These disparate incidents all have their own causal logics, but taken together they point to a broad, decentralized supply chain that sustains and enables illicit activity in the Americas. This criminal industrial base is one of the most important, but ill-understood factors explaining the strength of criminal networks in this region.

We are reminded of criminal industrial base when we hear about its outputs, seizures of explosives, armored vehicles, and artisanal firearms that catch headlines. But more concerning to me is the diffusion of knowledge that is happening constantly between and within illicit networks.

Industries, whether licit or illicit, benefit tremendously from clustering. The more people within a particular sector are sharing information and working together on processes, best practices, tools, and technologies, the more innovation you expect to see. In the legitimate economy, this explains why Detroit is an automotive hub, why Boston leads in bioscience, or why the tech industry took root in Silicon Valley.

Looking to the criminal industrial base, I think the same or similar factors help us explain the pace of technological advance by illicit groups in recent years. We’ve seen narcosubmarines for instance go from crude and scarcely seaworthy vessels to standardized and quasi-mass-produced trafficking mainstays. Weaponized drones have undergone a rapid period of innovation, going from unguided bombers, to one-way attack platforms that now increasingly mount fiber-optic spools to avoid electronic countermeasures.

The criminal industrial base is not new, but it is understudied. Governments tend to treat its various components as isolated problems, and in doing so continue to find themselves on the losing end of the adaptation battle. There needs to be a more systematic effort to reckon with this criminal industrial base, and understand how it manifests across countries and criminal groups in the Americas.

Bombs and Drones

Several analysts (myself included) have documented the revolutionary impact that unmanned aerial systems (UASs), or drones, are having on the fight against organized crime in the Americas. Whereas previously states ruled the air, that dominance is now being tested. Commercial, off-the-shelf drones from brands like DJI offer illicit actors the ability to surveil targets at a distance, deliver contraband without exposing members to risk, and launch precision strikes.

But the use of weaponized drones in particular is constrained by another factor, the ability of criminal groups to rig models designed for civilian hobbyists with weapons of war. Non-state armed groups either employ existing munitions like black market fragmentation grenades, or build their own contact-detonating explosives from scratch. In either case, the group must also figure out how to mount these to a civilian drone.

The skill floor for this isn’t particularly high, Mexican cartels have been known to affix explosives with duct tape and other haphazard measures. But to ensure consistent detonation groups must typically invest a considerable amount of time and expertise in fusing, explosive design, and drone tactics. Trevor Ball outlines some key considerations in an excellent article last year:

“If integrated or semi-permanently fixed to a UAV, for example, a munition’s safety, arming, and/or fuzing mechanisms may need to be modified to ensure it will detonate upon impact at a (relatively) low velocity. If a conventional munition is modified to serve as a small air-delivered bomb, it may benefit from the addition of craft-produced components, such as fins or stabilisers. Munitions normally fitted with time-delay fuzes, such as hand grenades, are sometimes modified to accept impact fuzes. If not correctly modified, UAV-delivered munitions may function prematurely, partially, or not at all.”

A major bottleneck to criminal drone employment therefore seems to be the availability and sophistication of explosives. This is borne out in the case of Colombian armed groups where the dissident FARC faction known as the Estado Mayor Central (EMC) were early adopters of armed drone technology. Drones were as new to the EMC as any other actor in Colombia’s decades-long internal armed conflict, but the group did possess significant expertise when it came to explosive design which allowed them to better exploit their potential in combat.

Indeed, the long history of bombings in Colombia means that many of the groups still active today have a wealth of expertise when it comes to explosive design. Recently Colombian security forces reported the arrest of two men each with around 7 years of experience as bombmakers and drone operators for a FARC dissident faction.

This may also help explain why Colombia has seen such an explosive growth in illicit drone use. The country recorded its first lethal drone incident in July 2024, while in 2025 sustained multiple significant drone attacks that injured or killed dozens of civilians and security personnel alike. More, Colombian groups are now adopting fiber-optic drones that have come to characterize the battlefields in Ukraine. Colombian groups’ familiarity with bombmaking seems to have allowed them to quickly scale up the deployment of weaponized drones in combat.

By contrast, in Mexico it seems as though there may be more of a parallel evolution in drone use and explosive manufacturing. While improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have been used by Mexican criminal groups for decades, the rise in drone incidents has coincided with a dramatic increase in the employment of more conventional explosives and mines.

In comparison to early examples of weaponized drones like the 2017 seizure of a “papa bomba” explosive equipped UAS widely regarded as the first public instance of this technology appearing in Mexico, today cartel drone munitions feature innovations like fragmentation liners, and 3D-printed stabilizer fins. Large seizures of drone-dropped munitions also show a significant degree of design standardization (though variation persists).

Conventional explosives have also become more sophisticated, as evidenced in June of 2023 when a Mexican army patrol vehicle was targeted by two bounding mines set by the CJNG, killing three soldiers. The mines, fashioned from commercial fire extinguishers, were designed to “jump” up when triggered and then explode outward, maximizing damage to passengers in the truck bed. One analysis of the incident notes how drone tactics and IED design feed into one another stating that, “CJNG bomb-making cells are also involved in weaponized aerial drone attached IED (single use drone strike) and IED bomblet design and manufacturing, with cross overs seen with general IED / IED land mine and weaponized drone IED designs.”

Technical insights gleaned by one group seem to diffuse rapidly to rivals who must adapt or die in the Hobbesian world of criminal armed conflict. While the CJNG are widely reported to have adopted armed drones the fastest, a recent report from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center found that their regional competitor, La Familia Michoacana, came in a close second.

Similarly, according to an analysis by InSight Crime, IED seizures by the Mexican government have skyrocketed since 2020, with 40 percent of all seizures taking place along the border between Jalisco and Michoacán, where conflict between the CJNG and its rivals is fierce.

The threat posed by criminal drones has led governments in the Americas to take steps towards regulating their sale on the civilian market. While these efforts have seemingly failed to put a dent in criminals’ ability to acquire UASs, if they bear fruit in the future it seems likely that these groups will not simply relinquish this capability but instead potentially turn to manufacturing their own drones, or at least drone components. Demand for 3D printed components for these artisanal UASs is likely to grow significantly under this scenario.

(Narco) Subs and Tanks

Perhaps nothing captures the idea of criminal innovation better than the sleek, low-profile hull of a narcosubmarine.

This catch-all term for a host of semi- and even wholly submersible artisanal boats regularly captures media attention, giving the impression at times that these are bespoke, even rare, vessels. In reality, while narcosubmarines indeed a represent a small fraction of the total number of drug-running ships, they are produced on an impressive scale.

The first documented appearance of such a vessel was in 1988 when an empty hull washed up on the Florida coast. Since then, criminal groups have had decades to refine their craft. Between 2020 and 2024 at least 93 of these vessels have been seized, mostly in the Pacific. At least four of the 54 strikes conducted by U.S. forces in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since September 2025 have targeted semisubmersible craft.

H I Sutton with Covert Shores, in 2021 noted that narcosubmarine production appeared to be entering a new epoch. Whereas previously production had converged on a set number of designs built largely to the same specifications which suggested relative stability among manufacturers, the emergence of new nonstandard designs suggested a period of flux in the illicit shipbuilding industry. Often these appeared as inferior copies of existing designs, suggesting that workers who may have previously been operating under the guidance of more seasoned builders were striking out on their own.

Sutton deemed this a new epoch of narcosubmarine design, where the technology and processes required to build these vessels has itself become commoditized. This also makes halting their construction far more difficult. A decentralized network with more actors participating in the industry not only means more clandestine shipyards, it could allow builders to experiment with new and stealthier designs.

The natural next front for narcosubmarine development is almost certainly transitioning these platforms from crewed to uncrewed designs. Roberto Uchôa has written an excellent article for Small Wars Journal outlining why this is the case. The absence of a human crew can greatly reduce the signature of these vessels, and allows them to loiter for extended periods of time off the coast waiting for patrols to pass. Notably, it also directly undermines the deterrent mechanism the United States is relying on to reduce seaborne drug flows through lethal airstrikes.

The first reported instance of an uncrewed narcosub came in July 2025 when Colombian forces seized one such vessel in the Caribbean. Last week, a small uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) fitted with a camera and antenna, was found by Spanish authorities off the coast of Gibraltar. The drone was empty upon capture, suggesting that its cargo had already been offloaded, or potentially that this was another trial run of the technology.

This latest innovation is made possible thanks to the long history of crewed narcosubmarine production. From an engineering perspective, building the hull is largely a solved problem, the main limitation to narco-USV (or even UUV) deployment instead is how to configure remote navigation, which at the moment seems to lean heavily on Starlink terminals to ensure connectivity on long transoceanic voyages.

While narcosubmarines slink through the seas, on land improvised armored fighting vehicles (IAFVs) otherwise known as narcotanks or “monsters,” have become a mainstay in Mexico’s criminal armed conflict. Like narcosubs, these vehicles have a long history of their manufacture, with sources widely crediting the Zetas for popularizing the vehicles in the early 2010s.

As with drones today, the Zetas’ use of narcotanks spurred rival groups to build their own IAFVs to fight back. However, many early monster designs are more useful for propaganda purposes than combat operations. Groups would compete to possess the largest, or most intimidating combat vehicle, repurposing dump trucks and fitting them with heavy slabs of metal. The results were weapons that, while impressive and difficult to answer with small arms, were vulnerable to becoming immobilized and seized, either by rival groups or Mexican security forces.

But the utility of mobile, protected, firepower remained, and so too did demand for new and improved narcotanks. Cartel armorers began using lighter steel armor to improve maneuverability, and repurposed SUVs and pickup trucks with mounts for light machine guns or .50 caliber rifles. Some modern designs even sport anti-drone “cope cages” or electromagnetic jamming equipment.

There is less open source data on narcotank seizures than there is on narcosubmarines, but the Zetas’ early adoption seems to have created a geographic production cluster around Mexico’s northeast, particularly Tamaulipas state. While narcotanks have by now made their way into virtually every major cartel’s arsenal, from January 2018 to June 2022, authorities in Tamaulipas decommissioned 153 IAFVs, the most of any Mexican state. Michoacán and Jalisco were distant second and third, with 33 and 25 seizures each.

More recently Mexico’s attorney general reported the destruction of 18 such vehicles between December 2025 and February 2026 alone. Videos and images from recent seizures show remarkable similarities in the design of these vehicles. It seems likely that Tamaulipas mechanics and craftsmen in the employ of criminal groups have converged on a common set of designs. Proximity to the U.S. border and the massive flow of automobiles and car parts that cross this every day almost certainly helps fuel these illicit factories.

Contested Logistics and Criminal Innovation

There are clearly many more facets to the phenomenon I’m describing. Illicit fuel refineries, artisanal firearms assembly lines, and of course drug production labs themselves all constitute aspects of the criminal industrial base in my view.

Dismantling this complex clandestine ecosystem is harder than it looks. In many cases it is nigh impossible to expect governments to be able to track down the inputs that feed the criminal industrial base. It is fairly easy for a mechanic to misreport the quantity of auto parts he or she orders and divert some of those to narcotank manufacturing. Similarly, a fisherman might order a replacement motor for their boat, only to install that on a narcosub instead, and that’s assuming authorities are even looking at these kinds of transactions in the first place.

Emerging technologies like 3D printing further complicate matters by allowing criminal groups to fabricate components that are virtually untraceable. Artificial intelligence may further aid artisans in their ability to refine designs and produce more complex vehicles, equipment, and weapons.

If there is a first step to take against the criminal industrial base, it should be recognizing that it exists, not as a set of discrete behaviors or pathologies, but as part of the logistical apparatus that sustains violent illicit actors. Governments should seek to better understand how the presence of certain kinds of covert industrial activity in their territory fuels further innovation and information dissemination.

Another key action would be to sever the recruitment pipeline for organized crime. Illicit actors depend on a range of skilled and unskilled labor to maintain their industrial activities. In Mexico, cartels have kidnapped engineers in the past and forced them to design clandestine radio networks, and continue to recruit chemistry students to aid in the synthesis of illicit drugs. In Colombia, non-state groups increasingly target children for recruitment as drone operators and maintainers. Depending on the level of skill required, cutting off the supply of labor could have a major impact on criminals’ ability to innovate and fabricate advanced systems.

What the Criminals Can Teach Us

At the risk of ending on a digression, I feel the ongoing war with Iran also carries relevant lessons for our understanding of the criminal industrial base. The United States and Israel rapidly achieved air superiority in the opening hours and days of that conflict, and proved far more adept at hunting down Iran’s road-mobile air defenses and missile launchers than one might have expected.

But even after weathering weeks of sorties, Iranian ballistic missile and drone launches never petered out, and appeared to stabilize at low (but nonzero) rate of daily attacks. Iran, of course, had been hardening its missile infrastructure for decades against a potential U.S. attack, nevertheless it seems that even with vast military overmatch, eliminating an adversary’s defense industrial base remains a dangerous dream.

Even if U.S. forces dramatically increase their strikes against nacrosubmarines in the hemisphere, or expands a land campaign to go after manufacturing hubs for IAFVs, it is likely that the institutional know-how and industrial capacity to continue building will persist.

In fact, there’s probably a lot criminal networks can teach our own armed forces about logistics in contested domains. Maybe this is all the more reason for the United States to pay more attention to the criminal industrial base as a case study in preserving supply chains under fire, as well as understanding how adversaries are likely to respond under similar conditions.

World War III is upon us. At least, that’s what a flurry of op eds have been proclaiming since at least 2022. The most recent of these, an excellent New York Times piece from University of Chicago Professor Paul Poast argues we should view the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Iran as two interlinked theaters of the same great power clash.

Unlike the first and second World Wars, that involved millions-strong armies marshalled by the globe’s great powers invading one another, the logic of nuclear deterrence has (for now) succeeded in keeping the United States, Russia, and China, from direct confrontation. Whether you believe today’s overlapping crises indeed rise to the level of world war, it does seem as though sharpened great power competition is producing a sort of instability cascade where various regional flashpoints are more likely to become internationalized as major powers take interest in their outcomes.

War is disastrous from an economic standpoint. Today’s wars, or war, if you’d prefer, have already triggered shortages and price hikes that tend to fall disproportionately on small and middle powers, which lack the flexibility or fiscal space to insulate their economies and societies.

But even advanced economies are not perfectly insulated from the consequences of war, especially when the fighting is in their own backyard. The outbreak of full-scale conflict in Ukraine spiked energy prices, especially in Europe, exacerbated food insecurity, and even triggered fears of second-order supply chain risks in the semiconductor industry. After more than four years of conflict, however, the world seems to have mostly adjusted. Now, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz seems to have the makings of a genuine crisis, as it slowly dawns on markets that even successful negotiations cannot avert a prolonged period of economic pain.

Oil and gas production that has been curtailed cannot be restarted immediately. Moreover, confidence in the Gulf states as an island of stability within an otherwise turbulent region seems irreparably shaken, potentially leading investors and governments alike to diversify their investment sources elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the United States is currently wagering more than 2 percent of its GDP (and counting) with a bet on transformative artificial intelligence, a capital and energy-intensive gamble, where even slight discrepancies between projections and reality could be existential for the companies in that sector. One could imagine how another crisis in the Indo-Pacific, say, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, might give the final push needed to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

But there is one region where the storm clouds of war don’t seem to be massing. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) sits at a confluence of resource wealth, strategic geography, and relative geopolitical stability that I don’t see many other places else these days. Maybe, but just maybe, these factors could help the region to guide a battered and bruised global economy through the choppy waters of conflict to safer harbor.

How LAC Can Help

LAC’s advantage lies in relative, not absolute, stability. Countries in the region face a raft of challenges that limit their economic competitiveness, from crumbling infrastructure to regulatory red tape, to rampant corruption and the perennial specter of organized crime. Still, if your risk calculations now include “probability of a Shahed blowing up the datacenter you’re building” LAC now seems like a pretty good bet.

The last interstate armed conflict between LAC nations that gripped the region came during the Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru in 1995. At least one state in the Americas has been at war (an interstate conflict resulting in at least 1,000 battle deaths) for just 73 of the 193 years in the Correlates of War dataset for that region which covers 1822 to 2014, though even this is biased towards the bellicose thanks to the United States’ inclusion that total.

The region seems like especially promising for investments in expensive, energy-hungry, and delicate industries like datacenters and semiconductors. These kinds of things don’t do well operating under missile bombardment, while in places like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, they can benefit from access to relatively cheap, and often quite green, electricity, as well as existing education and research hubs in the region.

Datacenters in particular are also hardened against intrastate violence, the type of violence that LAC countries are substantially worse at managing. Unlike mines, refineries, or factories, not much of value physically leaves the datacenter, limiting the opportunities for criminal groups to steal or extort. Simply throw up a few 4-meter electrified fences, post some guards, and you’re golden.

LAC of course has more than just peaceful (interstate) operating conditions to offer prospective investors. The region has been leading non-OPEC oil production growth well before war broke out with Iran and new discoveries suggest that there may still be substantial untapped potential.

To be clear, none of these new finds can substitute for lost Persian Gulf production. Brazil is the only LAC country to rank in the top 10 global oil producers, and even the daily output of Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, Guyana, and Ecuador combined doesn’t reach the amount of crude pumped by Saudi Arabia before the war. But LAC does not need to replace the Gulf in order to grow its relevance to global energy markets.

Countries like Guyana are extremely well positioned to benefit from higher global oil prices, while the fact that some two-thirds of Guyanese hydrocarbon exports flow to Europe means the country is probably the EU’s new best bet for diversification away from Russian supplies. Suriname, Guyana’s neighbor and a former Dutch colony also experiencing an oil and gas boom, could play a similar role.

Venezuela, of course, is also making headlines as another likely beneficiary if oil remains north of $100 a barrel. The country is still nowhere close to being an attractive destination for foreign capital of course. Nevertheless, the fact that Middle Eastern investments look more exposed than ever in the past 3 decades, combined with the Trump administration’s willingness to invest its own political capital to promote Delcy Rodríguez and the rump Chavista regime is still having some effect. Venezuela’s current protectorate status also means Washington can, in theory, steer a 1.1 million barrel per day firehose to other countries feeling the pinch from rising fuel prices (provided, of course, the crude is first refined along the U.S. gulf coast).

Argentina is a more minor player when it comes to oil production, but makes up for it in spades with natural gas. With the second largest technically recoverable shale gas reserves in the world, Argentina has been steadily ramping production in the Vaca Muerta formation for years. Now, as natural gas shortages promise knock-on effects for the availability of nitrogen-based fertilizers, Argentina is launching two projects aimed at indigenizing production of urea using gas from Vaca Muerta as feedstock. If successful, Argentina’s transformation into a fertilizer producer could benefit not just its domestic agricultural industry, but also bolster regional food security.

Finally, LAC’s exports are generally not at the mercy of geopolitically charged chokepoints. There is no country in the region today, save the United States itself, that could credibly close the Panama Canal, or Strait of Magellan. To the extent that LAC is underperforming when it comes to global trade integration, it is mainly a function of infrastructure gaps. The region remains behind the curve in many places when it comes to port-hinterland connectivity, its air cargo nodes are in deep need of refurbishment, and road and rail links are decaying or altogether nonexistent in key locations.

True, there is concern that some of these choke points and key transit nodes are being captured by China, and fears persist over the future of the Panama Canal (I share some of them), especially after a recent explosion under one of its bridges. But in the case of Panama, the waterway continues to see record traffic as conflict in the Middle East rewires global shipping routes, increasingly in the direction of the Americas.

Waiting on the World to Change

There are real opportunities for LAC to chase, but the road towards them is littered with pitfalls. Not every country will benefit, and a fair number are at risk of a serious downturn if conflicts in other regions don’t cool off soon, let alone escalate.

While I extolled the benefits of rising oil and gas prices for some countries, only a subset of the region will reap these. For countries that don’t have sizeable domestic energy reserves the Hormuz crisis is potentially disastrous. Chilean President José Antonio Kast has already seen his honeymoon period come to an unceremonious end, as his approval ratings tumbled by double-digit percentage points over cuts to fuel subsidies. Central American countries are heavily dependent on fuel imports for transportation and power. Even Mexico, ostensibly another oil producing country primed to benefit, is merely treading water to control domestic fuel prices.

Setting aside the perhaps uniquely mismanaged case of PEMEX, even countries like Guyana and Brazil that are in much better shape to capitalize on the rewiring of the global energy economy may still get it wrong. Countries could squander their current windfall on a spending spree that does little to address macroeconomic needs, drag their feet on boosting production and get surpassed by competitors, or even overestimate future demand and run headfirst into a price collapse. Running a petrostate is not easy, and the gulf monarchies are the exceptions, not the rule when it comes to governance quality.

With respect to agriculture, another sector where LAC harbors great potential amid disruption, dangers still luck. Soybeans, one of the most important export industries for Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, do not require much fertilizer, making them remarkably resilient in the face of ongoing tensions in the gulf. But this may come back to bite the South American agricultural titans as conflict grinds on. Other countries may start substituting fertilizer-dependent crops with soy, resulting in increased competition and driving down already razor thin margins for farmers.

There’s another question of whether the United States is the real winner in a more conflict-prone world. The United States is similarly far from global hot spots, with pacific (albeit increasingly frustrated) neighbors to the north and south. The United States is also now the world’s largest oil producer, has a surfeit of natural resources, and is home to the world’s leading AI and advanced tech companies. Why should the United States care about bolstering supply chain security in LAC, when it can do everything at home?

In some sense it’s not the United States that benefits most from closer ties to LAC, it’s everybody else. Europe and Southeast Asia in particular should be seriously considering how they can strengthen trade ties with the region. Washington should still care, if not for itself, then for its allies who are more exposed to conflict-related disruptions in the Middle East, Indo-Pacific, Africa, and, well, everywhere but the Americas.

The Trump administration claims these strikes have been wildly successful, reducing the volume of seaborne drug trafficking by more than 90 percent. Analysts have largely dismissed this claim, but it is harder to categorically reject it than one might expect. In February, Politifact queried the White House about this claim and were directed to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data showing a 98 percent drop in air and marine drug seizures from July to November 2025. However, maritime drug interdiction is primarily handled by the Coast Guard, which just reported a record volume of cocaine seized during the 2025 fiscal year.

Further complicating the deterrence narrative, Adam Isacson and John Walsh with the Washington Office on Latin America has done more work than most showing that total cocaine seizures by CBP have been largely unchanged since the start of lethal boat strikes.

Last month, more than 5,500 pounds of cocaine was seized by CBP. In 2025 that figure was 5,300 pounds, and in 2024 it was about 4,200 pounds. Assuming CBP seizes roughly the same fraction of drugs crossing the border, that suggests the volume of drugs bound for the United States has not decreased in any appreciable way (and may even be increasing). But while this chain of logic makes sense, without knowing the total volume of cocaine being trafficked each month, we can’t definitively say that boat strikes have had no effect.

To illustrate this, let’s say that before the start of lethal boat strikes, 100,000 pounds of cocaine was being trafficked to the United States each month. Now, using one of the more conservative estimates offered by the Trump administration, let’s say the strikes have deterred 90 percent of traffickers who would otherwise be barreling towards the United States. Now traffickers are only trying to move 10,000 pounds of product into the U.S. per month. That would mean in March, CBP intercepted more than half of all cocaine before it entered the United States, a remarkable feat.

My every intuition is telling me that’s not what is happening. Instead, even if seaborne trafficking is down, criminal groups are pivoting to air and overland routes, hiding narcotics in legitimate shipments, or turning to uncrewed systems to keep the cash flowing without relying on human crews. Still, getting good estimates about the size of illicit economies at large seems virtually impossible. In most cases we know the numerator, how much we are seizing, but the denominator, how much is really out there, remains infuriatingly opaque.

How Illicit Economies are Estimated

There are a handful of reports that attempt to figure out the denominator of organized crime. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime for instance periodically puts out documents on drugs, trafficking in persons, firearms, environmental plundering, and crime writ large. The NGO Global Financial Integrity (GFI) also provides estimates for the retail value of various transnational criminal activities, with the overall “market for crime” being valued at between $1.6 and $2.2 trillion. Unfortunately, these estimates from GFI are from their 2017 report on Transnational Crime and the Developing World and almost certainly outdated by now. Nevertheless, the $1.6-2.2 trillion figure continues to be cited by virtue of the fact that without it there are precious few hard numbers to benchmark the market for crime against.

I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive review of how all types of illicit activity are (or are not) estimated in a blog post, but want to give some color of how I think about these challenges when it comes to narcotics and arms trafficking in the Americas.

Drugs

Of all the types of illicit commercial activity, drug trafficking probably receives the most attention. However, the sheer variety of illicit substances, and their variable modes of production, makes getting a good estimate difficult. GFI uses two methods to estimate the sum value of cannabis, cocaine, opiates, and amphetamines, giving a range of between $426-$652 billion. Both methods, however rely on older UNODC estimates, in some cases from 2003, and extrapolating out from there.

Value estimates also can’t tell us much about whether the volume of narcotics we’re seizing is making a dent in overall supply. Drug prices fluctuate by region, and street prices are liable to be even more inconsistent as individual dealers are subject to highly uneven levels of overhead, supply chain security, and competition.

Nevertheless, plant-based drugs, and cocaine in particular, may be some of the easier drugs to estimate total production for. Coca leaves, the base ingredient for cocaine, occupy large swathes of territory that can be identified and mapped by land, from the air, or by satellite. The UNODC periodically releases fairly reliable estimates of coca cultivation in the world’s three largest coca producers, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. If you know how many acres are under cultivation, you should be able to calculate how much cocaine could be produced if all the coca leaves there were to be harvested.

Indeed, the UNODC’s 2025 World Drug Report found that coca cultivation in 2023 hit record highs, with more than 350,000 hectares under cultivation. Meanwhile, cocaine production was estimated at 3,708 tons, a 50 percent increase from the 2022 estimate.

Much of this was driven by Colombia, which not only saw increased cultivation, but higher yields from coca bush under cultivation thanks to the introduction of new and more productive strands as well as more sophisticated processing that allows drug traffickers to get more out of a harvest. The report was not received well in Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro threatened to pause collaboration with the UNODC in favor of an alternative methodology.

