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Just a day after President Donald Trump suggested that he’d use his crushing economic blockade in a bid to “take” Cuba, an administration official said much more American warfare is on the horizon across Latin America.

It’s called “Operation Total Extermination,” according to Joseph M. Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, who testified last week before the House Armed Services Committee.

Humire explained in written testimony that beginning on March 3, the US Department of Defense (which the Trump administration refers to as the Department of War) “supported, at the request of Ecuador, bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border.”

“The joint effort,” Humire said, “is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the US, setting the pace for regional, deterrence-focused operations against cartel infrastructure throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.”

The operation with Ecuador, led by the right-wing president Daniel Noboa, is part of “Operation Southern Spear,” the Trump administration’s illegal bombing campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, targeted at boats accused, with little evidence, of ferrying drugs to the US.

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The latest of these bombings, which killed at least two more people, occurred on Friday and brought the total death toll since September of last year up to at least 160.

No casualty counts have yet been released by the US or Ecuadorian government for its operations to target what they said were “domestic terrorist organizations.” But reports from those on the ground suggest they may have been similarly bloody.

Víctor Gómez, a journalist for the Ecuadorian outlet Radio Sucumbíos, conducted interviews with the residents of the rural town of San Martín in northeastern Ecuador near the Colombian border, who said their community was attacked twice by Ecuadorian and American forces on March 3 and 6.

Noboa celebrated the attacks on the area, which he said housed “a training ground for drug traffickers,” and reportedly the home of “Mono Tole,” who is the leader of the Colombian drug trafficking group known as the Border........

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