With this week’s unprecedented deadly military strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat in the Caribbean, it’s clear that the US plans to use tactics employed against terrorist groups against Latin American criminal organizations — up to and including threats of regime change against governments accused of backing the “terrorists.”

This has been a long time coming. President Donald Trump has talked about firing missiles at drug labs in Mexico as far back as 2020, according to former aides, and discussed the idea of using military force against cartels on the campaign trail. In February, shortly after taking office, the Trump administration designated several criminal groups, including the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and specially designated global terrorists (SDGTs), putting them in the same legal category as al-Qaida and ISIS. Last month, the New York Times reported that the president had signed a secret directive instructing the Pentagon to start using military force against these designated organizations.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump announced that the US had carried out a “kinetic strike” against “Tren de Aragua narcoterrorists,” killing 11 on board. The strikes came soon after the US deployed eight warships to the Caribbean and Pacific around South and Central America, an unusually large surge of military force to the region.

Trump administration officials have suggested that there may be more strikes to come. The administration has also accused President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela of controlling Tren de Aragua, a highly contested claim.

For his part, Maduro, a longtime US adversary, has accused the US of seeking “regime change” in Venezuela. US officials haven’t exactly denied this, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth calling it a “presidential decision” and one Trump official telling Axios, “This is 105% about narco-terrorism, but if Maduro winds up no longer in power, no one will be crying.”

Taken together, the Trump administration’s new approach could mark a major shift in the more than 50-year history of America’s “war on drugs,” its relationship with Latin America, and the increasing militarization of a wide range of policy.

Questions surrounding the strike

Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that emerged as a prison gang in the 2010s before morphing into a larger criminal organization, has been a major target of Trump’s rhetoric since his 2024 campaign, typically in the context of immigration policy and his administration mass deportation campaign.

The group is primarily known for crimes like extortion and human trafficking, and while it has been involved in selling drugs at the local level and in some cases smuggling small amounts across borders, experts are skeptical........

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