So, it seems possible to measure the total volume of cocaine being produced every year, but even with that impressive feat under your belt, obtaining the level of fidelity needed to determine whether certain policy interventions are working to disrupt traffickers remains elusive. InSight Crime illustrated this in an excellent way with their recent investigation into the Brazilian port of Santos. Long the capital for Brazilian cocaine exports to the world, seizures of the drugs at the port have fallen precipitously in recent years, even as global cocaine production exploded.

A recent investigation suggests that a combination of better inspection at ports, and the fact that Brazilian authorities are increasingly seizing cocaine shipments before they get to port is genuinely making a difference at Santos. But as one outlet has closed, others have opened, especially in the northern state of Bahia, and southern port of Paranaguá. Overlaying all of this is the fact that we still don’t really know how much cocaine is passing through Brazil, even if we know how much is being produced in a given year.

Turning to synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl the picture gets even fuzzier. While coca fields occupy acres upon acres, meth labs can be crammed into cramped and unsafe houses or even mobile labs making them difficult to track. Notably, while UNODC’s World Drug Report featured production estimates for cocaine, opium, and heroin, it sticks to reporting seizure numbers for most synthetic drugs. The sheer potency of these drugs also means that a much higher percentage of the total volume needs to be interdicted to make a dent on the supply side.

Guns

The conversation around arms trafficking is a good example of how a credible-sounding estimate can end up being propagated well past its useful expiration date.

Last year, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime put out a report scoping the various estimates around illegal arms transfers. One of their citations was to the 2017 GFI report, which estimated the value of the arms trade at $1.7-$3.5 billion. This in turn is a back calculation based on the claim that the illicit arms market is about 10-20 percent of the licit arms market. The 10-20 percent figure appears in a number of reports going back years, but to the best of my knowledge has its origins in a 2001 estimate by Small Arms Survey. We could be calculating the size of the modern illicit arms market based on data that’s a quarter of a century old.

Another data challenge comes from government opacity. The Mexican government’s recent lawsuit against U.S. arms manufacturers alleges that “between 342,000 and 597,000” guns are trafficked into Mexico from the United States each year. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report, citing Mexican government estimates, said that 200,000 guns are trafficked per annum. Meanwhile, Project Thor, an ATF-led initiative against gun trafficking, estimated that between a quarter of a million and 1 million guns are trafficked each year. To the best of my knowledge, the statistical methods and estimation strategies used to arrive at these figures have never been released.

In the open source, Topher McDougal and Sean Campbell recently applied a capture-recapture methodology to try and estimate the yearly flow of weapons into Mexico. This is typically used for estimating wildlife populations where the total population is unknown. Researchers capture a sample population instead, tag and release it, and at a later date capture a second independent sample. Based on the proportion of previously tagged individuals in the second sample, it should be possible to get a sense of how large or small the underlying population is (i.e. if there are very few tagged individuals in the second sample, the population is likely much larger).

In the case of illicit firearms, McDougal and Campbell use two datasets of firearms seizures, one consisting of leaked data from the National Center for Planning, Analysis, and Information to Combat Crime (CENAPI) supposedly containing records of firearms seized by Mexican authorities at the federal, state, and local levels, and one consisting of data on only arms seized by the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA). In theory, the proportion of guns captured by SEDENA in the CENAPI dataset should be the same as the proportion of guns in the CENAPI dataset to the total “population” of illicit firearms in Mexico.

However, by the authors’ own admission, these data “present an imperfect application opportunity because they are not independent, sequential attempts at the same capture process.” On top of this, while in theory all guns seized by SEDENA should also appear in the CENAPI dataset, just 26.5 percent of the SEDENA records are duplicated, making the SEDENDA dataset larger than the CENAPI dataset and not the other way around. Despite this, McDougal and Campbell argue the data still “represents a relatively independent attempt to capture (a) all illicit guns in circulation in Mexico, or alternatively (b) a sampling of the total guns intercepted by Mexican authorities.”

My goal isn’t to cast aspersion on the researchers, or any of the organizations mentioned above for that matter. The people working in this space are incredibly forthcoming about the limitations of their data, and the challenges associated with measuring black market trade. Notably, the average that McDougal and Campbell arrive at is much more conservative than many of the less methodologically transparent estimates, suggesting to me their research isn’t wildly overestimating the problem.

If anything, I think we need more efforts to apply different estimation methods, and replicate or update existing studies as new data become available. I also think we should be less credulous towards government figures when reported without at least some methodological color. While I am willing to acknowledge states likely possess important non-public information about various illicit economies, the quality of their publicly available data often leaves much to be desired and suggests to me that what’s happening behind the scenes may not be much better.

Drawing Good Lessons from Bad Math

I’m doubtful that we’ll ever be able to produce an estimate of total criminal activity that is unimpeachable, but I still believe there is merit in trying. Being open about your data sources and methods is a useful exercise in thinking through issues in a more structured manner as opposed to relying on intuition alone. Continued advances in commercial satellite imagery and artificial intelligence-assisted data analysis could also help us arrive a better estimates in the near future.

The question remains, however, if we can never know the denominator when it comes to things like narcotics or arms trafficking, how can governments know when they’re making progress against these issues?

Personally, I think part of the answer comes from thinking about outcomes instead of activities. The sheer quantity of narcotics trafficked each year matters only insofar as it correlates with bad outcomes like violence and drug overdoses. Our goal therefore shouldn’t necessarily be to maximize drug seizures, but minimize violence and overdoses. Even the crudest and most corrupt states can pull off “record” drug seizures from time to time, but there isn’t really a substitute for the hard work of building state capacity.

This is also why I’m skeptical that lethal strikes on alleged drug boats are all that effective even if we assume they are having the desired deterrent effect. Looking around the Americas today, it seems as though criminal groups remain firmly ensconced, growing rich and dangerous thanks to increasingly diversified illicit revenue streams that can’t be blown up with a single missile.

To be sure, I think most people working on hemispheric security issues recognize this. SOUTHCOM commander General Francis L. Donovan even acknowledged the need to apply “systemic friction” to criminal organizations, and noted that traffickers have adjusted their routes in response to U.S. strikes as well as increased maritime interdiction. So while I’m still hopeful that the United States renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere represents more opportunity than it does risk, we need to remain humble about what we do, and don’t know, and focused on driving the outcomes that genuinely better the lives of those in our shared neighborhood.

As missiles and drones crisscrossed the Strait of Hormuz, the United States convened an assemblage of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) leaders for the inaugural “Shield of the Americas” Summit. Earlier that week, the United States announced it was undertaking joint military operations with Ecuador against drug trafficking organizations. Donald Trump has also steadfastly insisted that, once the current unpleasantness with Iran is wrapped up, “Cuba is next.” It seems that even if LAC ends up playing second fiddle to the Middle East for the rest of the Trump administration, it will still receive far more attention than has been the norm historically.

But for all this unprecedented focus on the Americas, I’m increasingly left with the feeling that the “Donroe Doctrine” is failing to live up to the hype. This assessment isn’t new, when the 2025 National Security Strategy came out, I wrote that:

“it seems profoundly unclear what new dimension the Trump Corollary brings to the table. Instead, the NSS lays out a grab bag of things it doesn’t want to have happen in the Americas. We don’t want countries trafficking drugs, or migrants, we don’t want China controlling critical infrastructure, we don’t want to lose access to the Panama Canal. But are those things preconditions for the use of military force? Or does a country need to check several of those boxes (like Venezuela) before bombs start dropping? If countries work with the United States to stop those things from happening, will it be rewarded, and if so, in what way? These are fundamental questions about how you connect means with ends, the exact thing the NSS promises to do, but I feel myself having to fill in the blanks left in the document.”

Now, about four months later, I think that assessment holds up. While I do believe Washington’s foreign policy apparatus is trying to approximate a cohesive doctrine, at the strategic level the Trump Corollary has remained mostly a branding exercise.

This lack of coherence has caused the diminishment of the Donroe Doctrine from a sweeping hemispheric program, to a series of one-off engagements, and caused the United States to overinvest in counter-crime initiatives while ignoring for the most part China’s still deeply entrenched influence in the region. This is a problem because a Western Hemisphere focus is genuinely overdue, but the current U.S. approach risks sabotaging the long-term viability of such a strategy.

From Hemispheric Defense to “Greater North America”

The most recent downgrading of the Donroe Doctrine came with Pete Hegseth’s remarks to LAC dignitaries at the March 5 Americas Counter Cartel Conference. There, Secretary Hegseth articulated a vision of “Greater North America” encompassing “every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana.” These countries, bounded by the Amazon and Andes mountains to the south, constitute the United States’ “immediate security perimeter.”

I understand the United States’ rationale for this to an extent, strategy means prioritization, and if you have to draw a line somewhere, Greater North America seems pretty good. Through the lens of U.S.-China competition, Beijing has advanced the furthest in countries south of the Equator, while the United States remains ahead from Ecuador on up.

There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule, but the United States has been cleaning house this past year to shore up its north-western hemispheric dominance. Venezuela, previously a bastion of Chinese and Russian influence in the Americas, is now a de-facto U.S. protectorate. Panama, the first LAC country to accede to China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2017 has been actively curtailing Chinese influence in and around the Panama Canal, much to Beijing’s displeasure. Cuba is rhetorically defiant, but in no position to sign any provocative new economic or security deals with U.S. adversaries, and Nicaragua, which has stayed out of the spotlight for now, remains massively exposed economically to U.S. sanctions.

It’s not necessarily a bad idea to double-down on areas of comparative U.S. advantage, but drawing a security perimeter that includes only half of the Western Hemisphere is a deeply flawed approach. From a U.S.-China competition perspective, Greater North America does little to obstruct China’s access to Latin American raw materials or markets. Indeed, if the Donroe Doctrine truly ends at the equator’s edge, it would mean giving China unfettered access to some of the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals, agricultural powerhouses, oil and gas deposits, as well as critical Antarctic gateways.

Now, clearly the United States is not just ignoring the rest of South America, but its moments of focus have been more episodic than strategic. The Trump administration cancelled visas for Chilean diplomats to protest a planned Hong Kong-Chile fiber optic cable, and continues to raise alarms over the Peruvian port of Chancay. These efforts have certainly rattled China, however, to date they seem insufficient to compete with, let alone outcompete, China in the countries where it still holds a few cards.

In Panama, whose recent Supreme Court decision to cancel the leases held by Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison for two ports along the Panama Canal was hailed as a geopolitical win for Washington, the United States may have been its own worst enemy. Rhetoric about “taking back” the canal, by force if necessary, placed the government of José Raúl Mulino in the unenviable position of having to placate Washington’s demands, and fend of nationalist protest at home. In the end, it was Panamanian political will, more than U.S. strategic savvy that carried the day.

In the case of Venezuela, the geopolitical rationale for U.S. intervention is looking weaker as the United States continues pass Venezuelan oil along to China (albeit now at market rates). Further south, Argentina has been steadily increasing its grain exports to the PRC. China’s supply chains for oil, minerals, and foodstuffs from the Americas seem to be relatively untouched, whether their source countries fall within or outside the United States’ declared security perimeter.

Maybe I’m also blowing the “Greater North America” concept out of proportion. Hegseth’s speech was mainly focused on security and organized crime in particular, so perhaps the hemispheric Donroe Doctrine is alive and well, just with the countries of Greater North America getting a bit of extra attention.

But that argument still means the United States will be leaving several erstwhile allied governments in the lurch. Fully one-third of the 12 LAC leaders who attended the Shield of the Americas Summit hail from countries south of Greater North America. Even if unintended, revising the Donroe Doctrine from a hemispheric to half-hemispheric strategy signals that the rewards for being a staunch U.S. ally in South America are likely to be limited.

Towards a True Hemispheric Strategy

It is telling that, less than four months out from Operation Absolute Resolve, people are already starting to question how long U.S. interest in LAC will hold. U.S. midterm elections are on the horizon, and likely signal the end of the Trump administration’s blank check on foreign policy. Most analysts seem to implicitly or explicitly assume the Trump Corollary has an expiration date of January 2029, if not sooner.

I think that these assessments are directionally correct, but at the same time I believe we still haven’t hit peak Donroe Doctrine yet.

In the days following the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran for instance, I saw lots of speculation that, much like the perpetually deferred “Pivot to Asia” before it, the current pivot to the Americas may end up falling victim to runaway escalation in the Middle East. The most extreme version of that argument is unlikely for a few key reasons.

First, by this point the United States has created tethers to the region that will lock in a greater focus on hemispheric affairs for the foreseeable future. Managing Venezuela, figuring out what to do with Cuba, controlling migration, and maintaining drug interdiction efforts all demand continued attention, and impose reputational costs if they fall through the gaps.

Second, the cost of power projection in the Western Hemisphere is extremely low. The military and economic imbalance between the United States and its neighbors, along with the emergence of a like-minded bloc of countries means that it seems to be only getting easier for Washington to throw its weight around.

For a useful comparison, look at Operation Absolute Resolve versus Operation Epic Fury. In the first case, U.S. forces were in and out of Venezuela in a matter of hours, suffered zero killed in action, and left with a pliant successor firmly in place. In terms of munitions the operation was remarkably parsimonious, the majority of strikes on Caracas being conducted with lower-end, and easier to replace platforms.

That has clearly not been the case with Iran, and even though I think the United States has exceeded its wildest dreams in terms of military overmatch, Washington has no clear path to translating tactical success into strategic victory. While a tenuous ceasefire prevails for now, war with Iran has already resulted in U.S. deaths, depletion of critical interceptors and strike platforms, and a price tag in the billions.

Finally, it seems like a focus on the Western Hemisphere plays well with all the disparate factions of the modern Republican party in a way that other foreign policy adventures doesn’t. Isolationists still like the idea of blowing up drug traffickers at sea before their illicit cargoes can reach U.S. victims. Prioritizers are convinced that a new Monroe Doctrine will help secure the United States’ homefront for the coming war with China. Meanwhile primacists see no reason why the United States should have any more compunctions about intervention in its own neighborhood than it has in more distant lands.

The fact that all these groups can find common cause could even lead to increased action in Latin America as a way of scoring quick wins in response to foreign policy setbacks in the Middle East.

So the Greater North America focus at least isn’t going to change dramatically until 2029, but what happens after that? I’ll avoid speculating on likely electoral outcomes, but suffice it to say with the sole exception of a Rubio presidency, I would expect the next administration to seek to curtail Western Hemisphere activities across the board.

I understand this temptation, but viewing the Donroe Doctrine as merely a costly diversion from more important geographies is still throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, we should recognize that the germ of the idea, a belief in the need to reprioritize the Western Hemisphere, is a good one, even if the form it took proved lackluster.

It may be instructive to look to another period where the United States confronted a world order in decay. On the precipice of the Second World War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood the importance of a truly hemispheric strategy. Fearful that the rising tide of fascism could engulf the Americas in whole or piecemeal, FDR breathed new strength into the Inter-American system.

Notably, FDR and his advisors saw a “quarter-sphere of defense,” in other words Greater North America, as untenable for the United States. To avert this possibility, Washington worked with a diverse coalition of partners to secure critical supply chains, and present a united front against the Axis powers.

In Mexico, left-wing Lázaro Cárdenas cut off oil exports to Germany, Italy, and Japan in due time after nationalizing the country’s oil sector. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas’ autocratic government funneled raw materials to support Washington’s defense industrial juggernaut, and even dispatched Brazilian soldiers to the Italian campaign. Countless other countries furnished materiel and manpower to help the allied cause, while remaining insulated from the heaviest fighting taking place oceans away.

If the United States truly wishes to replicate the herculean efforts that carried it to victory in 1945, the worst thing it can do is turn its back on the Americas at large. Instead, I hope that we can learn the right lessons from our present moment that a Western Hemisphere focus harbors great potential, but also that alliances built on fear and encompassing only half the hemisphere are doomed to fall short.

Already notorious among Latin America watchers, the facility reached new levels of notoriety, after the United States shipped more than 200 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang there in February 2025. Later the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a U.S. resident who was rendered to CECOT without due process as a result of an “administrative error,” captured public attention and earned national, as well as international opprobrium.

But while Trump and Bukele’s scheme to position El Salvador as a hub for Prison as a Service failed, CECOT continues to garner admirers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Most recently, Chilean president and anti-crime crusader José Antonio Kast toured the facility prior to his inauguration.

Indeed, perhaps the single most remarkable part of El Salvador’s journey from one of the most homicidal countries in the Western Hemisphere to one of the most peaceful is the fact that the country was able to maintain control over the prison system even as incarceration rates skyrocketed. That hasn’t happened more or less anywhere else in the hemisphere.

This feat is all the most impressive when you look at the state of prison systems in most other Latin American countries. As a rule, these tend to be violent, overcrowded, and porous, sustaining all manner of illicit economies within their walls. Some of the hemisphere’s most feared gangs, like the Brazilian First Capital Command (PCC) and Venezuelan Tren de Aragua got their start within these sordid carceral facilities.

Most of us are familiar with this problem at some level. Stories abound of prisons-turned-resorts for their inmates, where booze, drugs, and even exotic pets flow easily in and out. But it strikes me as well that prisons should, in theory, be one of the easiest problems to solve. Unlike the ever-shifting drug trafficking routes, or the thorny task of community policing in dense urban agglomerations, prisons represent a finite number of static locations that should possible to secure one after another.

Unlike most other aspects of the illicit economy, locking down a prison isn’t like squeezing a balloon. If the state can achieve lasting control over one facility, inmates housed there won’t just be able to migrate to another site with weaker supervision. Meanwhile, governments have far more tools at their disposal to disrupt the power of gangs once their members are already behind bars.

Now, just because prison reform seems like it should be easier than other counter-crime interventions, that doesn’t mean it’s easy by any stretch of the imagination. Vast amounts of blood and ill-gotten treasure have been spent keeping Latin America’s prisons overcrowded, under-resourced, and riven by corruption. Often the key links in these networks are prison administrators themselves, who line their pockets handsomely with the kickbacks that come from turning a blind eye to prison-based smuggling networks.

So even though on paper prisons seem like natural starting points for combatting criminal gains, in practice there’s an overwhelming sense that the system in some countries may be so rotten that nothing short of throwing it out and starting over from scratch has any chance of success.

Still, I think it’s too early to throw our hands up in defeat at this prospect however and hope to outline in this post why prisons throughout Latin America have failed, why I think prison-based gangs are still weaker than we might assume, and how governments could begin to course-correct.

How Prisons Fail

It’s easy to understand how prisons can become breeding grounds for organized crime. Keeping hundreds, or even thousands of lawbreakers under one roof is a challenging task even for well-resourced states. In the United States for instance, prison gangs remain some of the most resilient and brutal illicit organizations around.

The logic of prison-based gangs is simple. Leadership remains on the inside, sending orders to foot soldiers and lieutenants on the outside. These lower-level gang members obey their incarcerated bosses because failure to do so risks forgoing the gang’s protection if and when they themselves are arrested and jailed. For gang leaders, running things from behind bars is also appealing, you’re already locked up so there’s no need to worry that getting arrested will compromise your operation.

Meanwhile, prison guards and administrators allow their charges to have free reign within their cells, and overlook (or even facilitate) smuggling into prisons in exchange for a promise by the gangs to maintain a modicum of order. Failure to strike this deal tends to unleash bloody riots and massacres that most facilities are unable to contain.

The Tren de Aragua gang exemplifies this phenomenon. In 2011, Venezuela adopted the “pran” system in its correctional facilities, devolving responsibility to individual inmates to reduce conflict and violence among various prisoner factions. Tocorón prison, in Aragua state, was a model of this new system, and over time morphed into an inmate-run playground for criminals.

When, in 2023, the Venezuelan police and military raided Tocorón, they found quarters for inmates’ families, artillery shells, a swimming pool and even a private zoo on the grounds. These discoveries made for lurid headlines, but the raid did little to disrupt the Tren de Aragua’s actual operations, as the group had long since metastasized into a truly transnational outfit with tendrils snaking through Colombia down into Peru and Chile, among other geographies.

Reform in this environment is a wicked problem. In order to successfully manage their operations on the outside, prison-based gangs have successfully co-opted virtually every layer of the carceral system. Guards turn a blind eye to violence and illicit commerce, wardens are either on the take or under the gun, and any attempt to reassert state control is met with fierce resistance both within and outside prison walls.

In 2024 for instance, Elmer Fernandez, the newly appointed director of Colombia’s La Modelo prison was gunned down in Bogotá after pledging to crack down on gang activity in the penal system. In Ecuador, the spate of violence that saw gunmen take over a live TV broadcast was precipitated by the escape of José Adolfo Macías Villamar, leader of the Choneros gang, as he was about to be transferred to a new prison. The brutality, coordination, and resources of these gangs tend to far outstrip a conventional law enforcement approach to securing prisons.

More recently, Guatemala declared a 30-day state of siege following coordinated riots that took over three prisons. The violence was reportedly aimed at securing more favorable conditions and transfers to lower-security facilities for Barrio 18 gang leadership. While Guatemalan authorities quickly regained control over the facilities and seem to have stabilized the situation relatively effectively, it remains unclear how durable any gains in prison security will prove.

Inability to reform the carceral system in my view undergirds virtually every failed “mano dura” campaign in Latin America over the past two decades. Politicians, wanting to show they are tough on crime, send the military and police to the streets, where they usually end up arresting a lot of people. But expanding the prison system costs money and takes time, things that aren’t very politically expedient, so the influx of prisoners exacerbates conditions within the carceral system and strengthens the hand of gangs that run these facilities.

The prison, intended to sequester violent individuals from society, is paradoxically at the heart of the violence plaguing several Latin American countries.

The El Salvador Exception

El Salvador stands out as perhaps the only country in recent history to have effectively dismantled its own prison-based gangs and restored state control over the carceral system. It has done so despite nearly tripling its prison population in the space of four years. This is partially a consequence of policy and partially happenstance.

Policy-wise, the Bukele government implemented a number of draconian measures intended to limit the ability of gang leadership to coordinate with their forces on the outside. This included shutting off cell phone reception on prison grounds, limiting family visitation rights to prevent the smuggling of contraband, and housing members of rival gangs in the same blocks. Such practices are avoided elsewhere in the hemisphere as they tend to exacerbate violence within prison facilities.

However, in El Salvador’s case, the speed and scale of the crackdown proved sufficient to catch prison-based gang leadership off guard. This is more a matter of coincidence than a coherent strategy. Several reports now indicate that Nayib Bukele’s government negotiated with gangs, including MS-13, to keep levels of violence within acceptable bounds. When the initial state of exception was declared, gang leaders allegedly ordered their members to lay low, believing it best to wait out the crackdown before returning to business as usual.

By the time it was evident that there would be no such restoration of the status quo, it was too late, while thanks to their negotiations with the Salvadoran government, the Bukele administration conveniently had a rather comprehensive picture of what the gang leadership structure within its prisons looked like. Finally, the construction of new facilities, like CECOT, gave the government expanded capacity to transfer gang leadership and break up networks of command and control.

However, it is still worth noting that most of El Salvador’s prison population is not housed in CECOT, and while the facility has been the subject of harrowing stories of abuse and deprivation, it seems like inmates in other penitentiaries may have it even worse. According to a recent report from the NGO Humanitarian Legal Aid, 40.9 percent of the 470 deaths recorded in Salvadoran prisons since March 2022 have occurred in Izalco prison, while another 18.9 percent were documented in the La Esperanza Center.

While CECOT’s doors are open to a rotating cast of international media outlets, the rest of El Salvador’s penal system is far more opaque, and gang influence there runs deeper. Izalco for instance was populated initially by Barrio 18 members, and even split into two sections to separate rival factions when the gang fragmented between 2009 and 2010. For Bukele’s prison strategy, breaking the power of criminal networks at facilities where the gangs are more entrenched has seemingly required a higher dose of state brutality.

As with most elements of El Salvador’s crime crackdown, the more layers you peel back of the narrative concerning the country’s success at controlling its prison system, the more complicated, and less replicable it appears. However, the dream of replicating Bukele-style policies remains tantalizing for countries grappling with seemingly intractable criminal networks. When Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa announced the construction of two new maximum-security facilities, he made sure to note “For all the Bukele lovers, it is an identical prison [to CECOT].” Noboa was not exaggerating, Ecuador is currently contracted with the same Mexican Salvadoran firm that built the now infamous detention facility.

The Weaknesses of Prison Gangs

El Salvador’s story also reveals something that may seem counterintuitive at first, while prisons-based gangs can appear implacable, this criminal organizational model is weaker than it lets on.

Prison-based gangs are something of an evolutionary dead-end for organized crime. The structure confers a number of advantages, such as built-in shelter, and recruitment mechanisms, but these ultimately don’t make up for the liabilities in the face of a sufficiently determined government. Command and control is especially susceptible to destruction at either the individual level by transferring individual prisoners, or system level, but blocking cellular communications or housing members in the same cell blocks as their rivals.

El Salvador illustrates how this can genuinely put criminals on the back foot. When Bukele’s crackdown began, MS-13’s prison-based leadership council, the Ranfla Nacional, quickly found its ability to communicate with the outside world cut off, leaving their followers disoriented and vulnerable to being mopped up piecemeal by police and military operations.

Notably, Mexican cartels, arguably the most successful transnational criminal groups in the Western Hemisphere, are not prison-based. In fact, the cartels go to pains to get their top leaders released from captivity or otherwise escape from prison when they are captured. Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán escaped from prison not once but twice, in 2001 and 2015. The Sinaloa cartel would later use the threat of mass violence and unrest to successfully spring El Chapo’s son Ovidio Guzmán in 2019, and again (unsuccessfully) 2023.

This isn’t to say that Mexican cartels don’t exert massive influence within the country’s prison system, they assuredly do. Rather, controlling prisons seems to be more like the byproduct of the cartels’ efforts to penetrate and co-opt as many institutions as possible, not an integral feature of cartel organization.

Of course, the second most successful criminal groups in the Western Hemisphere, Brazil’s PCC and rival Red Command (CV), among others, are prison-based. PCC leader Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, alias “Marcola,” has been incarcerated since 1999 while his network has proven resilient despite cycling through multiple different penitentiaries.

My sense with these organizations however is that they benefit most from Brazil’s sprawling and under-resourced carceral system. According to World Prison Brief, Brazil’s incarceration rate has grown more than 90 percent between 2014 and 2024. Without commensurate spending on renovations, new facilities, and better wages for guards, shuffling gang leaders around often simply means opening new vectors for recruitment or violence.

