Treating Cartels as Terrorists Isn’t About Crime—It’s About Justifying Force
Trump’s militarized approach breaks international law, ignores how criminal markets work, and reveals a strategy driven by power, not public safety.
The US boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific that have killed more than 100 people have materialized concerns raised by experts after the executive designation of 13 cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Those warnings centered on the expansion of presidential powers reserved for armed conflict, the justification of mass deportation policies, and the interventionist narratives now being put into action.
Cartel violence has undeniably made Latin America and the Caribbean one of the most violent regions in the world. But using that reality as a pretext to expand lethal force for political gain is not strength—it is a strategic weakness. By framing drug trafficking as terrorism, the Trump administration believes it can disregard international law, sideline human rights, and abandon what decades of research tell us about how transnational criminal networks actually operate. This approach does not dismantle cartels; it escalates violence and destabilizes the region.
Recently, Trump justified the Caribbean strikes by claiming that “Every boat that gets hit, we save 25,000 American lives. And when you view it that way, you don’t mind.” The statement exposes the strategic incoherence behind the administration’s approach.
The primary driver of drug overdose deaths in the United States is fentanyl, which accounted for more than 65 percent of fatalities in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet fentanyl is neither produced in Venezuela nor trafficked through the maritime routes targeted by these strikes. In other words, the policy’s stated objective—saving American lives—has little connection to the actual dynamics of the drug trade it claims to confront.
What this strategy is achieving instead is the erosion of the rules-based order in the hemisphere. As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has underscored, combating illicit drug trafficking is fundamentally a law enforcement matter, governed by strict limits on the use of lethal force. Under international human rights law, which the United States is obligated to respect even overseas, the deliberate killing of individuals who pose no immediate threat and who could be apprehended through non-lethal means constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of life—an extrajudicial killing.
These strikes also erase critical distinctions between high-level traffickers and the individuals actually being targeted. Investigations by the Associated Press show that some of those killed were low-level actors—often fishermen driven by economic pressure to assist traffickers. Under a law enforcement framework, these boats would have been interdicted and their crews prosecuted in US courts.
Even setting aside the human rights concerns this administration appears willing to dismiss, Trump’s advisers should mind the strategy’s effectiveness—because by its own logic, it fails. As drug policy expert Vanda Felbab-Brown has long argued, killing drug mules has virtually no impact on the flow of narcotics or the structures of criminal organizations. These actors are easily replaced, while the systems that sustain transnational crime remain intact.
The administration’s National Security Strategy embraces a militarized approach while ignoring fundamental economics: you cannot use airstrikes to dismantle a market that demand keeps alive. It calls for regional cooperation against “narco-terrorists” to curb instability and migration, yet overlooks one of the most consequential sources of cartel power—access to US sourced firearms. The proliferation of military-grade weapons sustains the very violence the strategy claims to reduce, driving displacement across the region and contributing to the worst border crisis in modern US history. A strategy that relies on force abroad while ignoring its own internal enablers is not a security strategy—it is a contradiction.
What has become evident is that this strategy is not truly about addressing crime. The administration’s willingness to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández—a figure emblematic of the nexus between political power and organized crime—makes that clear. No serious counter-narcotics agenda can claim legitimacy while invoking “narco-terrorism” to justify force abroad and, at the same time, extending leniency to a leader convicted of state-sponsored drug trafficking—someone who weaponized public institutions to facilitate the very criminal economies Washington claims to be fighting. If the goal is security rather than spectacle, the facts—and the priorities—need to align.
Cartels are not ideological actors; they are market-driven organizations that adapt to incentives. When pressured, they diversify into more lethal drugs, expand into human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and environmental crimes, penetrate legal economies, or shift operations to new geographies. In the most destabilizing scenario, sustained militarization and misclassification can push criminal groups toward radicalization.
By confusing crime with terrorism and force with effectiveness, the United States risks reshaping the criminal landscape of the Americas in ways far more dangerous than the problem it claims to solve.
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