical the cooperation remains to U.S. counternarcotics efforts.