On top of this, groups like the PCC and CV also control territory in urban centers and along key drug trafficking routes in the Amazon and Triple Frontier regions. The CV has also benefitted from a franchise model that delegates significant authority to local bosses, making it resilient to senior leadership decapitation.

A similar phenomenon could be said of the Tren de Aragua, which by the time of the raid on Tocorón, had long since franchised out its name to a coalition of gangs ranging from Arizona to the Andes. Ultimately, it seems as though the more a group grows in power, the less it tries to rely on control over prisons.

Making Prisons Work

The greatest enabler of prison-based criminal groups is state neglect. Governments don’t like spending money on prisons, lest they be accused of lavishing more funding on outlaws than honest citizens. In Ecuador for instance, then-president Lenín Moreno slashed the nation’s prison budget by 15 percent during the Covid-19 pandemic, just before a string of prison massacres would herald the country’s spiral into insecurity.

Even when new prisons get built, there is a disconnect between the time it takes for those facilities come online and the desire to show immediate results, especially arrests, and without constant attention it is easy for the same pathologies of corruption and mismanagement to crop up.

I’m not going to pretend I can offer a step-by-step guide for carceral reform that works in all circumstances. But I do think the region’s security forces should think critically about how to turn the structural weaknesses of prison-based gangs to their advantage, namely the fact that the locations of gang leadership are known at all times and restricted to a finite set of facilities.

In this regard, I think the first step towards reform starts with a six-month to one-year pilot program in moderate-risk facility. The program should involve a comprehensive audit by federal authorities of the prison administration, and endeavor to root out any possible graft within the system and replace corrupt personnel.

Staffing numbers should be increased with clear objectives to reduce, and ideally eliminate, violence within the facility. When sufficient staff levels have been reached, guards should lead targeted seizures of contraband, especially weapons, drugs, and cell phones, and relocate known gang leadership cells to different wings of the facility. The overall goal should be to ensure that the state has complete visibility into goings-on at the pilot prison.

Ideally, states could implement the pilot program at the same time that they build new and more modern maximum-security prisons. Upon completion of both, the trainings and best practices from the pilot facility could be rolled out to other prisons in the system, while the new prisons would help alleviate overcrowding and contain the highest-risk inmates. Then, rinse, and repeat the same program in another facility or two.

Implementing this is likely to trigger a violent response from gang members within and outside the facility. Governments should expect and prepare to contain a spike in violence outside the prison walls while pressing on with reforms in the pilot facility.

Notably, I don’t think Bukele-style violence is necessary to achieve control over prisons. If anything, the culture of impunity and brutality El Salvador has cultivated is undermining El Salvador’s progress in carceral reform. Outside CECOT, some prison administrators in El Salvador seem to have picked up where the gangs left off when it comes to operating smuggling networks behind bars.

Above all, the region needs better prison administrators and guards. Latin America is littered with the bloodstained and hollowed-out remains of what were once state-of-the-art prisons. While I do believe that the region also needs to build more prisons as an essential step towards reducing overcapacity, simply building your own CECOT is clearly no silver bullet.

The problem with running comprehensive carceral reform is that it takes time and costs money, neither of which are popular with electorates. Nevertheless, I’m increasingly convinced that there is no credible path to combating organized crime anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that does not first run through the carceral system.

For those of you uninitiated into this discourse (lucky you), the idea rests upon Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” In the early years of the United States, Letters of Marque and Reprisal were issued primarily to seafaring raiders to plunder the ships of enemies of Washington, in essence making them legal pirates.

Recently, the concept has come back into vogue as the United States looks to wage war against an expansive host of criminal actors now designated as foreign terrorist organizations. One notable proponent is U.S. Senator Mike Lee who introduced the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act last December aiming to authorize the President to issue letters of marque against “any individual who the President determines is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization.”

In theory, issuing Letters of Marque would be a cheap force multiplier for counter-cartel efforts in the Western Hemisphere at a time when runaway escalation in the Middle East is straining military resources. Elite bands of formalized privateers could deploy to the region to interdict drug boats, liberate trafficked persons, and dismantle fentanyl labs. The system would in theory pay for itself, by allowing participants to self-finance by seizing the ill-gotten booty of the cartels for their own enrichment.

Now to be clear, I don’t think any of the current policy proposals for Letters of Marque are going anywhere, but I’ve yet to see a clear rebuttal of the idea from an operational perspective. Today, I hope to provide a quick take on why Letters of Marque are more trouble than they’re worth when it comes to the fight against organized crime.

I should give credit where it is due, this is a creative idea. Other proposals to modernize Letters of Marque for cyber operations or sanctions enforcement could have some utility so I do think we should encourage more out-of-the-box thinking. But at some point we need to also ground that in reality. The impression I get is that the most vocal proponents of Letters of Marque for cartels started off with the assumption that this is a genius hack for getting after organized crime and never looked back.

My central gripe with the way Letters of Marque are presented from a policy standpoint is that the juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. Proponents seem to think there is a legion of expert operators champing at the bit to sink their teeth into the cartels were it not for our pesky laws against private citizens crossing international borders to kill people. And why not? Americans are the most heavily armed citizenry on the planet, and we have ample Special Forces veterans sitting around waiting for the call of duty (at least, that’s what they tell me on their podcasts).

But my suspicion is that the vast majority of people with both the desire and capability to fight the cartels are either (a) already serving in the U.S. military and law enforcement, or (b) working for private security contractors which can do this work under existing legal frameworks without the need for Letters of Marque.

The first argument against Letters of Marque for cartels is that private U.S. actors don’t actually have a good track record employing violence on foreign soil without hefty assistance from Washington.

In May 2020, a group of Venezuelan expatriates and military contractors organized by private security firm Silvercorp USA launched an abortive invasion of Venezuela. Known as “Operation Gideon” the attempt at toppling Maduro’s regime proved short-lived, and most of its participants were either killed or captured by Venezuelan forces. Overall the operation was a bizarre boondoggle and furnished Maduro with U.S. hostages to use as bargaining chips in future negotiations with Washington.

Last month, the Cuban coast guard engaged in a firefight with a boat full of armed individuals that sailed from Florida with the goal of sparking an uprising on the oil-starved island. While the Cuban government accused the group, which included at least two U.S. citizens, of being agents provocateurs, the fact that Trump Administration officials seemed quick to downplay the incident suggests that it was probably not part of a wider conspiracy.

Erik Prince’s intervention in Haiti is likely the best example of a private U.S. entity taking the fight to foreign criminal organizations. But it is telling that Prince and his organization were able to set up shop in Haiti without a Letter of Marque. Instead, reports indicate that Prince and his company entered into a somewhat ingenious arrangement with the Haitian government to get a cut of the country’s customs and tax revenue in exchange for their services. While there is much to criticize about this arrangement, and Prince’s use of unrestricted drone warfare in Port-au-Prince, clearly the absence of Letters of Marque isn’t preventing U.S. security entrepreneurs from expanding abroad.

Another success story, Operation Golden Dynamite which exfiltrated Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado ahead of her planned receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, demonstrates a nonlethal use-case for private sector actors in the security space. Led by Grey Bull Rescue, a private firm comprised of Special Forces veterans specializing in high-value extractions, the operation still required coordination with U.S. forces, and indeed may have benefitted from simultaneous air patrols in the southern Caribbean which may have distracted Venezuelan military units while the Nobel laureate slipped through.

In general, I’m willing to accept that private entities can play a role alongside U.S. uniformed services, but just not in the way advocates of Letters of Marque think. Indeed, the more you dig into the kinds of requirements for the fight against organized crime, the more it looks like what the U.S. really needs is contractors, not freebooters.

This doesn’t just apply to kinetic operations, the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance stack that is needed for effective counter-cartel ops is more significant than most people think. In the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific for instance, the United States has access to powerful surveillance aircraft, satellites, and naval platforms to look for small drug trafficking boats. While President Trump’s claims of a 95 percent reduction in maritime trafficking are doubtless exaggerated, lethal strikes on drug boats have most likely caused criminals to pivot towards more covert methods, which means finding illicit activity in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific is even harder for less well-resourced private actors. Of course, the U.S. military could set up new partnerships with some of these entities to bolster their manpower and maybe allow for more seizures of smuggling vessels in lieu of airstrikes. But that looks a little different from the dream of privateers on the open seas.

This is not to mention the moral hazard questions Letters of Marque introduce. Let’s say, for instance, that one of our enterprising lawful pirates gets himself captured while poking around Culiacán. Does the United States fly in Delta Force to rescue them? Alternatively, what if some freebooters patrolling the southern Caribbean decide to seize a fishing boat and get rounded up themselves by the Colombian navy? Even for a White House that is increasingly willing to throw its weight around against Latin American governments, this seems like a recipe for headaches. Far from being a force multiplier, opening the door to private counter-cartel operations could therefore end up being a drain on U.S. military and diplomatic resources if the privateers bite off more than they can chew.

Another part of the problem is that the stuff cartels traffic in, illicit drugs, is illegal to sell in the United States. It’s not like our hypothetical privateers will be able to turn around and sell their captured booty for its market value. Of course, proponents argue, that’s what prize courts are for, to adjudicate the value of the loot and dole out their just rewards. That however puts the U.S. government in the somewhat odd position of setting prices for illegal narcotics.

At first blush it seems like this kind of arrangement is ripe for unintended consequences, set the reward too far below the street price, and privateers might be incentivized to get into the drug game themselves for greater rewards, set the price too high and the cartels might be able to use that to justify jacking up their own prices, increasing criminal profits. Now it is true that the cartels don’t only traffic in drugs, these days cartel portfolios are remarkably diversified, and include illicit gold, timber, wildlife, and more. But that probably also creates even more headaches. How should a prize court adjudicate the seizure of people being trafficked, for instance?

I’m not saying you couldn’t figure all this out, and there have been efforts to sketch a legal architecture for modernized prize courts, but it sure seems like an awful big headache to resuscitate a jurisprudence that’s been comatose for two centuries in the pursuit of nebulous gains. This is the fundamental problem with Letters of Marque as a policy, the United States already has much better tools to fight the drug cartels without them.

Maybe some readers will accuse me of being insufficiently agentic, or having a so-called “cheems mindset” by making this argument. Before you rush to the comments section, know that I have identified my own ingenious alternative for any sensitive young men or women looking for another way to fight back against the cartels. You can read more about that idea here.

This comes as Ecuador has reportedly mobilized as many as 75,000 troops in a reinvigorated campaign against organized crime. Since the country declared war on crime for the first time in 2023, violence has remained stubbornly high, homicide levels even increased between 2024 and 2025. This time, however, Quito has the backing of the United States, where the Trump administration is urging countries to use military force against criminals.

Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has frequently clashed with Petro over security policy. Earlier this year, Noboa announced 30 percent (later raised to 50 percent) tariffs on Colombian imports, a Trumpian policy meant to punish Colombia for failing to curb the drug flows that are fueling Ecuador’s violence crisis.

Latin America is no stranger to disputes between neighbors, last year for instance Peru and Colombia got into a diplomatic spat over the latter’s claims to Isla Chinería on the Amazon River. But these latest conflicts seem to carry a sharper edge as the United States advances its own more interventionist foreign policy in the region.

U.S. President Donald Trump along with key advisors have called for a military coalition to fight organized crime explicitly modeled on U.S.-led efforts to dismantle ISIS. Washington also says it is willing to intervene in the region unilaterally if need be to go after criminal groups.

The implication here is not only that the United States could launch more military operations against uncooperative countries, but that U.S. allies in Latin America should also be willing to shoot first and ask questions later in the service of a new war on crime. That’s troubling for countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico who are less on board with the White House’s approach.

Last week, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva held a press conference to announce strengthened defense industrial cooperation between Brazil and South Africa. With the specter of the Iran war hanging over geopolitics, and concerns over U.S. military adventures closer to home, Lula raised a few eyebrows with his statement that: “Here in South America, we present ourselves as a region of peace. No one here has nuclear bombs. But if we don’t prepare ourselves defensively, one day someone will invade us.”

Commentators on social media have drawn attention (not always in good faith) to recent defense agreements between the United States and Paraguay meaning that Brazil is at risk of “encirclement” by a growing host of pro-U.S. countries. Russian outlets like Sputnik Mundo have fanned the flames claiming Lula’s fears of receiving the “Maduro treatment” are behind recent arms purchases.

Some Brazilian lawmakers have gone even further, tabling proposals for Brazil to withdraw from Latin America’s arms control regime and resurrect its nuclear weapons program. I’ll be upfront and say that I don’t think these efforts are going anywhere. Even recent defense budget increases for weapons procurement are gap-filling measures, not seismic shifts.

That being said, in today’s post I hope to take a bit of a broader look at whether we’re heading towards an arms race, how likely the Americas are to remain a zone of peace, and why some increased defense spending could still be good for the region.

(Re)armament Dynamics

Latin America has more or less resisted being drawn into the global rearmament race. Still, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, South America increased its arms imports by 31 percent between the 2016-2020 and 2021-2025 periods. Total arms imports nevertheless remain lower than they were from 2005-2015, owing largely to macroeconomic headwinds and the collapse of Venezuela’s weapon imports.

However, there are three dynamics to watch for that could drive greater arms imports by Latin American countries in the next couple of years.

The first, and perhaps most interesting dynamic is hedging. In a previous post, I detailed the overall meager state of Latin American air defenses, countries wishing to buy a bit of insurance against U.S. military adventurism would do well to strengthen their air and missile defenses, expand stocks of fighter jets, and modernize their navies.

The goal of hedging is not so much to militarily deny the United States, but rather make one’s country a thornier target that Washington would not be able to lean on without sacrificing capabilities in other, more strategic regions.

Brazil is the most likely candidate to be affected by hedging dynamics, the country has long sought to position itself as a global power, ambitions which may be challenged by U.S. efforts to assert itself as master of the Western Hemisphere. Unlike Mexico, which would come under intense U.S. scrutiny were it to engage in a major military buildup, Brazil has the advantage of geographic distance from Washington. Still, the level of resources needed to successfully hedge against U.S. military might is likely to remain cost-prohibitive even for the Latin America’s largest economy.

Meanwhile, with a more trigger-happy administration in the White House, the mere appearance of an anti-U.S. military buildup could be sufficient to trigger a preemptive strike. Nevertheless, countries could play a longer game, building up under the radar now, but with the goal of eventually being in a position to resist the United States 15 or 20 years down the line.

The second dynamic involves the United States actively applying pressure on regional governments to spend more on their militaries. In the wake of the Shield of the Americas conference, and with war in the Middle East escalating, the United States is likely looking to shift some of the burden for the global war on crime to its partners.

The White House’s new “America First Arms Transfer Strategy” makes explicit the U.S. desire for overseas weapons sales to serve as an engine for the domestic defense industrial base. High up on the list are likely to be drones, counter-drone equipment, as well as updated ISR aircraft and maritime patrol boats.

Ecuador could be an example of this dynamic at play. The country has been a peripheral player in the regional arms market, but Quito’s renewed offensive against organized crime could drive the need for new kit.

The final dynamic is modernization, and is probably both the most banal, but also the most important one for understanding recent trends in defense procurement. Simply put, militaries periodically need to update their equipment as it ages out of relevance. In the case of Latin America, which has historically bought much of its gear secondhand, many systems are reaching the end of their serviceable lifespans.

Indeed, some of the biggest-ticket arms purchases in the region are fighter jet modernization programs. Brazil is replacing its F-5Ms, which it kept in service for a whopping six decades, with the JAS 39 Gripen. Colombia is also moving forward with the Gripen to replace its ageing Kfir fighters, while in 2024 Argentina inked a deal to acquire F-16s from Denmark to phase out its F-5AMs. Peru is expected to join this trend when it selects a modern fighter that will take the place of an increasingly unreliable fleet of MiG-29s and Mirage 2000s.

These are not so much indicative of an aerial arms race as they are the product of multiple countries arriving at the same capability requirements independently of one another. Still, even routine modernization efforts can trigger accidental arms race dynamics. Chile, which once boasted the most modern air force in South America, now finds itself flying in increasingly competitive skies.

At worst, all three dynamics combined could potentially produce a security dilemma for Latin American states, wherein efforts by one country to increase its military power fuel insecurity in its neighbors, prompting them to rearm and fueling a vicious cycle of militarization.

Running Faster, Still Falling Behind

Thinking about rearmament dynamics in the Americas today, I’m reminded of the short-lived, but dramatic naval arms race that gripped South America in the early 20th century. Buoyed by high commodity prices and eager to assert itself on the global stage, Brazil purchased two dreadnoughts from British shipyards in 1907. The first of these ships, Minas Gerais, would (very briefly) have the honor of being the most powerful warship in the world, boasting a dozen 12-inch guns.

In response, Argentina and Chile each ordered a pair of dreadnoughts of their own, with Buenos Aires notably opting to buy its ships from the U.S. yards. But the arms race cooled off before it truly began. A 1910 mutiny by Brazilian sailors against corporal punishment and demeaning conditions known as the “Revolt of the Lash,” along with economic slowdowns in all three countries dampened enthusiasm for runaway naval buildup. In Chile’s case, the outbreak of World War I offered a convenient opportunity to offload a costly investment, and Santiago allowed the British to purchase both of its dreadnoughts for service in the Royal Navy.

Argentina also tried to sell back its warships to the United States, but both were considered obsolete designs. Brazil offered the Minas Gerais and her sister ship Sao Paulo for service in the British cause in 1917, but the offer was rebuffed as the two lacked modern fire control systems. The real naval arms race taking place in the north Atlantic had left South America in the dust.

Even in the event that U.S. provocations and local tensions trigger a wave of defense spending by Latin American countries, it seems likely that the region as a whole will remain behind the cutting edge of defense technology. Under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela spent billions building up its armed forces. But the systems it acquired, like the Russian S-300VM air defenses, probably the best anti-air systems in all of Latin America, were not one, but two generations behind Russia’s state of the art by January 3, 2026.

In addition, we shouldn’t forget that militaries, at their core, are comprised of people and are constrained most critically by the trainings and values instilled into their members. All the fancy kit in the world will make little difference if the soldiers responsible for operating it don’t know how to use it effectively, as was the case in Venezuela this year, or if inhumane disciplinary conditions cause them to revolt, as was the case in Brazil in 1910.

For Latin American militaries looking to meet the defense challenges of the 21st century, relying on flashy, expensive arms purchases is almost never an effective strategy. Governments looking to truly advance their military capabilities should focus on practical reforms to their procurement processes, alongside training and doctrinal reform to ensure that the money they spend on their armed forces can go further than it does today.

The Illusion of Interstate Peace

To be clear, I still regard the possibility of a major arms race kicking off in Latin America as a remote one. Its governments face significant fiscal constraints that limit their abilities to make significant investments in military buildups. The region also has strong norms around peaceful resolution of disputes that offer plenty of off-ramps for interstate tensions.

Still, we should not take on faith alone that the Americas will be spared interstate conflict. Peace is in constant need of maintenance, all the more so when the clouds of war seem to be gathering around the world.

There are also structural factors that may be tilting the correlation of military forces towards instability. The ascendancy of one-way attack drones and other cheap precision munitions is tilting the offense-defense balance in favor of the attacker, while allowing bad actors to hold at risk infrastructure and populations deep inside other countries’ territories. Criminal groups seem to have recognized this fact, and are expanding their use of weaponized drones in a crude imitation of the tactics used by Russia and Iran.

Even on a comparatively shoestring military budget it seems likely that a malicious state actors could acquire the means to threaten their neighbors.

Indeed, Venezuela’s saber rattling towards Guyana between 2023 and 2025 had some of the makings of such a conflict. While the ability of the Venezuelan armed forces to actually invade and occupy the Essequibo was always fanciful, Maduro’s use of missile-toting fast attack boats and hybrid criminal-political actors along the border allowed Venezuela to threaten significant costs for Guyana’s economy and political stability at relatively little expense for Caracas.

Getting to a full-scale regional conflagration will still require a lot of things to go wrong, but I could see the possibility of militarized border disputes potentially spiraling into something resembling the Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru that raged for about a month in early 1995. I could imagine a world in which one country ends up stealing a march on its rivals in the domain of cheap precision strike, and could be tempted by dreams of quick, decisive war.

In a more dangerous world, preserving Latin America as a zone of peace will require more active engagement and maintenance.

The document does an excellent job dissecting the multitude of humanitarian and legal concerns that flow from this statistic, and I recommend you read it before continuing with this post as I’m going to focus less on those aspects, and more on why drones have proven so deadly in Haiti.

It’s hard to find good granular data on drone use, especially by nonstate actors. Nevertheless, a new research report by the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) sheds some light on how uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) have been employed in Mexico. Drawing on data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), the NCITE researchers identified a total of 221 drone incidents in Mexico between 2021 and 2025, resulting in 77 recorded fatalities. In other words, on average one person ends up dead for every three drone attacks in Mexico. In Haiti, each drone operation on average results in close to nine fatalities.

In Colombia as well, data on drone attacks is hard to come by, but the New York Times, citing Defense Minister Pedro Sánchez, reported that the country had sustained the “equivalent to 333 successful attacks” in 2025, resulting in over 100 police and military “casualties.” These figures are fuzzier, but they also come out to about a three-to-one drone attack-to-casualty ratio.

I’m sure that total number of attacks and casualties in both Mexico and Colombia is much larger than what’s been picked up in the open source, but I’m not sure the number an order of magnitude larger, which it would have to be to stack up against Haiti. Now add to that the fact that the population of Haiti is roughly a tenth of Mexico’s and you start to get a feel for just how extensive this campaign has been.

But why have drone attacks in Haiti been so much more lethal than what we’re seeing elsewhere in the hemisphere?

One explanation is that this is a function of the high population density and urban terrain of Port-au-Prince and its surroundings. This means errors in targeting can be much more deadly if explosive-armed drones end up detonating on crowded streets, in residential buildings, or near schoolyards.

But I think even more important is the fact that, in Haiti, weaponized drones are the purview of a specialized “Task Force” exclusively dedicated to their use. This Task Force was announced in March 2025 by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé and would operate as an arm of the Haitian government, but was supported by a team of private military contractors supplied by Erik Prince’s latest venture known as Vectus Global. These forces are focused almost exclusively on drone operations, allowing them to build up lethal expertise in the use of these weapons.

One lesson from the past five years of combat UAS history seems to be that, while it’s relatively easy to get started using drones, it’s hard to use drones effectively. That seems to be the case in Ukraine especially, where both Moscow and Kyiv have concentrated UAS expertise in a number of specialized units. It turns out that while your average infantryman may benefit from having a spare drone or two around, becoming a true master of drone tactics takes time.

We see this happening in Mexico too with groups like the CJNG employing custom “Droneros” units and actively recruiting Colombian veterans of the war in Ukraine to gain their expertise. This trend is borne out to an extent in the NCITE report, where CJNG-attributed drone attacks average one fatality per every two incidents, making them 42 percent more lethal than the overall trend.

Video of a drone strike on an evangelical seminary in Haiti.

My hypothesis therefore is that the presence of dedicated drone operators, lack of accountability for civilian casualties, and complex human and urban terrain in Port-au-Prince and its environs have produced a lethal mixture in Haiti. Drones have in this way introduced a new vector for civilian victimization, but without necessarily promising an end to the country’s cascading security and political crises.

Is Unrestricted Drone Warfare Working?

Whether its quadcopters in Haiti or Tomahawks in Iran, the Trump Administration and its backers seem enchanted with the idea of bombing to win. Setting aside the major ethical and rights considerations Human Rights Watch lays out with respect to this strategy in Haiti, it’s worth interrogating whether the drone campaign has actually broken the power of Haitian gangs.

In theory, drones offer a convenient way for security forces to strike at gangs without exposing their own personnel to retaliation. The ability of quadcopters to maneuver between buildings also allows for precision-guided strikes previously the sole purview of more advanced militaries.

Furthermore, unlike in Mexico and Colombia, it also seems as though Haiti’s gangs have been slow to acquire and use drones themselves. Despite claims by gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier that he could “kill anyone in the country” with an explosive UAV, criminals have either struggled to access significant numbers of drones, or are bottlenecked when it comes to expertise. This makes the air war even more lopsided in favor of the government, even as the state remains on the back foot when it comes to territorial control.

The chart below maps the total number of events coded as political violence by the ACLED. While there does appear to be a drop in total events following the introduction of armed drones in March 2025, the trend hasn’t been particularly consistent.

Digging into the data a bit more and the total number of political violence events has declined across the board since the drone campaign was launched. The sole exception to this trend was the “Explosions/Remote Violence” category, which spiked from zero events in the March 2024-February 2025 period, to 93 in the subsequent 12 months, mainly because the drone attacks themselves are recorded in the data.

These data are borne out by reports that security in and around Port-au-Prince is slowly but surely improving. Without reliable countermeasures to drones, gangs have been forced to retreat from neighborhoods, allowing the Haitian National Police to move in. Early on in the drone campaign, The Guardian interviewed a number of people who seemed willing to give the benefit of the doubt if it meant a reprieve from escalating gang violence, one particularly evocative example for me was the following: ““For us … drones are entirely proportionate to the level of weaponry the gangs possess,” said Rosy Auguste Ducéna, a respected human rights advocate who works for RNDDH [the National Human Rights Defense Network] in Port-au-Prince.”

However, this early optimism has almost certainly been tarnished as the collateral damage continues to mount. This included an attack on a gang leader’s birthday party on September 20, 2025, that caught multiple civilians in the blast, including young children who were promised gifts if they attended the celebration. Abuses committed in the name of security and stabilization are not new for Haiti, but the seeming lack of any effort by the government to reckon with civilian casualties is a deeply worrying trend nonetheless.

It’s also worth noting that reports of battles and civilian victimization episodes still number in the hundreds. The news coming out of Haiti remains pessimistic about the government’s ability to combat gangs, and according to the latest data from InSight Crime, Haiti’s homicide rate in 2025 was about 10 percent higher than in 2024. If drones were the silver bullet to Haiti’s violence problem, we would hope to see more conclusive results a year in.

It turns out however, that as with conventional war, you cannot assassinate your way to stability. While the drone task force has excelled at raining death from above, the central problem continues to be that the Haitian state lacks to ability to take and hold territory. Drones can clear out gangs from a region, but without boots on the ground to stabilize and restore order, other armed actors will rush to fill the vacuum.

This all suggests that the drone task force has failed to deliver the kind of transformative security gains Haiti needs and has come with the side effect of exposing civilians to yet another form of extrajudicial violence. Relief may be on the way, with the impending deployment of the multinational Gang Suppression Force (GSF) that may be able to actually lock in territorial gains, but how this new entity will interact with existing security forces, especially the drone operators, remains to be seen.

Tenth Time’s The Charm

Haiti is currently waiting with a mix of trepidation and hope for the arrival of the 5,500-strong UN-authorized but operationally independent GSF. The force will pick up where the beleaguered and perennially understaffed and under resourced Multinational Security Support Mission left off. In doing so, it will also join the ranks of several international missions like it that have came and left Haiti over the past decades.

The GSF could provide Haiti with the physical presence it currently lacks. While the total number of personnel is still far below what would be necessary to secure the whole country, it can put a meaningful dent in gang controlled neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and buy much needed breathing room for the country’s beleaguered interim government.

However, the GSF will not be the only show in town, as the continued presence of private military and security contractors adds to an already dizzyingly complex strategic picture.

According to public reports, the Haitian government signed two agreements with Vectus Global, the first a one-year contract for training and technical assistance standing up an armed drone task force. The second agreement allegedly grants Prince’s group a 10-year contract to collect customs and tax revenue in exchange for assisting the Haitian government with border and infrastructure security.

I’ve yet to hear a satisfying answer as to how the GSF will work with either Vectus Global or the government’s drone task force. When it comes to the use of armed drones, in a worst-case scenario, the existence of parallel chains of command could result in green on blue friendly fire episodes. Continued drone strikes that result in civilian casualties might also degrade the legitimacy of the GSF in the eyes of the Haitian populace, who have much cause for skepticism towards even the best-intentioned international forces.

In the case of Prince’s contractors, I will be curious to see how they interact with the company of GSF troops that is to be deployed to the Haiti-Dominican Republic border. If both forces are able to work together on joint security, it could be a meaningful boon to curb the flow of weapons that crosses the border on land. However, the two forces may well find themselves clashing over methods and jurisdictional questions, with no clear authority to adjudicate these questions.

As a final reflection, I wonder what the nature of the conflict in Haiti portends for other countries pursuing a more militarized strategy towards gangs in the Western Hemisphere.

Military analyst Jack Watling has argued that the future of conventional war will increasingly feature grinding urban sieges like those we have seen in eastern Ukraine. I wonder whether the fight against organized crime will similarly become (even more) urban in the coming years. Not only are cities lucrative extortion and logistics hubs, they may end up being one of the few places where non-state armed actors can hide effectively from increasingly pervasive aerial surveillance and strike assets.

When long-endurance UAVs can scour every inch of the Amazon, and satellites can beam high-fidelity real-time video coverage to military targeters, the concrete jungle could be the last, best, sanctuary for criminals and weak irregular combatants. Haiti demonstrates however, that even in the age of cheap precision, urban combat remains lethal for civilians, all the more so when international norms around necessity and proportionality are being systematically stripped away.

Don’t get me wrong, the airport is fine, but compared to Guatemala’s neighbors, La Aurora feels aged, and together with the traffic getting to and from, reminded me of LaGuardia circa 2015. Landing there you would be hard-pressed to realize you’re in the capital city of Central America’s largest economy.

The airport is also too small to be a major transit hub, but from where it is currently nestled in the heart of Guatemala City, there’s no place for it to expand. Meanwhile the surrounding volcanoes and mountains mean transatlantic flights can’t take off fully fueled and need to stop over in San Salvador before continuing.

With La Aurora hemmed in, Guatemala could simply build a new and improved airport outside the city, like Honduras has with its (really nice) Palmerola International Airport. But doing so would require expanding the roads that lead into the city proper, or else accepting that Guatemala City’s congestion problem (the worst in Central America) will become even more intractable.

La Aurora airport embodies Guatemala’s development challenges in miniature. During my time in the country, the sense I got was that, if the country could just get its infrastructure right, the rest would follow.

The country has strong domestic industries, a large and young population by Central American standards, access to both Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and access to U.S. markets thanks to the CAFTA-DR trade agreement. There is a real sense of dynamism, as well as a fair amount of sophistication that came through in my meetings.

Some would say the real thing Guatemala is lacking is governance, and the presence of corrupt, entrenched rentiers is the real reason nothing gets built. To be clear, corruption is clearly a colossal challenge in Guatemala, where current President Bernardo Arévalo had to fend off a slow-moving coup attempt by the so-called “Pacto de Corruptos” that sought to prevent him from taking office.

Unfortunately, it seems like Arévalo’s administration has fixed neither corruption nor infrastructure. While the government has instituted stricter requirements for transparency in contracting, networks of graft remain firmly in place, often run by career bureaucrats who remain firmly ensconced while ministers cycle in and out. In the meantime, new entrants struggle to navigate mounds of paperwork and compliance requirements.

One person I spoke with told the story of how, after heavy rains inundated a stretch of road, it took several months for the government to get the permits sorted to allow a construction company to fix the segment. At that point, most people would have been more interested in getting the road back up and running than ensuring all the contracting was above board.

I’m sympathetic to the challenges Arévalo faces. He was dealt an extremely tough hand and has managed to play it expertly. But the mismatch between expectations and reality was acute while I was in Guatemala, and the demand for real transformative change, or at least the appearance of it, could produce even more political volatility as the country gears up for elections next year.

A Nation of Chambers and Councils

Several of our meetings were with the private sector, and let me tell you, Guatemalans love their industry associations. For any sector you can conceive of, there’s a chamber, council, or association. Most prominent of all is these is the Guatemalan Chamber of Industry, which by my count has at least 50 sub-councils focusing on coffee roasting, mining, candy and chewing gum, and PVC pipe manufacturing.

Guatemala is a relatively small country, and that means the business community is even smaller. Combined with the layers upon layers of industry associations, councils, and chambers, that means it’s fairly easy to get a read on what the private sector is thinking as a whole.

The Guatemalan business community is also fairly introspective about the challenges their industries face. For example, I’ve heard countless countries pitch themselves as potential hubs for semiconductor manufacturing, and was fully prepared to hear something similar in Guatemala from executives hoping to leverage their country’s ties to Taiwan to get in on the chip business. In this regard, I was pleasantly surprised to hear one interviewee remark that Guatemala needed to focus on consumer electronics assembly before it could even begin to think about climbing the lowest rungs of the semiconductor value chain.

Another common theme was that, in the absence of government infrastructure development, private companies are stepping in out of necessity. Especially when it comes to roads, there has been a surge in private road construction in Guatemala. That’s a fine stopgap measure, but the benefits from these efforts are unlikely to be shared widely, and if anything could have the effect of boxing out competitors who can’t afford to set up their own parallel state.

But any construction is better than no construction, especially since Guatemala’s growth potential remains bottlenecked at every turn by infrastructure. Guatemala at the moment has essentially two functional commercial ports, Puerto Quetzal on the Pacific coast, and Puerto Barrios on the Atlantic. With annual throughput capacity of 340,000 and 200,000 containers respectively these ports are not particularly large (in 2025 the port of Cristóbal, Panama alone moved more cargo than both ports combined), and operations at both are controlled by powerful longshoremen’s unions. The average waiting time for a ship to dock at either port is around 90 days.

Linking the Pacific and Atlantic coasts is the CA-9 highway, which is just two lanes wide for most of its length. Even where the road widens to four lanes as it passes through Guatemala City, the increased volume of cars there causes commercial trucks to move at a snail’s pace.

There are a couple of legislative projects that are showing promise for infrastructure rejuvenation. The Priority Road Infrastructure Act established a new directorate under the Ministry of Communications, Infrastructure and Housing entrusted with a mandate to fast-track new roads and maintenance. Unfortunately, that entity is behind schedule in getting up and running owing to uncertainties over lines of authority, composition, and the fact the 2025 budget was approved before the bill was passed, creating uncertainty as to where the 30 million quetzales the bill appropriated would come from.

A new law on ports currently being considered would attempt to reduce the power of longshoremen’s unions and make it easier for private actors to develop new ports. If passed, this could help drive investment in port infrastructure, and open up new export opportunities with more specialized terminals for agricultural goods or bulk minerals.

Still, this approach runs the risk of transforming the country into a world of private ports, connected by private roads to private companies, helping a limited number of firms boost exports, but not necessarily creating conditions for broader-based economic growth.

Our Man Arévalo

Another takeaway for me was the extent to which Guatemala has quietly given the United States everything it could possibly ask for. Guatemala has accepted more deportees than any other country, it eagerly signed an agreement on tariffs and trade and has kept its mouth firmly shut about the United States’ lethal boat strikes or the capture of Maduro. Arévalo has even kept the Guatemalan embassy to Israel in Jerusalem after Jimmy Morales moved it there in 2018.

In some respects, this strategy seems to be working pretty well for Guatemala. Arévalo has avoided any major blowups with Trump that could give his opponents room to further undermine his government. Guatemala has also hung on to a sizeable chunk of the remaining USAID money, according to some people I spoke with, as much as 85 percent of the remaining funds for Latin America and the Caribbean are being directed towards Guatemala. Of course, the overall pie is much smaller, but it’s a pretty impressive feat for Guatemala all things considered.

However, other people I spoke to still felt jilted by the United States. Guatemala has missed out on the love-fest that leaders like Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele have received. Even Gustavo Petro managed to finagle a surprisingly chummy one-on-one with Trump in the Oval Office. Several people were confused as to why Guatemala wasn’t invited to the upcoming “Shield of the Americas” summit in Miami that representatives from Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Paraguay, El Salvador, Ecuador, Argentina, Honduras, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia and Chile will all be attending.

The simple answer is Arévalo doesn’t fit the part. An academic by trade elected on a social-democratic platform simply doesn’t play to the Mar-a-Lago crowd the way El Salvador’s swaggering millennial dictator does. Never mind the fact that Bukele has been far more eager to cozy up to Beijing than Guatemala, which remains a dutiful ally to Taiwan.

Ultimately, I think the status quo is ideal for Arévalo. Guatemala gets to reap the benefits of cooperation with the United States, while the president is neither drawn into a diplomatic feud with Washington nor exposed to attacks from the left for visibly bending the knee to Trump.

However, with elections coming up in 2027, staying out of the limelight may no longer be an option, and Guatemala’s more conservative elites will likely be eager for a candidate who can sweet-talk Trump and win accolades from online MAGA influencers. My hunch therefore is next year’s campaigning season will feature several candidates who are jockeying for the White House’s endorsement. Trump himself may be eager to continue his streak of kingmaking Latin American presidents.

But appealing to partisan politics in the United States is a strategy that at best pays out half the time. A friendlier relationship with the Trump administration does not guarantee new economic opportunities, and by the time the next president is inaugurated in Guatemala, the United States will be gearing up for its own election season.

Security without Mano Dura?

Originally, our visit was scheduled for late January, only to be postponed at the last minute when Guatemala declared a 30-day “state of siege” triggered by violence tied to the Barrio 18 gang in the country’s prisons. In response, criminals rioted and took hostages in the prisons, set up roadblocks in parts of Guatemala City, and killed nearly a dozen police officers.

Coverage of states of exception these days is often colored by the experience of El Salvador, which just extended its one-month state of exception for the 48th consecutive month since 2022. In reality, states of exception often come and go without much in the way of fanfare or results.

In Guatemala’s case, the 30-day state of siege was exactly that, lapsing on February 16 with a declaration by the government that violence had been brought under control and the order restored to the prison system. While the limited state of exception is probably a good example of fighting crime without sacrificing democracy, it seems far too soon to tell whether the limited campaign will have a lasting effect on security.

Guatemala’s homicide rate in 2025 was 16.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, slightly less than Costa Rica, which is confronting a wave of criminal violence, and more nearly 40 percent lower than neighboring Honduras. It has been trending downwards over the past decade, though with a brief post-Covid bump.

Most of the criminal violence is driven by street-level gangs like Barrio 18 and MS-13, who finance themselves mainly through extortion. While both are officially designated foreign terrorist organizations, they are both poor and poorly armed compared to the region’s illicit apex predators like the CJNG and PCC.

Nevertheless, during our time in Guatemala City, the overwhelming impression was that security wasn’t great, but remains “good enough” even during the height of the state of siege. Indeed, some of our interviewees even teased us a bit for our skittishness upon learning we postponed in January. “Nothing has really changed” one person messaged, “but I completely understand.”

Guatemala City features the usual urban security markers, lots of private security, barbed wire and entryways inset from the street. Of course, I was flitting between nicest of the nice parts, but still it felt like the city has a more relaxed and at-ease energy than other spots in Central America.

There’s reason to believe the current equilibrium won’t hold up for long though. Mexican cartels have increasingly penetrated Guatemala to secure trafficking routes. Indeed, after the death of El Mencho, Guatemala deployed military personnel to its border as a precaution against potential CJNG retaliation there. The introduction of new and hardier strands of coca plant has also introduced cocaine production to neighboring Honduras, fueling new criminal dynamics that Central America’s security forces could be ill-prepared to confront.

Another, more structural, challenge arises from the fact that Guatemala is among least-urbanized countries in Latin America, with just 56 percent of the population living in cities compared to a regional average of 81 percent. Coupled with the fact that the median age is around 25 and emigration has slowed dramatically since 2025, internal rural-to-urban migration could still be a big problem.

As urban populations grow and outstrip the ability of the government to provide services or enforce property rights, we tend to see organized crime explode. That’s the case right now in Guatemala City where Zone 18, the most populous and violent of the city’s 22 internal subdivisions.

Beyond Guatemala City, regional centers like Quetzaltenango, Cobán, and Huehuetenango are all poised to experience population booms over the next decade. This is all the more reason for Guatemala to get infrastructure right, if urban populations spike without the accompanying security apparatus or built environment to sustain them, the country could face a wave of violence that will be difficult to staunch.

In the interest of not ending on this pessimistic note, I should end instead by saying that I truly had a wonderful time in Guatemala City, and my one regret is not being able to take in more of the country between meetings. Those of you who know me know that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Guatemala, and the country has always been my first love as a Latin America analyst. The weather I returned to in DC this week certainly has me missing the Land of Eternal Spring even more.

In response, CJNG members erected more than 250 roadblocks in at least 20 states, and engaged in targeted attacks on security forces, reportedly slaying 25 members of the National Guard in the state of Jalisco alone. Nevertheless, for now, the violence seems to have been a temporary eruption, rather than a sustained challenge to the Mexican state. The question now is whether a successor can be found, or if the CJNG will disintegrate into brutal civil war like the rival Sinaloa Cartel.

The operation has also reinvigorated debates around the so-called “kingpin strategy” referring to the security policy championed by former President Felipe Calderón that focused on capturing or killing high-profile crime bosses. There is a robust body of evidence suggesting that the elimination of criminal leadership does not meaningfully reduce violence. If anything, kingpin strategies could increase conflict, as would-be successors vie for control, and use brutal tactics to signal their credibility and resolve.

If those trendlines hold, insecurity in Mexico could spike in the coming months, and the Sheinbaum administration, along with the U.S. administration that cheered the operation on, will seemingly have taken one step forward, only to move two steps back.

But in today’s post I argue that, at least from a U.S. perspective, violence may not be the key metric. Instead, borrowing a bit from the evolution of U.S. strategy during the Global War on Terror (GWoT), I think Washington’s primary goal is to degrade the capabilities of Mexican armed groups, especially when it comes to their ability to move drugs, people, and potentially gunmen across the border, as well as their ability to mount a large-scale challenge to the Mexican state.

Under this framework, a more fragmented criminal landscape comprised of local bosses fighting over neighborhoods rather than multinational smuggling networks could still be a win in the eyes of this White House.

The Kingpin Strategy and High-Value Targeting

“If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting” – Gen. Curtis LeMay

Over the GWoT’s 25-year history, the United States has gradually transitioned from pursuing stabilization as the solution to transnational terrorism, to optimizing for threat reduction. If you care about stabilization, the war on terror seems to have manifestly failed. ISIS still exists, and is spreading its tentacles far and wide, Al Qaeda still exists, and the Taliban have come to control Afghanistan again to boot. The territories the United States hoped to bring democracy and prosperity to remain fragile and conflict-prone.

However, if you care about threat reduction, the ability of terror cells to pull off mass-casualty attacks in the west on the scale of 9/11 seems to be greatly diminished. Indeed, this September the United States will have gone 25 years without a single terrorist attack even scratching the scale of September 11, 2001. It seems like the United States has, in this regard, made good on its pledge of “never again” (on U.S. soil, that is).

For the most part, the United States has achieved this by pivoting from full-scale invasion and occupation to remote violence, emphasizing in particular high-value terrorist leaders. Today, most non-specialists would be hard-pressed to name the current leader of ISIS. Since the 2019 killing of the group’s first leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the organization is now on its fifth caliph in about seven years. Of course, ISIS remains a potent threat, and its franchisees in places like Afghanistan and the Maghreb are gaining ground, but the core group itself is a shadow of the force that seemed on the verge of overrunning Iraq in 2015.

Other countries have also had success pursuing leadership decapitation strategies for counterterror. Look for instance to the Basque separatist Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) terror cell. Over the course of its nearly six-decade history, ETA was reportedly responsible for more than 850 deaths, with the heyday of its operations in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, the group declared, and subsequently broke, numerous ceasefires with the Spanish government.

However, Spain’s domestic counter-terror capabilities had grown substantially thanks to international assistance and the heightened securitization of domestic terrorism in the GWoT era. By 2009, 277 alleged members of ETA had been arrested, including the group’s entire leadership council and several successor commanders. By 2011, the group was estimated to have just 50 members. By 2018, ETA announced it would unilaterally demobilize, formally admitting what had already been known for years at that point.

There were other factors at play in ETA’s dissolution, but perpetual leadership churn was undoubtedly a major component. This case also demonstrates how leadership targeting can grind down a group’s cohesion and will to fight over time.

There are, of course, key differences between organized crime and terror cells. The latter are explicitly politically motivated, and can accordingly be convinced or compelled to abandon their political goals through negotiation or force. Criminal groups are primarily profit-motivated, and will continue looking for sources of illicit revenue for as long as they are able. This makes organized crime more adaptable to leadership decapitation as these groups have a broader set of strategies they can pursue in the face of state pressure.

Still, the basic logic of high-value targeting should apply for the simple fact that running a transnational criminal syndicate is hard work. Navigating internal power struggles, keeping track of illicit financial flows, and evading detection by the state all at once is no mean feat, and most people who try to break into the game end up in prison or worse. While there may be a near-infinite supply of people who would like to run a cartel of their own, the bench of talent that can run a cartel well is likely relatively shallow.

As a result, I don’t think it’s fair to say that any strategy that focuses on high-value targeting is doomed to fail. Rather, I think that it is a question of what metrics you are using to measure success. Leadership decapitation might cause groups to splinter into rival factions rather than disband altogether, but it also follows that smaller groups focused on fighting with one another are less capable than a single large criminal network.

I will freely admit that this probably isn’t as effective at decreasing violence at the local level, and without a more comprehensive security strategy it never will be. However, it probably is effective at reducing cartels’ ability to orchestrate major attacks like we saw on Sunday. Other key elements of cartel power, like their ability to manufacture improvised armored fighting vehicles, secure access to high-powered weaponry, and recruit foreign mercenaries are also probably degraded as the ranks of senior leadership thin out.

But even these gains require sustained pressure to bear fruit. Mexico’s problem for the past two decades seems to be that the government has applied just enough pressure on the cartels to foment leadership struggles and a Darwinian race among cartels to become as violent as possible to outcompete one another, but never managing to sustain the pace of operations needed to actually disorient criminal command and control.

Maintaining Operational Tempo

The death of El Mencho is likely to increase, rather than decrease, pressure on Mexico from the United States to take out more cartel leaders in the coming months. Indeed, Trump explicitly claimed credit for the operation in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the possibility of unilateral U.S. military intervention continues to hang over Mexico’s head.

Mexico could still turn this situation to its advantage if it is able to apply sustained pressure against CJNG leadership.

The most important missing piece of the puzzle for Mexico’s fight against the cartels is tempo. Currently, analysts point to two scenarios for the post-Mencho CJNG, either a relatively smooth succession, in which case the group returns largely to the previous status quo, or descent into a bloody civil war. Experts with more insight into internal CJNG dynamics than myself have speculated on who the key power brokers could be in either scenario.

But think for a minute if, instead of just killing El Mencho, the government was able to arrest or kill key lieutenants like Juan Carlos González Valencia, El Jardinero, and R2 within a 72-hour period. Suddenly, command and control becomes much harder, the arm of the state seems longer, and individual bosses start to fear they could be next.

There are signs this could be happening, albeit at a slower pace than my hypothetical. The CJNG lieutenant known as “El Tuli” who was reportedly charged with orchestrating the February 22 attacks was killed in a confrontation with Mexican security forces.

My hunch however is that Mexican Special Operations Forces (SOF) are the most important bottleneck to the country’s ability to maintain high-intensity operations (more on that in a future piece). While Mexico’s elite troops clearly showcased their capabilities with the Mencho operation, there are only so many units that can go after the most brutal, and heavily protected, cartel bosses.

The total number of special forces in Mexico is likely in the low single-digit thousands, but the real the number of personnel who can be entrusted with kicking down doors and taking the fight to the most well-protected criminal leaders is almost certainly less than that. Every casualty incurred as part of a counter-cartel raid therefore represents a loss that is costly and time-consuming to replace. Meanwhile, Mexico’s small air force means that other methods of precision strike are unavailable to the government, the only solution for now at least is boots on the ground.

Orchestrating these raids is time-consuming and inherently risky. In 2023 the units that captured Sinaloa Cartel leader Ovidio Guzmán suffered a total of 10 killed in action, representing about 5 percent of the force. Current reports maintain that no military personnel were injured during the attack on El Mencho, but in 2015 a previous effort to capture the CJNG leader saw cartel members down a military helicopter with shoulder-fired rockets, killing several more security forces.

An article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times also described in depth how the CJNG had built concentric layers of defense around El Mencho’s hideout, employing landmines and hundreds of heavily armed guards. Had operational security been compromised, it could have easily become a grinding firefight.

Another potential limitation is intelligence, I think it’s plausible that the Mexican armed forces don’t actually know where many cartel bosses are, or at least not with the degree of precision to plan a major strike operation around.

Here I hope the United States is beginning to play a much greater role. We’ve seen Pentagon, DHS, and intelligence community all step up their collection on cartels since 2025, and I would expect by this point the United States has built a fairly substantive picture of the major players and their bases of operations at this point. The best-case scenario would be for the United States to continue providing enabling intelligence and training, while Mexico remains the tactical lead.

Takedowns of figures like El Mencho can also help generate a self-reinforcing intelligence cycle. High-profile raids on senior leadership cause lower echelons to scramble, and start communicating with one another. If those communications can be intercepted, they could reveal the locations of other nodes in the chain of command. But being able to successfully, intercept, exploit, and execute on this intelligence a rapid clip is immensely challenging.

Building this kind of infrastructure was vital to the success of Plan Colombia. With U.S. assistance, Colombian forces over time became adept at raiding one insurgent camp, collecting intelligence from the materials they seized, and feeding them into their military intelligence system to identify subsequent targets, a self-propagating cycle that decisively shifted initiative to the state.

The final hurdle is what I’ll term broadly as “political will.” Mexico’s ruling Morena party faces numerous allegations of being in bed with organized crime, and although I am highly skeptical of allegations (including those made by President Trump) that Sheinbaum herself is bought and paid for by organized crime, her control over security policy at the local level is far from absolute. Add to this the difficulty of waging war against dozens of independent, increasingly decentralized, criminal networks at once and it seems increasingly unlikely that Mexico has crossed some internal Rubicon when it comes to counter-cartel strategy.

I am also conscious that I’ve framed things in this piece in fairly simplistic “government vs. cartels” terms. Criminal power and political power tend to overlap, clash, and recombine in unpredictable ways. It’s hard to tease out the full implications of this in a blog post, so I will suffice it to say that clashes between the Mexican central government and one cartel do not necessarily imply a similar approach will be taken towards other criminal networks.

Security Snake Oil

I remain optimistic about Claudia Sheinbaum’s ability to get security policy right. She enjoys strong approval ratings, ironclad majorities in the legislature, and judiciary (whether you like it or not), giving her broad remit when it comes to determining counter-cartel strategy.

The Mexican public wants to see the power of organized crime broken, and even the supporters of her predecessor’s conciliatory approach to cartel violence have conducted an about-face to applaud the killing of El Mencho. Meanwhile the United States is eagerly cheering on a more muscular approach to organized crime, as long as the White House can take some of the credit from time to time.

But political will has to be paired with strategy. I’ve written before about how it seems frustratingly difficult to actually curb criminal violence once nonstate groups have reached a certain level of power and influence. The fact that most of the unrest following El Mencho’s death seems to have petered out within 48 hours risks lulling both Mexico and the United States into a false sense of security. The goal should not be for violence to simply return to the status quo ante, the goal should be to meaningfully curb CJNG’s power and influence.

The core issue with Mexico’s historical use of the kingpin strategy was that it tried to end-run the hard work of increasing state security capacity and territorial control. The hope was that with a few well-placed leadership decapitations, the main body of the cartels would disintegrate. That approach has clearly failed, but it remains appealing to policymakers willing to accept flashy headlines as an acceptable substitute for strategy.

While I can’t independently verify this individual’s claims, his story is not beyond the pale. Since the early 2010s, thousands of Colombians have gone abroad to serve in all manner of conflicts, both righteous and reproachable.

Colombians can be found today on the front lines of Ukraine’s grinding struggle against Russian aggression, defending businessmen in Latin American urban centers, and serving as instructors for the Libyan military. In fact, the same individual might end up doing all three of these things over the course of their mercenary career, moving between global hot spots in search of increasingly lucrative contracts.

A watershed moment came in 2021 when Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, kicking off the political and security crisis that continues to engulf that nation. 26 Colombians were arrested in connection to the killing, mainly ex-soldiers who had been brough into the country as private security contractors, drawing renewed attention to Colombia’s role in the global mercenary ecosystem.

In the years that followed several articles have shed light on the reasons for Colombian soldiers are in such high demand. A combination of U.S.-training, hands-on expertise, all at relatively low cost makes Colombian fighters desirable to a wide range of groups looking for hired guns. At home, a weak military pension system and extensive informal recruiting networks create powerful push factors for ex-soldiers to try out the mercenary lifestyle.

But these explanations offer only part of the puzzle. Colombia is no longer at war, and the pace of military operations has slowed down especially under President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” agenda. This seems like it would put a damper on demand for Colombian fighters, but the geographic scope of these soldiers of fortune has seemingly never been greater.

This is because the country’s mercenaries are no longer selling just their experience at home, but instead boast resumes speaking to a history of service in all manner of battlefield conditions. Like the CJNG gunman, many Colombian mercenaries are now veterans of three or more wars.

Fighters with experience in Ukraine especially seem to be in demand by groups looking to tap into expertise forged in the crucible of the world’s deadliest conventional war. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that the CJNG, which has been particularly active in recruiting Colombian fighters, has also been the fastest cartel to innovate when it comes to the use of armed drones.

The Call to Arms

With more than a quarter of a million active-duty personnel, Colombia’s military is the second-largest in South America, surpassed only by Brazil. In 2021 the New York Times reported about 10,000 military personnel retire each year across all branches. Most enlisted soldiers retire after two decades, receiving a pension that amounts to around $400 a month as thanks for their service. That’s not nothing, but for a 38, 40, or 45 year-old retiree who may have never held a civilian job and might now have a family to support, the prospects aren’t heartening.

Going abroad to work for private military contractors or cartels can be appealing for ex-soldiers. According to recruiters, some of these gigs can pay upwards of $4,000 a month, a full order of magnitude greater than what they might be collecting from pension disbursements. The work is dangerous, sure, but no more so than patrolling the same regions they’ve spent the last 20 years operating in.

At least, that’s what the recruiters say.

Word-of-mouth recruiting networks are key to explaining why Colombian mercenaries have spread so far and wide. While the country is not the only place in the Americas home to large numbers of underpaid and underemployed ex-military personnel, would-be mercenaries in Colombia have access to well-established and trusted channels for securing foreign employment.

These networks have their origins in Plan Colombia itself, when the United States brought in several contractors to assist in a host of activities, from training special forces, spraying chemical defoliants over coca fields. Working with military and security contractors exposed thousands of Colombian soldiers and police to the concept of mercenary work.

Then in 2005, the now-notorious U.S. private military contractor Blackwater began recruiting ex-military and police forces to deploy as building security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Chris Dalby has documented, this operation was set up under the nose of the U.S. government, and ultimately earned the PMC a $42 million fine. In 2009, Blackwater went legit with its efforts and stood up a formal recruiting arm in Colombia to funnel personnel to its operations in the Middle East.

Demand for Colombian mercenaries continued to grow when Blackwater founder Erik Prince launched a new venture known as Reflex Responses (R2) based in and backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Dozens of Colombians were among the first recruits to arrive for this project, and would eventually form the core of the UAE’s own bloodstained venture into power projection by proxy in places like Yemen and Sudan.

It’s also worth noting as well that at the time these networks were coalescing, Colombia seemed to be a rare example of successful counterinsurgency operations. While the country has suffered setbacks since, through the mid-2000s until the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, Colombian security forces were steadily gaining ground and beating back an insurgency which just a decade prior had seemed like it might be a genuine threat to the state’s existence. Compared to Iraqi or Afghan troops who also received extensive U.S. training during that same period, Colombian forces looked head and shoulders more competent, fighting and winning against their guerrilla foes thanks to their own skill at arms.

Starting in the early 2010s, path dependency starts to set in. While Blackwater also employed a number of ex-military personnel for other Latin American countries, especially Chile, the sheer number of Colombians who went abroad helped recruit their former squadmates and friends, who in turn recruited their own personal connections, growing both the absolute number, and proportional representation of Colombians in private armies and security details.

Personal ties could also help alleviate some of the issues associated with false or misleading recruitment campaigns. The war in Ukraine has generated no shortage of horror stories involving foreign nationals brought to the front lines without their knowledge or against their will. Many Cuban nationals fighting in the Russian armed forces were lured there with promises of civilian work, only to be coerced into signing enlistment contracts. Colombian veterans of multiple different conflict zones should, in theory, now be able to share knowledge with prospective recruits about which entities are trustworthy and which deployments are safer than others.

Of course, this system is far from perfect, and Colombian volunteers with Ukraine’s International Legion as well as soldiers contracting for the UAE have at various points reported being pressed into combat roles unexpectedly, receiving pay that is far below advertised levels, and enduring dehumanizing living and training conditions. Still, if the pipeline for Colombian mercenaries is even slightly better-vetted than that for other nationalities, it could have a big effect in terms of how many people are willing to sign up to fight abroad.

Darfur, Donbas, and Durango

It is difficult to fully describe the sheer range of activities and geographies where Colombian mercenaries are present today. Broadly speaking, the current loci of mercenary activity seem to be the Middle East and North Africa, and Ukraine. However, the nature of this work is transient, and evidence increasingly suggests a relatively free-flowing market for Colombian military entrepreneurs willing to hop from conflict to conflict plying their trade.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the UAE has continued to recruit heavily from ex-military and police ranks. According to one ex-Navy officer interviewed by the newspaper El País, since 2014 some 2,000 Colombians have been deployed to Yemen to assist with campaign against the Houthi rebels spearheaded by the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

More recently, in 2024 Colombian outlet La Silla Vacia, broke a story of a unit of at least 300 ex-soldiers fighting in Sudan on behalf of the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Some of these fighters were reportedly hired as security guards in Dubai, only to be shipped off to Sudan via circuitous routes. At least 20 have died there because of kamikaze drone attacks, while other Colombian fighters have reported that a large part of their job involves training RSF fighters, including child soldiers.

Since 2022, the outbreak of full-scale war in Ukraine has proven a magnet for foreign fighters of all stripes, including Colombians. According to the latest reports, as many as 7,000 Colombians may be serving with the Ukrainian armed forces, making them one of the largest contingents of foreign fighters in the country. While it’s easy to ascribe cynical motivations to fighters who sign up to fight for the UAE, in the case of Ukraine I believe there is genuine heroism on display.

Ukraine must rank near dead last on your list of best places to be a soldier, especially if you are simply looking for an easy payday. Still, stories abound of Colombian fighters who traveled to Ukraine, in some cases with nothing but the clothes on their backs, to help it resist foreign aggression. A friend of mine who visited Kyiv last year has often remarked of the plethora of Colombian flags that decorated a memorial to fallen foreign soldiers.

Given the pusillanimous approach of most Latin American governments to the war in Ukraine, it is inspiring to see citizens from the region standing behind their principles and risking their lives.

However, the influx of foreign fighters to Ukraine has clearly enabled some bad actors to sneak in as well. Last summer, Intelligence Online reported that a joint operation between Mexican and Ukrainian intelligence services had uncovered a scheme by cartels to send their members to Ukraine in order to receive training on drone warfare.

For Mexican cartels, Colombians veterans of Ukraine are the easiest way to gain access to a higher caliber of tactical knowledge, especially concerning the use of drones, mines, and fortifications. A shared language facilitates information transmission, and even the brutality of cartel warfare could be a welcome change of pace when compared to the grinding nature of frontline battle in Ukraine.

There is even a chance that Colombian mercenaries’ experiences abroad are now boomeranging back to haunt the country’s domestic security situation. While Mexican cartels have been using weaponized drones for years, Colombia has witnessed a rapid escalation in its fight against unmanned aerial systems since 2023. The country reported its first lethal drone incident in the summer of 2024, by that same time in 2025, dozens more attacks had struck at military bases and civilians alike.

In my opinion, there is a chance that the new drone skills picked up by Colombian mercenaries in Ukraine, and subsequently exported to Mexican criminal groups, have in turn been observed by armed groups like the ELN and FARC dissidents as templates for non-state drone tactics.

I don’t necessarily think there is direct transfer of knowledge happening here, but rather a kind of osmosis driven by social media and cartel propaganda videos. This would, I think in part, help explain why we’ve seen such a dramatic uptick in the sophistication of criminal drone tactics within Colombia, despite the fact that the country’s armed forces themselves are only just beginning to roll out UAV and counter-UAV equipment. For the time being however, this is just a hunch, I’d be eager to get your thoughts on the argument though.

A Golden Age for Mercenaries in the Americas

The above challenges have prompted calls within Colombia to outlaw mercenaryism or at least take steps to account for ex-military members travelling abroad. Whether such efforts actually end up driving legislative action or not, I worry it may be too little, too late as the Americas seem on the verge of a boom in demand for private security forces.

Part of the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine espoused in the 2025 National Security Strategy is a kind of new, sharper-edged vision for the war on drugs and crime in the Americas. That alone is a tall order, given the reach and power of the Western Hemisphere’s largest criminal networks. It seems likely that the United States won’t be able to achieve its desired security outcomes using military force alone, at least not without suffering major tradeoffs in terms of readiness in other regions.

If the past is any guide, when the United States wants to achieve certain security outcomes, but doesn’t want to put its own military on the line, it turns to contractors.

Take Venezuela for instance. Any U.S. company about to invest millions or even billions of dollars setting up shop in that country again is going to want to protect their investment from the multitude of armed criminal groups eager to extort foreign businesses with deep pockets. The Trump administration may be of little help for countries that fall prey to such intimidation. For all its early bluster, it seems unlikely that the United States will want to deploy its own armed forces to safeguard every potential investment.

However, at the same time the White House is likely more than happy to allow U.S. firms to contract their own private security to defend their new assets. Such an approach kills two birds with one stone, contributing to the stabilization mission in Venezuela without imposing the burden of public security on the U.S. military.

In this scenario, Colombian security personnel will find themselves in even greater demand, but other countries could also come to the fore.

One theory of mine is that we could see an uptick in Salvadoran private security contractors in the next couple of years. El Salvador’s military and police forces are far smaller than Colombia’s, so there may be issues getting a critical mass of recruits, but the Central American country’s newfound reputation for brutally effective counter-crime operations has won it a sizeable coterie of admirers.

Notably, the Wall Street Journal claimed that Salvadorans were already playing key roles in Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s operations in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Given the chummy relations between Prince and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, private military contracting could end up a convenient way for the country’s ex-military and police forces to feather their nests upon at the end of their service.

A golden age for mercenaries could deliver security gains in the short term, but as the recruitment of Colombians by the cartels in Mexico shows, criminals have their own means of soliciting hired guns. A less regulated, more opaque private security ecosystem bodes ill for hemispheric stability.

While Russia issued a strongly-worded condemnation of U.S. actions, and Chinese diplomats met with Maduro the day before his capture, neither country was willing to risk a showdown with the United States over an indebted and fragile dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere. This fits a broader pattern where neither Moscow nor Beijing have seemed willing to lift a finger to back their ostensible allies in Syria or Iran.

If I were a tin pot dictator looking for a lesson from the past two years, I think it would be that if you want someone to trade with in peacetime, call the Russians or Chinese, but if you want help for when the shooting starts, call the Cubans.

Of course, there are important reasons why Havana might be more invested in the Maduro regime’s survival than Beijing or Moscow. Venezuela was at best a convenient partner for Russia and China, but for Cuba maintaining a supply of Venezuelan oil was a matter of existential importance. But beyond pure material concerns, the presence of Cuban special forces in Venezuela is in line with the broader history of the Communist Party of Cuba’s extremely proactive foreign policy.

Cuban military advisors have traveled the world helping bolster anti-capitalist insurgencies, Cuban sympathizers have penetrated the highest rungs of the U.S. diplomatic corps and intelligence agencies, and the Cuban revolution exerts a powerful ideological pull within left and left-leaning spaces. Whether you think this is admirable or damnable, it is undeniable that the island nation has punched well above its weight on the global stage.

Cuba strikes me as one of the last bastions standing against what Francis Fukuyama deemed the end of history, a communist regime dedicated to third worldist revolution and willing to invest its blood, and what little treasure it has, in fighting the imperialist West wherever it can. But the rest of the world no longer thinks the same way, and the cracks in Cuba’s façade are increasingly apparent.

Cuba’s overseas medical missions, where the country sends its doctors abroad to provide care in exchange for money or in-kind support from the host country, are a good example of a program which is noble in theory. However, the program has faced accusations of labor exploitation as the island has come to rely on them more and more for income. Potentially tens of thousands of Cubans are also fighting on behalf of Russia in Ukraine, many of whom were recruited under false pretenses as part of a smuggling operation Havana has seemingly been reticent to crack down on. Finally, decades of economic mismanagement (U.S. embargo notwithstanding) have left the country circling the drain while highlighting the regime’s need for increased repression to stay in power.

Now as the White House moves to try and give the Communist Party one final push off the ledge, today’s post hopes to trace some of the ways Cuba has cast a far larger shadow over world affairs than one might expect, and why, after nearly 70 years of dueling with the superpower to the north, it seems like the project could be on the verge of coming undone.

Cubans in Angola

On November 10 1975, the Portuguese flag was lowered from Fort São Miguel, Angola, with little fanfare by a military which had spent more than a decade waging grinding counterinsurgency wars throughout Portugal’s African colonies. The next day, Angola declared its independence, but for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) however, the war for independence was but a prelude to an emergent civil war.

By late 1975 the MPLA was no longer fighting colonial armies, but was instead embroiled in a three-way civil war against the U.S.-backed National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) which received backing from both the CIA and China. On top of this internal power struggle, apartheid South Africa, fearful that the independence of both Mozambique and Angola could precipitate more unrest at home or in occupied Namibia, soon became involved.

By 1975 Pretoria was building up an invasion force to deploy into southern Angola codenamed Task Force Zulu. The primary target of this operation was the MPLA, who could at that time muster between 5,500 and 8,000 troops under its armed wing, the People’s Armed Forces of Liberation of Angola (FAPLA) at independence. The invasion moved swiftly, delivering a series of defeats to FAPLA troops in the south and eventually threatening the capital Luanda.

In the face of a rapidly deteriorating situation, Cuba organized a massive air and sea lift of Cuban troops to bolster the MPLA and retake the south of the country. The island nation had cooperated with the MPLA for about a decade, but until now its role had mainly been supplying trainers, never more than a few hundred. Prior to 1975 Havana also hoped Angolan independence would allow it to draw down these forces. Now that would have to wait. Unwilling to let the MPLA fall, the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) embarked on a colossal strategic and logistical undertaking known as Operation Carlota.

Approximately 30,000 troops were deployed to Angola in the first waves, alongside heavy artillery and multiple rocket launchers, crossing 6,000 miles of ocean to turn the tide. The origins of this taxing intervention reveal several underlying dynamics in the Cuban-Angolan relationship. Its very name, which drew upon the actions of Carlota Lucumí or “Black Carlota” who led a Cuban slave revolt in 1843, deliberately evoked Cuba’s deep ties to the African continent. Indeed, Cuban rhetoric often framed its deployments to African countries, Angola included, as recompense for the island’s historical role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Ultimately over 400,000 Cubans would serve in Angola between 1975 and 1991. The majority of these individuals would fill military postings, but some would also serve as doctors, teachers, and administrators helping the MPLA consolidate control over the new Angolan state.

It’s worth dwelling on the magnitude of this effort for a moment. Here you have a small island nation, locked in its own Cold War with a much larger adversary to the north, conducting expeditionary logistics to sustain a major fighting force an ocean away. This is the type of operation that is expected of great powers, and in terms of personnel levels and the duration of their deployment, I think we have yet to see either Russia or China embark on an equivalent mission in recent memory.

Perhaps the high-water mark of Cuban combat involvement would come after August 1987 when the FAPLA began building up forces at Cuito Cuanavale for a massive southward push against UNITA. The FAPLA’s first offensive began with 6,000 elite troops and 80 tanks advanced on UNITA positions along the west bank of the Lomba River. Upon reaching the Lomba however, Angolan forces confronted not just UNITA, but a 3,000-strong South African detachment, complete with tanks and artillery drawn up in defensive positions.

The FAPLA units were plagued by poor communications and battlefield coordination, leading several detachments to become pinned down by South African firepower along the opposite bank of the river. Badly mauled, the attacking forces sustained as many as 3,000 casualties while roughly three-quarters of its armored assets were crippled. Worse yet, the loss of such a large portion of FAPLA’s supposedly best units emboldened South Africa to press deeper into Angola. Thus, the MPLA found itself on the defensive against a joint South African-UNITA attack that was once again eyeing Luanda as its ultimate goal.

The MPLA brough new entreaties to Havana, and in response, Fidel Castro embarked on yet another major cross-Atlantic deployment, airlifting additional troops and equipment to Angola. Cuban forces embedded with FAPLA troops at the brigade level, constructing defensive fortifications along the Tumpo bridgehead on the Cuito River. These were supplemented by minefields and artillery emplacements to create deadly killing fields along all potential crossings.

Subsequently, Castro ordered the Cuban-FAPLA units to pull back, a savvy tactic which forced South African-UNITA forces to waste men and material penetrating empty defensive lines under punishing artillery fire. In early 1988 the SADF attempted four assaults on Cuito Cuanavale, and though they inflicted considerable casualties on both the Cubans and Angolans, the invaders were repulsed each time. While South Africa would maintain a nominal presence in southern Angola to rebuff future FAPLA assaults, the danger of a total collapse of the MPLA had seemingly passed.

At the tactical level the results of the battle were mixed, but Cuito Cuanavale was quickly mythologized as a turning point in the struggle against imperialism and a decisive blow against the South African apartheid regime in particular.

The Cuban intervention in Angola is to me one of the most interesting conflicts you’ve never heard of (Billy Joel fans maybe excepted). What’s also fascinating is that it seems like Cuba’s ideological commitment to Angola and the MPLA was genuine. Sure, Fidel and the Cuban leadership consistently sought to draw down their forces, and Cuba undoubtedly reaped benefits from its alliance with an oil and minerals-rich country like Angola, but the expected returns seem minimal compared to the risks of deploying tens of thousands of your own soldiers an ocean away.

Cloak and Dagger

In addition to coordinating both overt and covert military interventions, Cuba has proven adept in the field of espionage.

Perhaps the most famous case is that of Ana Belén Montes, who was arrested on by the FBI on September 21, 2001. For 17 years she reportedly acted as a double-agent, using her position within the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where she eventually rose to become a senior expert on Cuba, to pass classified intelligence over to a Havana. Montes is regarded as one of the DIA’s worst counterintelligence leaks, and pled guilty to revealing the identities of at least four undercover agents operating in Cuba.

Montes never took a paycheck from Havana, her reasons for spying were rooted in sympathy for the Cuban cause. This is a pattern among Cuban double agents, who, more often than not are enticed by the romanticism of the Cuban revolution. In 2024 for instance, veteran diplomat and career ambassador Manuel Rocha was arrested and charged with spying for the Cubans as well.

Like Montes, Rocha was already sympathetic to Cuba when he entered the foreign service, and by his own admission pursued a career in diplomacy in order to better aid Havana. Cuba’s ability to cultivate highly-motivated double agents willing to climb the rungs of U.S. intelligence and diplomatic bureaucracies has afforded it an important window into Washington’s Latin America policy. It may also be a bargaining chip Cuba can deploy to garner support from its authoritarian allies.

In the summer of 2023, the Wall Street Journal broke a story that China had reportedly negotiated agreements with Cuba for access to signals intelligence facilities on the island. Previous investigations, as well as a slip of the tongue by Marco Rubio during the 2016 Republican primary debates, suggest that China has enjoyed privileged access for far longer. It may well be the case that Cuba opened the door for Chinese intelligence services in exchange for economic support from the PRC.

Two years ago, I worked on a project looking into open-source information on these sites. While we weren’t able to find a smoking gun, there seems to be plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that, at a minimum, these facilities are both active and have the requisite capabilities to gather signals intelligence on the United States. One of the sites, a circularly disposed antenna array under construction near Santiago de Cuba on the island’s southeastern coast, seems to have been abandoned following publication of our report as well.

It may be the case that signals intelligence has supplanted human intelligence as the primary mode of espionage Cuban can trade in. Parsing fact from fiction in this area is difficult given the tendency of exaggerated or even wholesale fabricated takes to blow up when it comes to Cuba. Nevertheless, even if the ideological appeal of the Cuban revolution has dissipated following the end of the Cold War, Cuba’s intelligence apparatus is surely still a force to be reckoned with.

The Curtain Falls

Given the Cuban Communist Party’s track record of both opposing U.S. interests abroad, and remaining well-entrenched at home, it seems like the party should be well-positioned to weather a second Trump storm. Indeed, for most of the first Trump administration, there seemed to be little indication that the revolution wouldn’t keep marching on.

There are several reasons for why Cuba now appears to be trapped in an inexorable downward spiral, but the most clear-cut is probably Covid. The pandemic decimated Cuba’s economy, bringing the all-important tourism industry to a screeching halt. It further disrupted the island’s sugar industry, another key export sector and source of foreign currency.

In 2021 the death of Raúl Castro and ascension of Miguel Díaz-Canel also left the country, for the first time since the revolution, with a leader who had not taken part in the overthrow of the Batista regime. While Cuba had weathered economic deprivation before, now it faced hardship without a particularly charismatic leader to embody the spirit of revolution.

A negative economic shock turned into a worsening crisis as a lack of revenue left the Cuban government unable to respond to subsequent challenges. Cuba’s infrastructure, already dilapidated, suffered with blackouts becoming longer, roads more dilapidated, and public services less reliable. Cuba’s alliances helped, but not enough. Russia in 2022 set its economy alight upon the pyre of invasion, China invested in some new infrastructure, but the easy money of the early Belt-and-Road years was gone, and Venezuela could barely pump enough oil to keep its own regime afloat.

Worsening economic conditions also resulted in the onset of mass protests, and on July 11 thousands of Cubans took to the streets to voice their dissatisfaction. President Díaz-Canel immediately condemned the movement as a U.S.-led effort to destabilize the country, and deployed riot police to crack down. According to Cubalex, a total of 1,400 people were detained in the immediate aftermath, and a year later half of these remained incarcerated.

Large-scale protests movements were comparatively rare in Cuba, where the regime security forces excel in more precision means of silencing dissent and maintaining social control. Harsh crackdowns and mass arrests peeled back the mask for many, and earned international opprobrium, including from Havana’s allies on the left.

Cuba’s crackdown also most likely foreclosed the possibility of an Obama-style détente with the Biden administration. The White House could not be seen as easing pressure on a government which had just jailed hundreds of peaceful protesters, causing Biden to leave more or less in place the restrictions Trump placed in his first term on remittances to the island.

Still, had Operation Absolute Resolve not taken place, or had it failed, I think the Cuban regime ekes its way through. As it stands, the operation’s tactical success has further emboldened the Trump administration when it comes to foreign policy. This in turn has given the United States a powerful source of leverage to pressure both Venezuela and Mexico into cutting off oil exports to Cuba.

From the administration’s perspective, I understand why this is happening. Buoyed by the tactical success of Operation Absolute Resolve, it seems bizarre for Washington to continue to allow a hostile, authoritarian government to remain in power less than 100 miles off the coast of Florida.

The geopolitical conditions are also ripe. Since the Cuban Missile Crisis, Havana was protected from U.S. designs first by the fact that the Soviet Union could hold at risk U.S. interests in Europe, and post-Cold War by international norms that mostly deterred the United States from invading other countries without at least a plausible international legal rationale. Today, those norms have come apart at the seams, while none of Cuba’s nuclear-armed allies are willing to extend their security umbrellas to the island.

Finally, I imagine there is a strong personal political angle to all of this. Marco Rubio’s star continues to rise within the Trump administration, and toppling the Cuban Communist Party would be an immortalizing achievement.

None of this means I agree with the current U.S. strategy towards Cuba, but I do understand it. Worsening economic conditions and corroded popular legitimacy at home, coupled with abandonment by erstwhile allies has created the perception that the Cuban regime is teetering at the edge of a cliff, and the United States need only give it a final shove.

Epilogue: A Farewell to Hypocrisy

Last November I wrote about how easy it is to misuse historical analogies when arguing for regime change in Venezuela. Now it seems like we are at risk of using what just happened in Venezuela to analogize a potential regime change or regime management approach in Cuba. I would urge caution on that front for a couple of reasons.

For one, prior to Operation Absolute Resolve, the strongest argument in favor of regime change in Venezuela was the result of the 2024 election where Edmundo González won a blowout victory over Maduro. There is no such equivalent in Cuba, where the regime is far more entrenched and opposition political parties are nonexistent. If the United States wants to replace the Cuban Communist Party wholesale, it would need to throw its weight behind a new government with no demonstrated popular mandate.

Now of course the United States didn’t try to install the opposition in Venezuela, opting for a strategy of regime management rather than regime change. But that is equally uncompelling when applied to the Cuban case where, without a Castro in power, there’s no convenient boogeyman to pin the crimes of the Cuban government on. Díaz-Canel could be an option, but he strikes me as an uncompelling candidate for scapegoat.

There is also less to negotiate over in Cuba. The country has no major oil reserves that can be the focal point for a deal and a magnet for foreign investment. I could see Trump dredging up the expropriation of U.S. companies following the revolution, but it’s hard to see that messaging as compelling given the damage all happened nearly 70 years ago. While I don’t think Trump has any compunctions about using force against Cuba, he does seemingly obey the ironclad rule that any military action must be swift, decisive, and bloodless for the United States.

The baseline scenario that results from this bodes ill for the Cuban people. It suggests a stalemate in which the United States wants regime change, or at least a deal with Cuba that would precipitate regime change, but is unwilling to make the military commitment needed to effectuate this. Meanwhile, the depletion of oil reserves makes life worse and worse on the island, potentially until a popular revolt and subsequent crackdown gives the White House something approximating causus belli.

That is one outcome, but I judge another, less probable scenario in which the Cuban Communist Party embraces some of the hard-nosed realism we’re seeing from Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. In this world, the Cuban regime agrees to pay lip service to the Donroe Doctrine, shut down its alleged Chinese spy bases, and open the door for U.S. businesses (maybe real estate comes first given Trump’s penchant for waterfront development). Some elements of the Cuban leadership might still have to leave, while in the U.S. hardliners in Miami would feel betrayed, but it would give both parties something.

Finally, this might all vanish into nothing. If the administration decides to put all its chips on regime change in Iran, or another shiny new foreign policy objective bursts onto the scene, the Cuba issue could fade to the background. Even if I do judge this as possible, I do not think such a de-escalation will stick, and Cuba is liable to find itself back in the United States’ crosshairs before 2028.

Matias Spektor wrote recently that the world may come to miss the hypocrisy of the old U.S.-led, rules-based international order. While Washington consistently violated its own stated principles, it at least sought to justify its actions in relation to said principles. A world where U.S. foreign policy is dictated by plain-faced resource grabs or personal grievance is much more unpredictable and dangerous for all involved. Cuba will need to adapt to such a world or perish.

Like other resource-rich nations, Latin American countries also have a troubled history with their mining sectors. From Spanish colonial exploitation of silver and gold resources to more recent corruption scandals and environmental disasters, to the ongoing scourge of illegal mining by criminal actors, the industry does not necessarily have a sterling reputation. At the same time, many governments in the region continue to view their mineral wealth as a key to economic development.

As the technologies that power the modern world demand a more diverse array of elemental inputs, countries are looking to position themselves as new players in niche markets. It seems everyone these days is announcing new REE finds for example, while mineral reserves in the Venezuela’s Orinoco region have emerged as an important subplot in discussions that country’s economic future.

Critical minerals is one of the policy sectors where the gulf between hype and reality is at its widest. Articles often breathlessly recycle figures about trillion-dollar mineral deposits buried beneath Greenland’s ice, or at the bottom of the sea. Governments can be incentivized to repeat these claims in the interest of attracting new investment, but the economics will out in most cases.

For every headline about Latin America’s minerals potential, the expected windfall has been slow to materialize. Countries have been more eager to erect regulatory walls than to get shovels into the ground. In the meantime, growth projections have been revised downwards as prices fluctuate, and new reserves are discovered. In countries like Panama, existing mining operations have also been shuttered amid growing environmental unrest. Given the long timelines associated with the mining sector, the region is currently at risk of being left behind in the scramble for critical minerals.

Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg

If you’ve been following the critical minerals space since, say, 2022, you’ve probably heard about the Lithium Triangle. Referring to a region of lithium-rich salt flats between Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, the triangle harbors more than half of the world’s lithium reserves. As the electric vehicle revolution kicked off, attention on the region skyrocketed as a key source for the materials that made EV batteries possible.

Between 2022 and 2023 lithium was trading at historic highs, prompting many to dub “white gold” the new oil, and the Lithium Triangle the next frontier in great power competition. In Bolivia, then-president Luis Arce championed the cause of an “OPEC for Lithium” to ensure that the riches to come would benefit the people, not foreign multinationals. He was joined in this initiative by Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, who in 2022 issued a presidential decree nationalizing Mexican lithium reserves (estimated at about 1.7 million tons) and creating a new state-owned enterprise Litio para México (LitioMX) to develop these.

Ironically, the two biggest proponents of a lithium OPEC were those countries that produced the least amount of lithium. Despite harboring 23 million tons in estimated reserves, Bolivia accounts for less than 1 percent of global lithium production. The lithium-rich Salar de Uyuni salt flats are protected by the constitution, which states that only the government can develop these reserves. The Bolivian government has accordingly sought to partner with a rotating cast of companies, from U.S.-based startup EnergyX, to the Chinese and Russian firms CBC and Uranium One. While newly-elected President Rodrigo Paz has signaled an openness to greater foreign participation and investment, he still faces a steep uphill climb.

In the case of Mexico, at the time that AMLO announced lithium’s nationalization, the country had no producing mines, and just one project with any level of viability. Since then, the establishment of LitioMX has been a procedural boondoggle buffeted by macroeconomic headwinds. Four years after nationalizing its lithium, Mexico is nowhere closer to seeing any benefits.

Globally, lithium is increasingly looking less and less like the new oil. Since 2022 prices have dropped significantly amid conditions of oversupply and flagging demand from China. While the long-term forecast still shows growing demand, and prices have started to rally again this year, additional minerals exploration has uncovered major lithium deposits in the United States like a reportedly 40 million ton deposit below the McDermitt Caldera along the Oregon-Nevada border. To be sure, it will take years, if not decades, for these new discoveries to turn into production, but the industry seems to be moving more towards a buyer's market for lithium.

Argentina and Chile by contrast have done much better for themselves at making the most of the attention around lithium. Chile, home to one of South America’s most advanced mining industries, is the second-largest lithium producer in the world after Australia. Just two companies currently produce lithium in Chile, multinational titan Albemarle, and the home-grown giant Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile S.A. (SQM).

Chile has had its own flirtations with resource nationalist policies. Former President Gabriel Boric once proposed a national lithium company, later pivoting to release a national lithium strategy instead, which established a greater role for the state in tendering and managing lithium concessions. The most immediate result from this strategy was a merger between SQM and Chilean state-owned copper company Codelco for the latter to assume a “fifty plus-one” majority stake in the former.

Chile has a pretty good track record running public-private partnerships in the minerals space. The country is the number one copper producer in the world and enjoys healthy partnerships with all manner of international mining majors. Nevertheless, Codelco’s expanded role under the national lithium strategy has raised some eyebrows.

For one, the lack of a public bidding process may have left money on the table for Chile and raised transparency concerns. Greater state intervention in the mining space may also mean lithium revenues could be used to plug up losses by unprofitable state-owned companies, rather than be reinvested in expanding production or research and development. From an environmentalist perspective as well, critics have challenged that giving the state a vested interest in mining operations will further sideline local community concerns.

Argentina’s lithium sector appears the most dynamic among the Lithium Triangle countries, and the fastest-growing. In 2020 the country produced 5,900 tons of elemental lithium according to the U.S. Geological Survey, in 2024 it produced 18,000 tons, a more than three-fold increase, with goals to boost production further over the next decade. This comes at a time when the country is also courting new copper mining investment and seeking to leverage friendly relations between Buenos Aires and Washington.

Argentina’s secret sauce, and potential Achilles’ Heel, is its federalist system wherein provincial governments control access to the mineral resources on their territory. This helps prevent resource nationalist impulses at the federal level from scuttling investments and allows experimentation at the local level with different models for partnership with mining companies.

But it also carries risks, especially when provinces like Jujuy and Salta which have historically been sidelined in national politics become geoeconomic lightning rods. Provincial governments can be more susceptible to bribery and corruption by foreign companies to offer sweetheart mining deals. In addition, this fragmented model of mineral rights means provinces often lack the financial resources to invest in enabling infrastructure for mining like roads, railways, and power plants. Overlaying all of this, of course, is Argentina’s reputation as a volatile economy incapable of providing the kind of legal and regulatory stability mining majors need to dump billions of dollars into multi-decade projects.

The Milei government is seeking to fix this with its RIGI program (Régimen de Incentivos para Grandes Inversiones) which provides tax incentives, 30 year legal stability commitments, and loosened foreign exchange controls to projects in strategic sectors, including mining. Milei is also working to revise Argentina’s prohibition on mining near glaciers, seen as an impediment to developing copper projects.

I’ve focused mainly on lithium here as one of the best examples of Latin America’s struggle dealing with hype and reality of mining economics, but the same logic applies to other would-be critical minerals superpowers in the region. Brazil for instance, has draw attention for its reserves of rare earth elements, estimated to be the second-largest in the world after China.

As the United States scrambles to break China’s stranglehold on REEs Brazil should, in theory, be able to leverage its reserves to draw investors from the United States and other governments leery of China’s current monopoly. However, as The Economist reported last week, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva can’t quite help himself from deploying resource nationalist rhetoric when he bemoans the possibility of “the same old countries digging holes in our country, taking our minerals.”

It’s hard to imagine a Brazilian rare earth industry emerging without foreign companies at the helm initially, and it’s equally hard to imagine any international investors paying the massive fixed costs required for REE extraction without more promising business conditions. For this reason, the firms best primed to operate in Brazil’s REE sector today are actually Chinese state-owned enterprises, who have both the technical know-how and deep pockets needed to navigate Brazil’s byzantine regulatory environment.

NIMBY Final Boss

Another challenge facing Latin American countries’ critical minerals ambitions is the fact that a good chunk of their citizens don’t actually want more mining. The region has a strong NIMBY (not in my backyard) bent when it comes to extractive industries. To be fair, that impulse exists most places when the topic of mining crops up, you can get a lot of people on board with the idea of more mining, but nobody wants to live next door to a mine.

In that respect, Latin America is no different from my home state of Minnesota, where debate has raged for over a decade around the proposed Twin Metals mine near the boundary waters national park. But the debate in Latin American countries tends to have even sharper edges.

Most good faith counterarguments against NIMBYism recognize that there are real tradeoffs to building more and building big, but that we can significantly mitigate most downsides. Works in Progress recently ran a good piece about this as it applies to water sanitation, where the United States spends billions trying to reach as-low-as-feasible targets, only to have water that’s more expensive, not much cleaner, than what you would find in Germany or Japan.

When it comes to modern mines, our environmental impact studies are more sensitive, our tailings dams are safer, and our water treatment is better. New and emerging technologies like direct lithium extraction (DLE) also hold out the possibility of technical fixes for concerns around water usage.

However, while YIMBYs in the United States complain about excessive environmental reviews or activists manufacturing endangered species to gum up the works of minerals projects, in Latin America, environmental activists are often murdered for their work. Indeed, the region continues to be the most deadly in the world to be an environmental defender, with the NGO Global Witness recording 117 such murders in 2025.

The environmental consequences of mining can also be deadly serious. Events like the 2019 Brumadinho dam disaster, when a tailings dam in Brazil collapsed killing 272 people and releasing toxic residue from mineral extraction into the surrounding environment, further erode public trust in mining. In the case of Brumadinho, the tailings dam had, prior to collapse, passed safety inspections and featured safeguards that should have alerted authorities to the risk of sudden collapse, highlighting the fact that even contingency planning cannot eliminate catastrophic risk.

Even short of full-blown disasters, mining operations frequently come into conflict with affected communities. The Lithium Triangle countries are once again good examples given the water-intensive nature of current modes of lithium production. That’s bad if you happen to live in a place like the Atacama Desert, already one of the driest locales on earth, which also happens to be home to South America’s largest lithium reserves.

The latest mania around rare earths seems primed to further exacerbate tensions with environmentalists. Current methods for REE separation and processing are notoriously difficult and polluting. Even if Brazil manages to attract the capital requires to bring large-scale REE production online, the environmental toll of such operations could catalyze fierce domestic opposition.

To mitigate these environmental externalities, some mineral majors have poured significant funding into standing up water treatment facilities, roads, schools, and security infrastructure in an effort to cultivate public trust. But these measures are inconsistent and can differ from company to company.

Finally, there is the ever-present menace of organized crime, which increasingly seeks to penetrate and exploit the mining industry. Criminal mining efforts can take the form of both artisanal small-scale wildcat mining projects, or the takeover of existing commercial mines. The former runs rampant in places like Venezuela, where it has been associated with mercury poisoning and the return of malaria thanks to the pools of stagnant water that form in illegal mine sites. The latter has come to plague large mining conglomerates in places like Colombia, where the Clan del Golfo has clashed with and at times taken over parts of a Chinese-owned gold mine in the department of Antioquia. Illegal mining both sours the investment potential of a country and degrades trust among local communities who could become find themselves caught in the crossfire of a criminal attempt to take over mining operations.

This all creates important domestic anti-mining constituencies who oppose new projects and work to close down existing ones. In Panama for instance, the Cobre Panama mine, which singlehandedly accounted for nearly 2 percent of the world’s copper supply was shuttered in 2023 by the country’s Supreme Court and amid mass protests. Efforts by the Mulino government to get the mine back up and running have provoked fierce opposition from civil society even as demand (and prices) for copper remain at historical highs.

At its worst, local opposition to mining undermines investor confidence, requiring governments to make additional (sometimes underhanded) concessions to attract future investment and reassure companies of the stability of their investments. A 2023 study for instance documented the use of off-duty police officers by provincial governors in Argentina’s northeast to intimidate indigenous communities at the behest of Chinese lithium companies. These methods in turn inflame local opposition and worsen public distrust towards the mining industry.

Conclusion

I still believe the critical minerals boom is a great opportunity for countries in Latin America. The United States is desperate to shore up its minerals security, and like-minded buyers are similarly wising up to the need to diversify sources away from China.

This is one area where the Trump administration’s resource fixation seems to be channeling things in the right direction. After years of discussion the U.S. is finally rolling out multi-billion-dollar stockpiling initiatives and earnestly working on price supports for REEs to break China’s control of that market. In Latin America, the ascendancy of U.S.-aligned governments in all three of the Lithium Triangle countries, and the overall rightward turn of the region, suggests new openings for creative dealmaking with the White House.

Seizing the moment will still require countries to look past the hype and focus on setting themselves up for success over the long term. Part of that will involve actually reckoning with the tradeoffs mining presents, rather than seeking to legislate these away.

My hunch is that the region already has all the laws on the books it needs to regulate the mining sector. The focus should instead be on boosting enforcement. That means hiring more mine site inspectors, boosting funding for rural police forces, and, of course, working to root out corruption in the judicial system.

Similarly, if countries want more environmentally friendly mine sites, they should try to make it easier or more attractive to build in a sustainable way. Offering tax incentives or permitting shortcuts for projects piloting low-water use technologies seems like a better approach than mandating that prospective miners must use DLE.

Getting these first steps right is important, but raw mineral exports alone will never be enough to deliver the economic growth that regional policymakers dream about. The key lies in climbing value chains, from lithium to batteries, from batteries to electric vehicles, and from electric vehicles to a globally competitive manufacturing sector. Few countries have successfully managed this ascent, but leaving minerals in the ground is a sure-fire way to keep that process from ever starting up.

The emerging “Carney Doctrine” has now received a fair bit of coverage, including from folks more specialized in Canadian politics than I.1 But I want to take today’s blog as an opportunity to give my own assessment of the contours and implications for Canada’s strategy. This is also a good reminder that this is an Americas blog and that means occasional Canada coverage.

In essence, Canada’s approach to the United States is one which seeks to limit the pain Washington can inflict when disputes arise, while cooperating on areas of mutual agreement. Carney termed this kind of policy “risk management” in his Davos speech, the equivalent in geopolitics could be a form of containment.

Canada’s containment strategy differs from balancing in that Canada does not explicitly seek the diminution of U.S. power on a global scale. Washington can still have a dynamic economy and wealthy consumer base that Canada can sell to (even with tariffs). The United States can still have a powerful military capable of deterring Chinese and Russian adventurism. However, Canada should seek to construct flexible alliances such that every time the United States brandishes its power against its northern neighbor, Canada walks away a little better prepared to confront future instances of bullying.

This sounds like a canny strategy for middle powers to pursue, but it is also fraught with risks. Fostering ties with a multitude of partners helps reduce exposure to any single risk, but can also give previously peripheral countries new sources of leverage. In one worst case scenario, Ottawa could find itself under pressure from both Beijing and Washington at once. Triangulating foreign policy is also a difficult act to sustain, Carney may be able to keep all the balls in the air at once, but his successor could prove less apt.

For this reason, the truest and best insurance Canada can buy lies in growing its own economic, military, and technological might. George Kennan, credited with architecting the United States’ Cold War containment strategy, wrote in his famous Long Telegram that “Much depends on health and vigor of our own society.” Canada’s containment strategy is not the same as that the United States pursued against the Soviet Union, but it is useful advice nonetheless. Carney’s speech shows he recognizes the strategic picture Canada faces, but he still has to deliver an ambitious domestic agenda to meet the present crisis.

Why Containment?

In 1924, Senator Raoul Dandurand remarked that Canadians “live in a fireproof house far from inflammable materials.” A century later that analogy rings increasingly hollow, the fireproofing is wearing off, and there’s smoke on the horizon. In particular, U.S. tariffs, disregard for international law, and musings about turning Canada into a 51st state have had a profound effect on Canadian politics. Indeed, this adversarial turn by Canada’s neighbor and number one trading partner proved decisive in getting Mark Carney’s Liberal Party off life support and catapulted Carney himself to the premiership.

Since Canada’s April 2025 elections, however, Prime Minister Carney has pursued a balancing act approach towards the United States. A week after the election he visited DC and had a frank discussion with Trump on trade irritants on both sides of the border while simultaneously pitching Canada as an ally on homeland defense and the Golden Dome.

To the extend Canada has sought to diversity its partners, it has focused on other erstwhile U.S. allies, especially Europe. In December 2025, Carney negotiated Canada’s entry into the Security action for Europe (SAFE) partnership intended to boost the European defense industry. Canada’s reserves of critical minerals, including elements like Tungsten and Niobium which are crucial for advanced weapons systems means it should be a natural partner in shoring up European supply chain security.

Carney’s recent China visit grabbed headlines as the most visible sign of Canada breaking with the United States. In practice, however, the deal he signed in Beijing seems clearly lopsided in favor of Canada. Canadian sales of new cars totaled 1.9 million in 2025. 49,000 Chinese EVs represent about 2 percent of this total, far from the existential threat to the North American auto industry critics have made it out to be. In return, Ottawa secured beneficial access to the Chinese market for major agricultural exports like canola oil, a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for Canadian producers. Furthermore, top canola-producing provinces poised to benefit the most from this include Alberta, where a burgeoning separatist movement has been an unpredictable element in Ottawa’s dealings with the White House.

Likely China was more than happy to agree to a worse deal on paper in order to get the symbolic benefits from appearing to peel away a U.S. ally. It is also not risk-free for Canada. While it initially seemed like Trump was willing to brush off the deal, he seems to have reversed course and is now threatening 100 percent tariffs on Canada. Hopefully Carney knew this was a possibility going into the China trip, his comments at Davos the following week suggest that he may have also been interested in the optics of the deal as well as the economics.

Even if Canada ultimately reverses course on its China deal under U.S. pressure, it has managed to regain some initiative in dealings with the White House. Instead of reacting to U.S. flights of fancy, Canada moved first to forge a new partnership with China, and should continue to look for complementarities between the Canadian economy and countries in Southeast Asia or Gulf States like Qatar. Future Canadian deals may provoke less resistance from Washington as Carney’s willingness to go directly to China first may have shifted the diplomatic Overton window for the United States.

At the same time, Canada has not given up on engagement with the United States over areas of shared interest, nor should it. Canada can build all the pipelines, ports, roads, and railways it wants for export diversification, but having the world’s largest economy next door is simply too tantalizing a market to abandon. For this reason, Canadian officials continue to engage their U.S. counterparts on issues ranging from critical minerals, to crime, to defense modernization.

The latter of these issues is of particular interest to me. Canada and the United States cooperate closely on a daily basis through institutions like NATO and NORAD, but U.S. threats have prompted some to argue Canada should view the United States as a national security threat. Practically, this has translated into increased scrutiny over U.S.-supplied weapons and equipment, including an ongoing review of Canada’s F-35 purchase. Personally, I think Canada should avoid trying to put up a fence around U.S. systems, and instead focus future procurement decisions based on what best meets Canada’s requirements and which proposals offer the most for domestic Canadian defense industry. Completely extirpating U.S. kit from the Canadian armed forces is both impractical and a recipe for another fight with Washington, but Canada should seek to have a diversity of suppliers in case future arms sales end up a political football.

Canadian Patrol Submarine Project (CPSP) could be a good test of this approach. A while ago, I along with some colleagues, argued Canada should join the AUKUS agreement to gain a nuclear-powered submarine capability. That ship has sailed, and to be honest at this point I think that’s probably a good thing, letting Canada diversify its defense industrial partnerships through the CPSP. The South Korean firm Hanwha has put forward an interesting proposal well worth consideration.2

In brief, I think this amount to a Canadian strategy of containment vis-à-vis the United States. Faced with an increasingly unpredictable neighbor to the south, Canada is seeking to plug up vulnerabilities while still cooperating on areas of mutual interest. The end game for this strategy is the same regardless of whether Trumpism continues to characterize bilateral relations, or if Washington’s line on Ottawa reverts back to the mean of partnership and cooperation. Either way, Canada hopes to limit as much as possible the United States ability to coerce it through economic or even military means.

Walking the Tightrope

No amount of international partnerships or diplomatic maneuvering can substitute for boosting the health and dynamism of Canada’s economy. On this metric, I am somewhat concerned that Carney is falling into the Sheinbaum trap wherein his success fending off existential economic and security threats from the Trump administration obscures a more lackluster track record on domestic issues.

To be sure, Carney has had his policy wins. One of Prime Minister Carney’s first acts even before the April election was to eliminate his predecessor’s consumer carbon tax, showing a willingness to break with previous orthodoxy in the name of spurring growth. His government also launched a new Major Projects Office in the fall of 2025 aiming to fast-track new infrastructure investments, including a liquified natural gas export terminal, mining efforts, and a new nuclear power plant. In 2025 Canada spent 2 percent of GDP on defense for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

But Canada is climbing out of a lost decade where economic growth consistently fell below 2 percent. 2025 was no different in this regard, with Canadian GDP growing by just 1.7 percent amid macroeconomic headwinds and uncertainty caused by U.S. tariffs. Much like repeated jokes about Europe’s sluggish reaction to its umpteenth wake-up call, the question remains whether policy is really meeting the moment. While Canada has announced important government-led investments in defense, mining, and energy, but the real measure of success for these efforts will be when private companies start making their own big plays.

Canada’s inter-provincial trade barriers have also proven thorny challenges to remove. During his campaign Carney pledged to eliminate, and some progress has been made since. These efforts even garnered a shout-out in the Prime Minister’s Davos speech, but liberalization has been uneven across the provinces. Recently, an IMF report found that Canada could reap a windfall equivalent to 7 percent of real GDP by removing remaining barriers.

Of course some slack is owed to Carney and his government. There are powerful interest groups with vested stakes in maintaining internal trade barriers, and dealing with provincial governments takes time and tact (mind you Carney’s party doesn’t have a majority!). Still, I do think electorates have cottoned on to the fact that you don’t get to claim existential stakes only to decline to acting with the urgency those stakes demand.

Perhaps the greatest test of Canada’s strategy will come this summer with the July joint review of the USMCA free trade agreement. It seems as though policymakers in both Canada and Mexico have priced in the fact that the review will not be the simple reauthorization they had once hoped for, and will likely involve more substantial efforts by the U.S. to renegotiate key provisions of the deal itself. But what those asks from Washington will be still seems nebulous, likely the White House itself doesn’t know at this point exactly what they will ask.

We also shouldn’t rule out either the possibility of an eleventh-hour Trump demand. Trump likely knows that the July review will be a moment of maximum leverage for the United States when it comes to economic relations with its neighbors and seek to exploit that to the fullest. Part of the test for Canada will therefore be managing its relationship with Mexico to present a united front, rather than succumbing to the desire to cut a separate deal with the United States that could be more convenient, but also costly in the long-term.

Looking South-North

Returning for a moment to Latin America and the Caribbean, I am more pessimistic about this region’s ability to implement an equivalent “Carney Doctrine” containment strategy. For all that the region embraces multilateralism, its institutions are facing unprecedented pressure and struggling to meet the moment.

It is hard to envision any grouping of countries in the region today successfully coordinating economic policy in response to U.S. tariffs. Even the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, meant to be a counterweight to the U.S. influence in regional institutions, failed to sign a statement condemning U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats last fall. The recent ascendancy of a number of Trump-aligned governments in Ecuador, Argentina, Honduras, and Chile further suggests these countries are more likely going to seek accommodation with Washington than unite to oppose U.S. overreach.

Had Denmark stood alone against the United States in the most recent row over Greenland, it seems reasonable to say the outcome may have been different. But Copenhagen had the European Union, as well as Canada and European NATO members to back it up, turning an opportunistic U.S. land-grab into a flashpoint with the entire transatlantic defense and security relationship on the line. In the end, spiraling tensions rattled the markets enough to trigger another about-face from Trump.

But should the White House turn its attentions back to the Panama Canal, the Panamanian government would not have such allies to call upon. Indeed, Gustavo Petro is busy putting forward his own, admittedly fanciful, attempt at reincorporating Panama into the territory of a new Gran Colombia. It is a testament perhaps to the deft diplomacy of the Mulino administration that the matter of the canal seems to have been put to bed for now, but a stray tweet could see the issue rear its ugly head once more.

I could still be wrong on this. Last week’s post discussed how the gap between U.S. military capabilities and Latin American air defenses could lead to the region boosting its military spending. Ever-mounting tariff threats could similarly prompt some countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to forge genuine economic partnerships between themselves and with extra-hemispheric partners to provide a counterweight. Especially if Canada’s containment strategy proves successful, it could make this more likely by providing a model for others in the hemisphere to replicate.

I’ll admit that made me laugh, in part because if the United States wanted to execute a smash-and-grab operation against the president of El Salvador, it would probably be quite a bit easier than Operation Absolute Resolve. And that’s saying something, because as we saw, Venezuela’s own military turned in an utterly dismal performance against the U.S. strike force.

While the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean was ongoing, several analyses (some better-researched than others) painted an intimidating picture of Venezuela’s air defenses on paper. Look at the S-300s, they said, look at the Buks, the Su-30s, the F-16s. Maduro himself boasted of Venezuela’s “thousands” of anti-air missiles (mostly Igla-S MANPADS) while one commentator on social media highlighted the S-125 Pechora and its VHF radar as potential kryptonite for U.S. stealth fighters.

I wrote earlier this week about the many reasons for Venezuela’s poor battlefield performance on January 3. In short, while the country’s air defense systems were outclassed at every turn by U.S. capabilities, the real story is one of a coup-proofed and horrendously corrupt military force failing to use what they had been given effectively. Institutions, not hardware, tend to decide wars.

But that being said, it is also true that, by the standards of the region, Venezuela actually had one of the best integrated air and missile defense systems. Overwhelmingly, Latin American militaries lack surface-to-air missiles, relying instead on gun-based and man-portable anti-air systems. Some countries are able to supplement these with relatively modern air forces, though without sufficient numbers to make much of an impact against a major power adversary.

This has major implications for the region as the United States continues to espouse the “Donroe Doctrine” and a hard power-first approach to the Western Hemisphere which has left many Latin American governments have been asking “could the U.S. do the same thing here?” The answer, in most cases, is basically yes.

Air Defenses of the Americas

When I say that Venezuela still has some of the best air defenses in Latin America, I’m not exaggerating. No other country in the region has the same combination or depth of short- and long-range missile systems, MANPADS, and gun-based defenses that the National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) possessed, and indeed continue to possess. Even if you write off Venezuela’s S-300 anti-air systems completely (which seems to be the case) and subtract the various Buk M2E medium-range anti-air launchers that were destroyed by U.S. forces in Operation Absolute Resolve, only Cuba, and perhaps Chile and Peru seem to be in the same conversation equipment-wise.

It makes sense that Venezuela would possess some of the best kit in the region. As an anti-U.S. dictatorship, the Maduro regime faced a clear external military threat it had to be prepared to confront. Furthermore, the importance of the FANB for regime security meant that the armed forces had significant leverage in budgetary negotiations to demand flashy toys. In comparison, most other Latin American governments face no such external adversaries and still harbor suspicions when it comes to perceived self-aggrandizement by their militaries.

I said institutions win wars, but technology undoubtedly shapes the way wars are fought. In the case of air defenses, the systems at your disposal limit the types of threats you are able to deal with in the first place. The maximum range of an Igla-S MANPAD is 6,000 meters. The maximum range of a ZU-23-2 anti-air gun system is about 2,500 meters. Meanwhile, an MQ-9 Reaper drone can operate at altitudes up to 15,000 meters, to say nothing of more advanced fighters and strike platforms that fly even higher. If all your country has are MANPADs and guns, that imposes a hard ceiling on the types of aerial targets you can credibly threaten. No level of training or preparedness can change this, if your doctrine calls for taking down enemy aircraft, you will simply need to get better equipment.

For this reason, the best air defenses most Latin American militaries have at their disposal are their air forces. These have seen considerable upgrading in recent years. Argentina just acquired F-16s, Brazil and Colombia are getting Gripens, and Peru is moving forward with its own fourth-generation fighter procurement process. But despite qualitative improvements, most air forces in the region are small, generally boasting at most a couple dozen fighters. Argentina’s agreement for instance secured 24 F-16s, while Colombia is spending $3.6 billion on a total of 17 Gripen E and F fighters, to be delivered between 2026 and 2032.

Maintenance and refueling requirements mean not all of these planes can always be in the air, leaving them vulnerable to being destroyed while on the ground. As we saw in Operation Absolute Resolve, Venezuela’s air force was nowhere to be found as helicopters streamed into Caracas. A recently released DOJ memo on Operation Absolute Resolve shows that the United States had been prepared to strike at air bases if necessary, but seemingly the sluggish and confused reaction of the FANB on January 3 elided the need for such measures.

There is also the matter of sea-based anti-air systems. On this front, the region performs somewhat better. The Chilean navy operates a pair of dedicated anti-air frigates, while the new Brazilian Tamandaré-class has twelve vertical launch cells for Sea Ceptor anti-air missiles. Even Venezuela’s lone operational frigate, the Almirante Brión carries a launcher for Sea Sparrow anti-air missiles.

But as with air forces, naval air defenses face readiness concerns that mean they may not be available on short notice. Like its air force, the Venezuelan navy played virtually no role during Operation Absolute Resolve. Furthermore, such systems understandably are limited in their ability to protect inland targets, meaning that if an enemy can slip past them at sea, they can enjoy free rein on land.

By contrast, ground-based air defense systems can at least in theory provide more of a persistent deterrent. Crews are able to rotate and perform necessary maintenance on-site, allowing for round-the-clock protection where they are deployed. However, they tend to be less mobile than planes in the air or ships at sea, and are often deployed to protect fixed targets which renders them vulnerable to being precisely located and targeted for suppression or destruction by attackers.

Of course, even with the above limitations, the United States may not be able to pull of an identical operation in other countries. MANPADs and guns cannot threaten high-flying jets, but they certainly can put up fierce resistance against helicopters and planes coming in to land. This is especially true when the operators of said air defenses are professional armies not riven by corruption and mismanagement like the FANB. Operation Absolute Resolve further benefitted from geographic features like Caracas’ placement along a coastal mountain range. A helicopter-borne raid into Bogotá or Brasília would likely flounder for the same or similar reasons that Operation Eagle Claw failed in 1980.

The broader point, however, is whether a sufficiently advanced military force could project airpower into a given Latin American country with minimal risk to itself. This is why integrated air and missile defenses are so important. An enemy can use high-flying systems to suppress or destroy point defenses while they bring in their low-flying rotor and fixed wing assets.

Mexico underscores just how far behind much of the region is on air defense compared to Venezuela. MANPADs excepted, Mexico has no surface-to-air missile systems to speak of, while the rest of its land-based anti-air is filled out by gun-based systems. Even its fighter complement consists of just a handful of legacy F-5Es and Fs.

Consider the following scenario: Claudia Sheinbaum is woken in the middle of the night by a call from the White House. Trump informs her that the United States has located CJNG boss El Mencho and is ready to take him out with an air strike. Sheinbaum can either walk back her opposition to U.S. military action in Mexico and claim that this was a joint operation to save face, or denounce the U.S. strike and suffer whatever fallout may come. With Mexico’s current capabilities however, she cannot stop the United States from taking the shot.

To be clear, I sincerely hope this scenario will not come to pass, and that the United States and Mexico can figure out a genuinely cooperative way to fight the cartels. But I think this possibility is worth highlighting as an example of how mismatched military capabilities shapes the universe of possible policy outcomes. While most analysts and commentators have a general impression that U.S. capabilities outstrip those of its hemispheric neighbors, these often lack clear technical analysis.

What are Militaries For?

Clausewitz teaches us that you don’t always need to decisively defeat an enemy on the field of battle to convince him that his political objectives are not worth the cost of achieving them. Venezuela’s problem is that its military effectively imposed no cost on the United States. This also matters for the country’s ability to deter future action. Again, in Venezuela’s case, it has virtually no capability to deter the United States striking Venezuelan soil again, it retains much of its air defense capacity in theory, but has already been exposed as a paper tiger.

The main lesson, in my opinion, for other Latin American countries of Operation Absolute Resolve is that they can no longer afford to neglect their armed forces. The Americas have long been considered a zone of interstate peace. The United States excepted, the Western Hemisphere spends strikingly little on defense.

I am generally of the opinion that this needs to change, and not just as insurance against a more trigger-happy individual in the White House. Having a competent, professional, and decently modern armed force not only helps deter incursions by outside powers, it enables faster disaster response, drives domestic technological innovation, and provides an important tool to counter organized crime.

There could also be risks to the United States over the long term. The United States enjoys a preponderance of force right now, but the more it threatens countries within the Western Hemisphere, the more these countries could be incentivized to increase arms spending. To be sure, some countries will likely throw themselves at the mercy of the White House, but it seems reasonable to expect that with the right incentives the hemisphere’s medium powers might be able to at least begin to shore up their defenses against gunboat diplomacy from the north. Justifications of the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe doctrine are often couched in the need for U.S. freedom of maneuver at home, but if military adventurism turns the region into an armed camp, that could have serious consequences for Washington’s ability to project power going forward.

Today this still seems like an improbable outcome, I am not sure the region has the political will or financial resources to dramatically boost defense spending to the levels needed, but it still seems a worthwhile exercise to consider the kinds of incentives the United States is giving Latin America. Relationships forged by coercion alone often prove brittle when push comes to shove.

There are signs that the region was already advancing much-needed military modernization priorities well before Operation Absolute Resolve. The fighter modernization programs mentioned above are good examples of this, as is the recent decision by the Brazilian army to procure Enhanced Modular Air Defence Solution from Italian arms manufacturer Leonardo. This purchase will give Brazil the medium-range surface-to-air capability it currently sorely lacks. I also have no doubts that the Brazilian armed forces will be able to employ their new air defenses more competently than the FANB.

That is a step in the right direction, but it is not enough. Ultimately, the point of a national military is to defend your sovereignty, lose sight of that purpose, or the material requirements that mission demands, and you may wake up one day to find your sovereignty vanished in the night, maybe along with your president.

My point is not to criticize ACLED’s rankings (as my friends know, I’m something of a superfan of the organization), the Conflict Index addressed my initial quibble by providing four indicators – “deadliness, danger to civilians, geographic diffusion, and the number of armed groups.” Ukraine is the deadliest conflict in the world, but Mexico experiences greater civilian victimization and is home to many more violent factions. That all tracks, yet I still find myself grasping for something else when it comes to the way we conceptualize criminal armed conflict.

What does it mean for us to say criminal groups control 40 percent of Mexican territory? Or that gangs rule 90 percent of Port-au-Prince? How can the government of Colombia negotiate peace with groups whose raison d’etre is trafficking illegal drugs and extorting civilians? Extreme organized criminal violence produces the kinds of effects we’ve come to expect from insurgencies or civil wars, but without the familiar ideological or political trappings we’ve come to rely on to guide our theories of change or victory.

From the outside, it may seem like all this bloodshed is culminating in something, a tipping of the scales that delivers a country wholesale into the hands of organized crime. But I would argue that in much of the Americas, criminal violence is less than the sum of its parts. Rather than grand schemes or strategic gambits, fighting in the region is characterized by an endless drip of assassinations, reprisals, and counter-reprisals, rising and falling sometimes at random, sometimes in response to a broader development in the security situation.

The result is a kind of conflict that is atomized and pushed to the background. Violence melds into the pattern of daily life, a steady drumbeat of headlines reporting murders and disappearances, neighborhoods slowly becoming hollow, and hushed reminders to friends and family to make it home before dark. Occasionally, this background noise erupts into the foreground, a massacre, a bombing, a weekend of coordinated killing. In response, the state moves in forces, and, if people are lucky this means violence declines, if not, violence increases for a much longer period. Ultimately, the fighting again fades from the foreground as life flows around it. This is a kind of conflict markedly distinct from even counterinsurgency, one where death tolls can rise to eye-watering amounts without ever seeming to cross the line into true warfare.

I call these periods Weeks of Lead, violent eruptions organized by criminal groups that are typically time-bound and generally oriented towards specific, limited, political goals.

In contrast to Years of Lead, the violence that springs from Weeks of Lead is less legible to an external observer. A key feature of criminal armed conflict is that the groups involved are not inherently political, but can become political for specific periods in order to achieve certain objectives.

Example Weeks of Lead include the first Culiacanazo, which took place in October 2019 when Sinaloa Cartel boss Ovidio Guzmán was captured by Mexican authorities. In response, the Sinaloa Cartel burned the city of Culiacán, attacked police and National Guard, and victimized countless innocent civilians until the Mexican government caved and released the son of El Chapo. Another, less successful example would be the weekend of killings that took place in March 2022 in El Salvador, when gangs killed 62 people in a single day, likely to protest efforts by the Bukele government to crack down on extortion. In this case, the violence backfired, and El Salvador has by and large managed to dismantle gangs in its territory, but the same cannot be said for most countries in the region.

This makes it hard to predict what the center of gravity for a given criminal actor is, or how it will respond to increased state pressure. Nevertheless, getting the theory right is of vital importance, especially as the United States barrels down the path towards a new Global War on Crime. The Trump Administration has made clear that they view this as an armed conflict, and the criminal networks of today as equivalent to the ISIS and Al Qaeda of yesteryear. This rhetoric is certainly good for stirring passions, but is this accurate?

Ecuador Explodes

“Know that you should not mess with the mafia!” a masked gunman shouted into the camera of a Guayaquil television station on January 9, 2024. This incident soon became synonymous with the ongoing wave of violence that has transformed Ecuador from an island of peace into the deadliest country in South America. It also served as the catalyst for at the time newly-elected President Daniel Noboa to declare a state of “internal armed conflict” and designate some 22 gangs as terrorist organizations, mobilizing the military to combat them.

The TV station takeover was set against a backdrop of a dramatic escape of Adolfo “Fito” Macías Villamar, leader of the Choneros gang, from Ecuador’s Litoral prison on January 7. The violence that gripped the country following Fito’s escape was likely partially orchestrated by the Choneros and their allies to either deter the Ecuadorian government from seeking to recapture him or otherwise distracting the security forces by presenting them with multiple competing crises. From that perspective, it was a canny strategy, but the Choneros’ plans likely did not go much beyond this point. Certainly, there was no total war envisioned against the Ecuadorian state, or at least not one that left the pages of gang propaganda. In the weeks and months that followed Quito’s declaration of internal armed conflict, homicides fell, then, they began to tick back up. Gangs content to lie low to avoid the heat from the military began to get restless, and marshalled gunmen to their banners.

In 2025, Ecuador’s homicide rate was about 29 percent higher than the previous year, and more than seven times higher than it was in 2019. Fito was recaptured last summer, but prison massacres and gang reprisals remain the norm. In ACLED’s Conflict Index this year, Ecuador was catapulted up 36 places to claim the rank of sixth most severe conflict in the world. Looking into the data further sheds some light on the nature of this internal armed conflict as it enters its second year.

You can probably spot a few notable trends on this graph. For one, the overwhelming majority of political violence in Ecuador takes the form of violence against civilians. This declined somewhat following Noboa’s initial declaration of internal armed conflict, while battles between the gangs and state forces trended upwards. However, since the summer of 2024, civilian victimization has remained stubbornly high. Intra-gang violence is also somewhat up, likely as state persecution has driven fragmentation and competition between armed groups. Overall, levels of conflict seem either unchanged or higher than they were before the government decided to go to war.

The gangs themselves do not have a political agenda, but the Ecuadorian state lacks the language to address the threat they posed as anything other than political. The result is something of a mismatch between government action and criminal reaction, often to the benefit of the latter.

Critically, gangs are more or less able to fight this war on their own terms. When state forces clamp down in one region, they can lie low and escalate operations in other territories. Doing so might put a dent in profits, but in the illicit economy such losses are often priced in already. When the focus shifts and pressure eases up, the criminals can revert to their old ways.

Inter-gang conflict adds another element of randomness to the picture. Prison massacres, for instance, are not directed at the state but rather rival groups housed in the same facility. Nevertheless, they serve as indictments of the Ecuadorian state’s ability to control what should be its most secure locations, while the murder of an incarcerated gang leader can spur retaliatory attacks far beyond the prison walls.

It is a somewhat tired analogy but the situation at present in Ecuador appears much like a game of Whac-a-Mole. State forces can clamp down on one region or group for a time, but almost inevitably violence escalates somewhere else, pulling resources away and allowing violence to break out anew in the formerly pacified region. The country is at war, but despite mobilizing the full might of the state crime and disorder still seem to be winning.

Mexico’s Two Wars

Mexico is one of the most interesting cases of organized crime seemingly bootstrapping itself into a quasi-insurgency. The process through which this has occurred is the result of a fierce arms race between organized crime in the country which has pushed illicit organizations to adopt more and more advanced tactics.

The leading criminal outfits in Mexico lay mines, fly drones, dig trenches, and drive around in convoys of improvised armored fighting vehicles. They employ dedicated units of ex-military and mercenary soldiers for high-intensity operations like the Jalisco Cartel New Generation’s “El Mencho’s Special Forces.”

Mexico’s cartel wars have always been tricky for me to wrap my head around. The level of tactical innovation we’ve observed among criminal groups in the country seems vastly beyond even what should be needed to resist police crackdowns, but for the most part these groups have kept both feet firmly planted in the criminal realm, not seeking to challenge so much as co-opt the state in their territories.

My sense is that Mexico faces two distinct modalities of criminal conflict. In one corner is the urban bloodbath, characterized by extortion, money laundering, and heavy civilian victimization, often public in nature to instill a sense of fear in the local populace. In the other is the rural insurgency, where criminal outfits contend with one another as well as the state to control the more rugged terrain on the outskirts of cities in order to either deny their rivals access to these lucrative urban centers or control key smuggling routes.

The interplay between these two conflicts is a key driver of cartel innovation. Criminal outfits must be able to preserve their lines of communication and supply lest they find themselves cut off and encircled by rivals. But once a group has gained access to a key town or city it must be willing to employ extreme violence in order to establish its dominance over the illicit economy there.

Both forms of conflict come with their own demands and challenges for security forces. Urban violence is hard to predict, with killings being executed by small teams or individual operatives while efforts to crack down risk serious collateral damage as cartels meld into dense residential blocks. By comparison, the rural insurgency features larger concentrations of fighters, symbolized by the convoys of up-armored pickups bearing columns of loosely disciplined yet heavily armed gunmen. However, equipped as they are cartel forces are often more than a match for local state police (if they are present at all in the first place) and are spread over a much wider area, making it hard for the Mexican state to achieve local superiority.

This 2022 article from InSight Crime, which recounts the story of a gunman working for the United Cartels in their conflict against the CJNG was always evocative for me. As he describes his journey through Mexico’s criminal armed conflict, his duties evolve from providing security to their local boss as he collected extortion fees, to confronting the narco-tanks and drones of the CJNG in battle on the grounds of an abandoned lime farm. The following passage does a good job in my opinion of capturing some of the intensity, and idiosyncrasy, of inter-cartel fighting:

“Each side had snipers wielding .50 caliber assault rifles, as well as a smattering of soldiers with AR-15s, M16s, and AK-47s. They each also had what they call Monsters: dump trucks and other similar-sized vehicles they’d fashioned into Mad Max-like tanks, some of which had turrets. But the Jaliscos had many more Monsters than the United Cartels. To slow these down, the United Cartels blew holes in the roads or brought backhoes to break up the highways…Still, Carlos said the fighting was sporadic, with shots traded across the lime farm in the middle of the night for a couple of hours, before becoming mostly quiet during the day. Supply lines were also strong. Carlos had six cartridges with 30 rounds each across his chest and another 12 cartridges within reach. Helpers also brought the soldiers good food from the local town, soda, fresh fruit juice, cigarettes, and, of course, marijuana and cocaine.”

This style of warfare is almost feudal in nature, with most fighters being drawn from and operating in geographically bounded regions. They are heavily armed, but poorly-disciplined, making pitched battles rare but skirmishes common. The most powerful cartels succeed by being able to move specialized and higher-quality forces from elsewhere into a contested area to achieve local superiority.

Compared to Ecuador, Mexican cartel tactics conform more closely to our understandings of irregular warfare. But there remains an important difference, despite the fact that the strongest cartels in Mexico wield immense firepower and resources at their disposal, they remain committed not to overrunning the state, but rather pursuing ever-expanding profits.

This helps us make sense somewhat of why homicide rates in Mexico have been falling over recent years, but the overall security situation still seems headed to hell in a handbasket. The actual level of daily bloodshed is not as important to the cartels as their ability to inflict violence, which has been largely unaffected by the state. Hot spots like Sinaloa (and even more specifically Culiacán) have seen their homicide rates skyrocket during the same period while state intervention has struggled to make a dent.

Staunching the Bleeding

What troubles me the most about this type of armed conflict is how difficult it seems to be to reverse. Once organized crime has reached a critical level of penetration in your country it seems you are destined to more or less be locked in to a certain level of baseline violence. Indeed, El Salvador pretty much the only country in the region which has successfully made major strides in breaking the influence of violent, consolidated, organized crime.

Before El Salvador, there was Colombia, which similarly made big strides in the security domain leading up to the 2015 peace agreement between the government and FARC rebels that brought an end to decades of civil war. But it is notable that the Colombian government was still fighting a politicized insurgency in the form of the FARC, which espoused clear goals that could be addressed directly in peace negotiations. Ideological insurgencies still have a role to play in Colombia’s security picture, but the tapestry has become more complex since then. Not only have Marxist insurgencies like the ELN become more criminalized, as the conflict transitioned from a civil war to flawed peace, paramilitary units set up originally to combat the FARC refused to stand down but instead transformed into more explicitly criminal enterprises.

This is probably a big reason why President Gustavo Petro’s “Total Peace” agenda failed, his government sought to negotiate with armed groups with the goal of reaching an agreement wherein they would feel comfortable laying down their arms. In practice, these groups were more than happy to pay lip service to the government in order to redirect their attention to fighting with each other for control over illicit economies.

Failure to understand the nature of organized crime in the Americas is also why I am cautious about U.S. rhetoric proclaiming to treat the cartels like Al Qaeda or ISIS. My worry is that we may be learning the wrong lessons from the Global War on Terror, namely that leadership decapitation can break up nonstate networks and keep them from being able to execute complex plots against the United States or regional allies.

This fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the challenge. Criminal organizations are not interested in complex operations, they are opportunistic and malleable. There is no one figure who can order the drug boats to stop launching, not matter how many get blown up. At best you can make certain forms of smuggling unprofitable, but trust that these groups will find a way to recoup the lost revenue some other way.

Now that doesn’t mean we are bound to lose this new war on crime, but it will require updating the way we think about the threats posed by violent organized crime. As I’ve tried to argue here, these groups sow terror and insurge against the state, but they are not terrorists or insurgents in the traditional sense. We should not expect the same tactics that worked against different opponents to be one-for-one applicable.

The task for the United States as well as its allies in the Americas will be how to choke off the revenue streams for organized crime, defeat corruption at the local level, while building up the kinds of intelligence and rapid-response capabilities to stymie Weeks of Lead when they do break out. By no means is this easy, and I confess I am ending this article here in part because I don’t have very good specific recommendations yet, but hopefully developing better frameworks for thinking about criminal armed conflict can allow us to start asking better questions about how we move forward.

On January 3 I woke up to my phone ringing. Answering it I was treated to the breathless voices of two friends informing me that the U.S. had just captured Maduro and his wife and was flying them back to stand trial in New York.

Admittedly, my first thought was that this must be a prank, so I did what any self-respecting analyst does and opened Twitter to confirm my suspicions. Instead, I was treated to a video at the top of my feed of U.S. helicopters flying over Caracas, with the caption “can we get a Venezuela edit of ‘Fortunate Son’?” At long last, the promised operation against Maduro had come.

The subsequent messaging from the White House has been, predictably, largely confusing and not a little bit contradictory. On Saturday, Trump announced that “we need total access” to Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, and that the revenues generated from that would help the U.S. “run” the country. The next day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC “we don’t need Venezuela’s oil” and that running the country really meant working with now-interim president Delcy Rodríguez to find areas of mutual interest.

For the most part, I think the current raft of think pieces covering these events is pretty good, and has converged on what I view as the right take, namely that the operation itself was a tactical masterpiece, what comes next is harder (and more confusing). So in this post, I’m hoping not to rehash that take, but give my view on why the implications of the U.S. capture of Maduro go far beyond Venezuela itself.

Right-Sizing Operation Absolute Resolve

In my view, no matter what comes next, the United States has already won. Operation Absolute Resolve surely ranks as one of the most impressive and audacious special forces missions in history. I can think of no other instance in which a foreign head of state was taken prisoner in the heart of his own capital and exfiltrated with no loss of life among the capturing force. As time goes by and we learn more about the true scale, complexity, and contingency of this operation I am sure it will swiftly take its due place in the annals of special operations history.

Even more importantly, the operation proved the United States was willing to use military force against the sovereign territory of a country in the Americas. I’ve argued before that Venezuela is merely the most convenient testing ground for a more expansive, and less restrained, vision of U.S. power. Maduro’s international isolation, domestic illegitimacy, and fraught history with Trump made him the first target, but he will not be the last.

The messaging from the White House has been remarkably consistent on this point, the United States expects to reign supreme in its hemisphere. From the “Trump Corollary” expressed in the 2025 National Security Strategy, to the President’s repeated statements that the next step in the ongoing counternarcotics campaign would involve going after traffickers on land. Indeed, it is telling that shortly after the capture of Maduro, Trump reiterated his desire to acquire Greenland, as well as threaten the governments of Colombia and Cuba.

Of course, as other commentators have pointed out, U.S. military intervention in the Americas is anything but unprecedented. This operation is more the United States reverting to the historical mean than departing from one, but the breaking of a three decade streak of non-intervention in the hemisphere deserves a eulogy at least.

The way the United States intervened in Venezuela also matters. The fact that U.S. forces were able to get in and out so smoothly again is a victory for Washington on several fronts. In particular, it leaves Venezuela with little recourse, their president is gone, held securely in the New York Metropolitan Detention Center, there seems to be little to no prospect of getting him back in the near term. Meanwhile, any retaliation the Venezuelan armed forces might wish to inflict on U.S. forces in theater would almost certainly be met with an overwhelming response. If U.S. and Venezuelan forces were still skirmishing on the beaches that would be one thing, but practically speaking there is nothing for the Venezuelan military to do right now.

In this way, criticism that the Trump administration launched a war of choice without the approval of Congress also rings somewhat hollow. Practically speaking, there is no conflict right now between the United States and Venezuela, U.S. forces were already safely out of the country, with their prisoners in tow, before the first reports of what had happened became known.

The unmitigated success of Operation Absolute Resolve therefore also strengthens the United States’ hand in negotiations with Delcy Rodríguez and the remaining Chavista inner circle. Washington has proven that the FANB’s ability to impose even token costs on the U.S. is severely limited. While another snatch-and-grab operation seems unlikely, the United States could almost certainly reach out and kill senior leaders like Defense Minister Padrino López or the interim president herself at its leisure and without much risk to its own personnel.

Other governments in the Americas are likely taking similar notes. While the spectacle of Operation Absolute Resolve probably raised eyebrows in Moscow, and Beijing, it should be even more alarming for governments in the Western Hemisphere. That is because unlike the United States’ peer adversaries, there are few (if any) countries in Latin America or the Caribbean that could hope to resist an operation on the scale of what was seen in Venezuela. Even the most capable militaries in the region would struggle to field 50 aircraft in a single operation, let alone the more than 150 used in Absolute Resolve.

Indeed, the operation’s success goes to show just how wide the gap has become in terms of the types of effects high-end militaries can create against low-end militaries. The temptation is surely strong to see whether the same feat could be replicated against, say, cartel leadership in Mexico.

But tactical success often carries with it strategic risk. Not only does the United States find itself now with the task of managing a fraught relationship with Venezuela, but it could easily succumb to the trap of overreach.

In 1954 a ragtag force of disgruntled exiles backed by the CIA succeeded in toppling the government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. The operation was, in retrospect, sloppily planned and hinged more on internal tensions within the Guatemalan government than any stroke of operational genius among the coup plotters. Nevertheless, the success of the Guatemala operation fed a myth of invincibility that historian Nick Cullather documented led the CIA in part to green-light another ambitious effort to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs in 1960. Compared to both of these operations, Absolute Resolve was infinitely more competently organized, but the danger remains that tactical success in Venezuela could lead to the United States embarking on riskier and less well-thought-out actions in the hemisphere. Past successes can make future blunders more likely, with devastating consequences for U.S. servicemembers, civilians, and the stability of the region as a whole.

A Word of Caution on Spheres of Influence

There are some who have taken Operation Absolute Resolve, and Trump’s invocation of the “Donroe Doctrine” as evidence of the United States’ continued shift into a world where the global great powers carve up the world into spheres of influence. To the United States goes the Western Hemisphere, while Russia and China are given free reign in eastern Europe and east Asia respectively. I remain skeptical of these claims. Even as the United States might seem eager to dance upon the grave of the rules-based international order, this does not mean Washington will consent to rule merely half the world.

Trump wants to be master of the Western Hemisphere, that much is certain. But the United States has never let domination in one region prevent itself from voicing concerns elsewhere. Indeed, it seems laughable to suggest that the United States plans to withdraw from other regions when it lobbed missiles into Nigeria little over a week prior to the capture of Maduro. It seems equally implausible as well to suggest that Trump would let Iran’s nuclear ambitions be managed by Moscow or Beijing as the masters of the Eurasian sphere of influence.

Even when it comes to Europe, Trump’s foreign policy is not one of neglect, but engagement in its own way. The 2025 NSS which drew much condemnation across the Atlantic, did so not because it sought to dust the United States’ hands of Europe, but because it sought to leverage U.S. power to meddle more in domestic European politics by supporting “patriotic European parties” aligned with the Trump administration’s ideological project. The United States is still engaging the rest of the world, it just may not be with the same language other countries are used to.

Thus, while China in particularly might feel emboldened by U.S. behavior in the Americas to push its own expansionist goals in the Indo-Pacific, that is not guarantee the United States will not snap its focus back to Asia should it sense a vital interest at stake there. Multipolarity does not guarantee the great powers of the world will find equilibrium, far from it, it demands a much more taxing dance by diplomats and generals alike to maintain an increasingly fragile status quo. We should beware the embrace of spheres of influence by world powers not so much because of what they may inflict within their designated boundaries, but because the very spheres themselves often overlap and provide new fuel for interstate conflict.

#1 This is a good Western Hemisphere strategy

“Careful what you wish for” has been my mantra as a Latin America watcher this past year. After spending most of my time in this space crying from the rooftops for policymakers to pay more attention to the Western Hemisphere, we now have the most Latin America-focused presidential administration in decades. In particular, acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio’s fingerprints seem all over the Western Hemisphere section of the NSS.

The Western Hemisphere section is, for the most part, blissfully free of culture war rhetoric that pervades other sections of the document. In fact, the two pillars of this strategy, dubbed “Enlist” and “Expand” would not be out of place in a DC think tank report (that’s a compliment), and center cooperation with allies and partners in the region. Many of their recommendations are pure common sense, like calls for increased coast guard and naval presence to deter drug trafficking, forging mutually beneficial economic ties, and facilitating technology transfer and arms sales to regional allies.

In particular, there is a remarkably cogent analysis of how the United States can compete with China. The NSS repeats common language about the hidden costs and risks to countries of relying on Chinese tech and infrastructure, but recognizes that the United States must do more than scold countries in the Americas.

While the United States government cannot compete with China on a raw dollar-for-dollar basis, it has the benefit of the world’s most dynamic economy and vast capital markets. These can be leveraged in ways that benefit Latin American partners and also box out Beijing’s ability to access critical raw materials, creating a self-sustaining hemispheric ecosystem that could be a major source of strength. The NSS gets these factors right, and it is honestly refreshing to see this argument being made at the highest levels of U.S. national security policymaking.

Also notable is the line that “we must not overlook governments with different outlooks with whom we nonetheless share interests and who want to work with us.” That could be taken as an olive branch to countries like Colombia or Brazil if they can successfully squash their beefs with Washington.

But writing the strategy is the easy part, and I’m still not totally convinced that we are setting ourselves up for success along the lines that the NSS articulates.

So far this year, the United States has had trouble taking full advantage of its wins. Pressure on Panama early on in the Trump administration resulted in a landmark deal between CK Hutchison and BlackRock to sell 43 overseas ports operated by the Hong Kong-based company. But the U.S. has taken its eye off the ball on the deal, opening the door for a Chinese state-owned shipping company to potentially secure a minority stake in 41 of these ports, including strategic holdings in Mexico and the Bahamas. China is also bidding on two new port concessions along the Panama Canal, while U.S. companies are seemingly nowhere to be found.

In Brazil as well, tariffs could have paved the way for a landmark critical minerals agreement that would lock China out of strategic reserves of REEs and niobium vital for defense production. Instead, the United States focused on trying to free Jair Bolsonaro, and may be losing interest in the fight now that it has become evident that such a demand is a complete non-starter for Lula. The United States might lose out on a potential opportunity in Brazil simply for lack of imagination.

There is still reason for optimism. The above examples prove that the U.S. still wields significant influence in the Americas, it is a question of how we use it and to what ends. Argentina, for instance, is a good case study of how positive engagement between the United States and the region could look. Hopefully the NSS, with its mandate to “identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program” can help course-correct, but my prognosis is mixed at the moment.

#2 I still don’t know what the “Trump Corollary” is

Perhaps the single most relevant statement in the NSS is its commitment to articulate and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. This is a punchy and evocative statement, sure to capture headlines, but when reading I found myself with more questions than answers in terms of what that actually means for U.S. foreign policy.

The most relevant text from the NSS reads: “We want to ensure that the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States; we want a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations; we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations. In other words, we will assert and enforce a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine.”

According to this framing the Trump Corollary covers a broad range of topics, from quality of governance to public safety to great power competition and command of the commons in the Americas. For a strategy that professes to offer a more triaged, focused vision of America’s available means and desired ends, this misses the mark.

Let’s consider first the strategic tradition the Trump Corollary is attempting to situate itself within.

Regardless of how you might feel about their contents, both the original Monroe Doctrine and Teddy Roosevelt’s original corollary articulate a remarkably elegant and cohesive strategy. Monroe’s articulation in December 1823 provided a clear objective, no new European interference in the Americas. Of course, at the time the United States had no means of enforcement, but fortunately Britain was willing to shoulder the thankless job of keeping the rest of Europe out while its former colony claimed the credit.

By the time Teddy Roosevelt came to office the United States was finally able to shoulder the full burden of the Monroe Doctrine, but with that power came a perceived responsibility for enforcing good conduct within Washington’s zone of influence. Accordingly, Roosevelt stated that, “in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” In this way the Monroe Doctrine as we know it today was conceived as a two-part policy (1) No intervention in the Americas by extra-hemispheric powers, (2) within the Americas, the United States reserves the right to intervene in its neighbors’ affairs as a policeman of last resort.

Again, regardless of how you feel about that framing, it seems profoundly unclear what new dimension the Trump Corollary brings to the table. Instead, the NSS lays out a grab bag of things it doesn’t want to have happen in the Americas. We don’t want countries trafficking drugs, or migrants, we don’t want China controlling critical infrastructure, we don’t want to lose access to the Panama Canal. But are those things preconditions for the use of military force? Or does a country need to check several of those boxes (like Venezuela) before bombs start dropping? If countries work with the United States to stop those things from happening, will it be rewarded, and if so, in what way? These are fundamental questions about how you connect means with ends, the exact thing the NSS promises to do, but I feel myself having to fill in the blanks left in the document.

At best, the Trump Corollary is a modification of Roosevelt, enumerating and updating the list of conditions under which the United States will get involved in its neighborhood. At worst, it is what James Bosworth aptly described yesterday as “a branding exercise for ad hoc decisions driven by the president’s whims and pique.”

#3 First Venezuela, then the world

Venezuela is conspicuously absent from any mention in the NSS. Indeed, the focus on enlisting allies and expanding partnerships seems to imply a rosier picture of U.S. engagement with the region than we are currently observing.

In my view, the absence of Venezuela from the document itself confirms my hunch that overthrowing Maduro is not the primary focus of the current U.S. focus on the region. Instead, I think Venezuela matters mostly insofar as it is bound up with Washington’s broader crusade against drug trafficking and migration.

That’s not to say Venezuela doesn’t matter. To the contrary, I think it is a critical test case for the United States’ ability to expand its campaign against narcotraffickers from the global commons to sovereign territory. Maduro’s regime, illegitimate and unpopular at home and with a dwindling and fickle set of friends abroad, is an appealing target, and potentially a valuable precedent. If the United States succeeds in striking Venezuela with limited repercussions, the Western Hemisphere will get a lot scarier for everyone who isn’t the United States. Mexico in particular will be paying close attention to whether Venezuela sets a precedent for U.S. strikes against land targets in the region.

This can also give us some signs of where things could be headed in the showdown between Washington and Caracas. If the United States’ primary goal is to prove it is able to go after traffickers on land, that raises the probability we could see airstrikes against Venezuela that nevertheless leave Maduro in power. In this scenario, the United States launches a handful of strikes using standoff munitions against narcotrafficking targets including ports or airfields, but doesn’t sustain this campaign for long enough to trigger a domestic uprising. Trump would still be able to declare victory by having targeted FTO-designated cartels on land (his stated objective) without having to reckon with the fallout of regime change.

This of course sounds like the worst of both worlds, constituting a flagrant violation of national sovereignty (which the NSS valorizes) while still leaving the Venezuelan people under the yoke of Maduro. In response, I would argue that such an outcome should be seen as at least plausible, and entirely in keeping with this administration’s core national security goals, namely to usher in a new Global War on Crime where the President’s authority to target cartels is viewed as sacrosanct and impervious to judgement.

#4 Risks and rewards for allies

As mentioned before, in the text itself the Western Hemisphere sections of the NSS are heavily focused on building partnerships with countries in the region. Reading between the lines, it looks like the United States is hoping to apply some of the same burden-sharing expectations on the region that it has asked of partners in Europe and Asia.

At a basic level, it seems that the United States heavy-handed approach to drug trafficking will trickle down through the rest of the region. Politicians who admired Nayib Bukele in El Salvador will be doubly emboldened by U.S. strikes on drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. In the near future, I would expect to see more countries using their militaries against drug traffickers and gangs, either in an effort to emulate the United States, or for fear of being seen by Washington as insufficiently committed to the cause of counternarcotics.

But taking domestic action won’t be enough, and the NSS seems to imply it will be looking to like-minded countries in the Americas to act as problem-solvers within their neighborhoods. This is in keeping with the Trump administration’s general preference for allies to increase their burden sharing. If countries really want to curry favor with DC, they will have to step up in ways they may have never anticipated.

What this might look like will be up to regional governments to decide, but it opens some interesting possibilities especially in the security domain. Maybe Argentina takes a more muscular approach to interdicting and boarding Chinese illegal fishing vessels in its EEZ. Maybe El Salvador sends a security advisory delegation to help Ecuador secure its prison system. Maybe Colombia launches a joint drone production program with a U.S. defense tech firm.

One of the biggest, and riskiest, challenges that the United States may ask its allies to take on is Haiti. Nobody wants to touch the beleaguered country, least of all the Trump administration, and for good reason. No country wants to commit their own soldiers to fight in punishing urban terrain against heavily armed gangs just to prop up an interim government that is hanging on by a thread. For this reason, the new Gang Suppression Force authorized by the Security Council this September remains in limbo, it exists in theory, but everyone is dragging their feet when it comes time to commit actual forces.

To me this is an overly cautious way of thinking about things. A country that is willing to accept responsibility and fully commit to leading the charge against Haiti’s gangs would likely get a warm reception in Washington. They could in turn leverage this goodwill to secure foreign military financing, security cooperation agreements, and even strike a more favorable trade deal. It will also behoove countries to take the initiative on this themselves, rather than wait for the United States to decide enough is enough an browbeat a coalition of countries into taking on the Haiti file.

#5 The foreign policy establishment has yet to notice the vibe shift

While I’ve focused this article on what the NSS has to say about U.S. strategy in the Americas, that has not been the primary headline around the document. Instead, most observers in the national security world have focused on what it means for Europe, or how it views the confrontation with China.

The fact that the Western Hemisphere appeared first among the list of regions is analyzed only insofar as it is proof that the document has its priorities all wrong. To be sure, there has been much ink spilled over the Trump Corollary, but this analysis is largely circulating within the same Latin America-watcher circles, struggling to break out into the larger national security conversation.

Perhaps this is just me feeling sore that after all this time the region I love still doesn’t have sufficient pride. But I do sense that for many of the pundits and analysts in DC’s foreign policy world, this focus on the Western Hemisphere is regarded as something of a distraction we must entertain before the focus reverts to the more relevant theaters of Europe, the Middle East, and Indo-Pacific.

I think this mindset is incorrect for a couple of reasons. First, at a very basic level the Americas will be relevant for at least the remainder of the Trump administration. Even if conflict with Venezuela is not imminent, the United States is reopening and expanding bases throughout the Caribbean and stocking up for a multi-year presence in the region. It seems likely that a larger U.S. force posture in the hemisphere is going to be a reality, and with a bigger hammer the United States is liable to go looking for nails to pound down.

Second, and more personally, I think the Western Hemisphere has much to teach us about the way geopolitics will play out in the coming decades. Whether you care about the future of democracy or the energy transition and the minerals that power it, urban combat or the demographic crisis, the Americas are an understudied and undervalued region. Indeed, part of my goal with this blog is to hopefully convince you that studying Latin America and the Caribbean is crucial to a well-rounded understanding of politics in the 21st century.

We might not all be Latin Americanists just yet, but it can’t hurt to brush up.

That means one of the biggest moats for a would-be bio/chem villain is technical expertise, where a powerful and morally unscrupulous AI model might be just the thing that’s needed to bring a terrorist’s vision into reality. From the AI side of things, as the cost of energy and compute fall, it can become cheaper and more accessible (other things equal) to harness dangerous AI capabilities. If you buy into the most extreme AI-doomer arguments, synthesizing a world-ending pathogen from even mundane ingredients would be trivially easy for the artificial superintelligences that are potentially just around the corner.

But even without a digital godhead, existing AI models have already proven their utility for biological and chemical uplift in skilled hands. Google’s DeepMind contributed to the Nobel Prize-winning effort to crack protein folding. OpenAI is collaborating with bioscience firms to try and predict the results of clinical trials with a goal of fast-tracking new drugs. If the applications of AI in the life sciences are even half as broad as their proponents claim, it stands to reason that the technology could be a serious risk in the wrong hands.

However, these arguments might be overlooking another important actor that stands to gain from illicit AI: the cartels. Today, thousands of people spread across dozens of countries are engaged in the manufacturing and trafficking of illegal drugs at the behest of sprawling transnational criminal networks. Increasingly these groups deal in drugs that aren’t grown, but synthesized from precursor chemicals. A sufficiently competent Artificial Intelligence could be a boon to this billion-dollar industry by upskilling amateur chemists, advising on lab design, or even aiding in the discovery of new narcotics.

My argument is not that we should neglect higher-order bio/chem weapons risks from AI, but rather that cartel adoption of AI for synthetic drug production is an important, and underappreciated, indicator of potential real harms from AI in the wrong hands.

The underlying logic for this is relatively straightforward: you can sell drugs for a respectable profit, and there is a fairly robust illicit economy wired to support you doing so. This is borne out by the fact that, sans-AI, the number of people who are working on making synthetic drugs like meth and fentanyl right now is much larger than the number of people trying to develop a chemical or biological superweapon. Making drugs pays, perhaps terrorism less so. If AI lowers the barriers to access for illicit science, it seems likely that more people may be incentivized to join the drug game than the terrorism game.

The synthetic drug revolution

Synthetic drugs are not new. Chemical stimulants like methamphetamine have been around since the late 1800s, but they are ascendant in the current global drug market. In the United States especially, the rise of fentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid, casts a long shadow over popular culture and political life. While fentanyl overdose deaths have declined from their previous record highs, the drug remains a fixture in American political discourse. Ending the fentanyl trade is ostensibly the rationale for tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China, as well as the semi-official casus belli for the ongoing U.S. military campaign in the Caribbean.

While fentanyl is perhaps the most notorious, it is but one of a host of synthetic drugs that are flooding global markets. This includes meth, which by some accounts is even more important for lining cartel pockets in Mexico and the United States, as well as more potent fentanyl analogues like carfentanil. Today, it is safe to say there are only two types of countries, those with synthetic drug problems, and those about to have synthetic drug problems.

Current trends point to synthetics becoming more, not less, of a problem in the coming years. Synthetic drugs have a number of advantages over more traditional plant-based narcotics. They are largely climate agnostic, require less space to produce, and can be more potent, allowing traffickers and users to get more bang for their buck. These factors are especially important as the United States steps up its military campaign against narcotraffickers, allowing synthetic drug operations to be much more resilient than previous drug operations. Coca fields can be spotted from outer space; fentanyl labs can fit inside a house.

Analysts have long highlighted the difficulty of supply side (i.e. interdiction-based) counternarcotics strategies. It is simply very difficult to interdict a large enough quantity of drugs to put a meaningful dent in their availability to street users and dealers. Synthetic drugs further skew this calculus in favor of traffickers. Whereas you might need a car or go-fast boat to smuggle an appreciable amount of cocaine into the United States, you can traffic an equivalent dose of fentanyl with a commercial drone, or on the person of a single drug mule. With the United States stepping up its operational tempo of lethal strikes against drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean, cartels will likely face pressures to adopt more distributed networks moving higher-potency narcotics. Fentanyl and its analogues fit the bill nicely.

Fentanyl is also not particularly difficult to make. In kitchens and home labs across Mexico, individuals follow rudimentary instructions to synthesize precursors and pre-precursors into viable product. This process is dangerous, often deadly for the cooks, and results in highly varied compounds that worsen the overdose problem among users.

Of course, user preferences can condition the types of drugs cartels are able to sell.

Europe, for instance, has emerged as the primary global market for cocaine, but fentanyl, which has ravaged the United States, has yet to make a dent across the Atlantic. But this means AI should be an even more compelling tool for drug cartels. If fentanyl is not seeing demand in a market, perhaps another synthetic drug might fill the niche. Using AI to synthesize new chemicals is an order of magnitude more complex than getting it to help out with fentanyl or methamphetamine, but it is not beyond the pale for powerful criminal syndicates.

Indeed, drug cartels have strong track records of synthetic drug innovation without AI assistance. The rise of tusi, or “pink cocaine” in South America, ecstasy labs in Paraguay, and the emergence of Chile as a ketamine smuggling hub all speak to this singular brand of illicit innovation and market adaptation.

Even a fairly limited chatbot capable of advising these artisanal chemists on their process could probably drive gains for cartels in the form of better product, higher yields, and fewer accidents. AI could provide step-by-step guidance on methamphetamine or fentanyl synthesis, avoiding reliance on artisanal knowledge or hastily scrawled recipes. It might also be queried on relevant safety procedures for setting up a home laboratory, and while the cartels could scarcely care less about the wellbeing of their cooks, avoiding deaths or lab explosions would help keep their illicit business humming.

AI seems like it could supercharge organized crime’s ability to both adapt to government pressure and unlock new markets. However, if the incentives are so strongly aligned, why haven’t we seen cartels turning to AI for drug development yet?

What to look for

Fortunately, getting an AI that can help you manufacture lethal drugs is harder than simply using a clever series of prompts on ChatGPT. For criminal groups seeking to leverage AI to uplift their drug production, there are broadly two options: (a) build your own model and the infrastructure to support it, or (b) buy it from somewhere else.

The first option is the most technically intensive, essentially requiring cartels to stand up their own underground datacenters and associated infrastructure to host customized models optimized for assistance with drug development. The good news is that this physical infrastructure presents a clear target for law enforcement operations. The energy demand of a datacenter, even an improvised one, should be a natural clue for U.S. and Mexican authorities to look for, while standing up an illicit AI infrastructure stack would be a costly investment for criminals.

Another red flag to look for would be cartel efforts to recruit data science and machine learning experts to help stand up their own models. The New York Times has already reported that groups like the Sinaloa Cartel have sought to recruit, by hook or by crook, chemistry students to assist with the manufacturing of synthetic drugs. Getting programmers to build a custom AI could cut out the middleman in this regard. As Mexico looks to boost its domestic AI and tech sector, the opportunities to either pay off or coerce young tech workers are likely to grow in the coming months and years.

Accordingly, while the barriers to criminals developing their own custom AI models are high, if there are any groups that could accomplish this, powerful and internationalized drug cartels like the CJNG are probably near the top of the list. These groups have sufficient access to money, control over territory, and co-option of state security forces to make a real play at setting up their own narco-datacenters. This approach also has the benefits of customizability and scalability. As compute becomes cheaper and cheaper, the cost for a criminal organization to build more and more capable models will likely continue to decline. A good general-purpose AI resembling the current state of the art might also be turned to objectives other than drug development, simultaneously running financial fraud schemes, developing hacking tools, and acting as personal assistants for cartel bosses.

Nevertheless, narco-datacenters are likely still a ways away. It seems more probable instead that at first criminal AI use would center on running local instances of open-source models that cannot be monitored by their original developers. Chinese models like Deepseek stand out as falling in the sweet spot for Latin American drug trafficking organizations, bringing a combination of close-to-frontier capabilities while being based in a country that has proven willing to snub U.S. requests for closer counternarcotics cooperation in the past.

Another option still would be for criminals to rely on a malicious AI built and hosted by third parties. There is a template for this already with the proliferation of subscription-based “no limits” chatbots like FraudGPT and WormGPT, designed to help users craft customized phishing schemes and cyberattacks. The developers of a hypothetical future DrugGPT would need to be insulated from U.S. and international law enforcement efforts. Perhaps they could be sheltered by an adversarial state with an interest in destabilizing the United States and its allies (China, Russia, or North Korea come to mind). Alternatively, they could simply have a network resilient and distributed enough to evade easy detection.

I’ve not included the potential that bad actors could jailbreak or otherwise evade the safeguards embedded in commercially available, proprietary frontier AI models. Anthropic’s recent detection of a China-based cyber espionage effort that used Claude Code to carry out autonomous hacking is an instructive case study. On the one hand, the incident underscores the level of threat from emerging frontier AI agents. On the other hand, the fact that Anthropic was able to identify the campaign and cut off the attackers’ access to Claude Code shows how quickly leading AI companies can pull the plug on nefarious uses of their proprietary systems. For criminal groups, relying on commercial, proprietary AI for their operations would be like building on quicksand.

Concluding thoughts

We shouldn’t doubt the industriousness of organized crime in the Americas. Cartels have built clandestine submarines, armored vehicles, and even oil refineries in the pursuit of illicit gains. In Mexico especially, criminal groups have the right combination of financial resources, state penetration, and territorial control that could conceivably make this a reality. AI adoption by these groups is likely a matter of “when” not “if” that is, if they haven’t begun already.

That being said, the fact that we haven’t yet seen widespread evidence of criminal use of AI to uplift synthetic drug production is a good sign. If you buy my argument that international drug cartels are the potential first movers in using AI for illicit bio-chem purposes, if they aren’t employing it at scale, that itself may suggest that we have time before a smaller and less well-resourced outfit tries to use AI to pull off a bioterrorism attack.

We should use this time to prepare. Agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration should develop procedures for testing the presence of AI in narcotrafficking operations. In particular, the United States and its allies should remain attentive to new synthetic compounds whenever they crop up on global markets to determine whether artificial intelligence might have played a role in their design. Ironically, good AI might be able to help these efforts. Analysis from the National Institute of Justice has argued that data and sample mining of new synthetic drugs can help forensic labs to better trace the evolution of these substances. The pattern recognition and data analysis capabilities of artificial intelligence might be of use in these efforts.

We can also learn lessons from past efforts to combat AI chip smuggling in order to prevent organized crime from getting ahold of the tech needed to build their own models. The United States in recent years has gotten better at spotting chip smuggling operations seeking to divert export-controlled equipment to China. The United States could look into exports of AI chips bound for datacenters in Mexico to ensure the ledgers match up. The U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security would be a key partner in these efforts, while the upcoming 2026 review of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement provides a useful forum to raise such concerns.

Finally, though it might cause some eyes to roll at the present moment, this is an issue ripe for international cooperation. AI is a digital tool that relies on physical infrastructure. Being able to access, and potentially pull the plug on this infrastructure when it is being used for nefarious purposes will be crucial. While some countries might welcome the establishment of illicit datacenters if they can help destabilize the United States, Washington and its partners should do their best to ensure that their access to the frontier of AI tech remains out of reach.

This piece owes a debt of gratitude to Iskandar Haykel for his thoughtful advice and review. All errors of fact, analysis, or omission are solely my own.

Close to the heart of the current debate is an argument, not necessarily over Venezuela per se, but rather what historical analogy best fits the Venezuela case study. Opponents of regime change point to the chaos in Libya (or Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter) to highlight the disastrous consequences of seeking to topple even a horrifically authoritarian government. Proponents brush off such parallels noting that Venezuela has far fewer ethnic and religious cleavages than those countries, and is in fact far more akin to Panama in 1989, an intervention which, while not without its critics, is probably a best case scenario for foreign regime change in the modern era.

Historical analogies are a perpetual-motion discourse machine, so it’s unsurprising that the conversation has converged on such a battle over case studies. But if they are going to debate analogies, both sides would do well to read up on Richard Neustadt and Ernest May’s seminal book Thinking in Time. Indeed, they seem to be falling into the exact pitfalls Neustadt and May warn decisionmakers about when it comes to applying historical analogies to current problems. While history is perhaps our single greatest tool for predicting the future, using historical analogies as a substitute for real analysis is the path to folly. At the end of the day, Venezuela is Venezuela, and no case study, however similar it might appear, can accurately model the complexities and contingencies that will bubble to the surface in a regime change scenario.

Venezuela is not Libya

For regime change skeptics, Libya is the archetypal failure mode for Venezuela. Like all good historical analogies, there are strong parallels to be drawn between the two. Of particular relevance given President Trump’s aversion to putting U.S. boots on the ground, Western involvement in Libya was limited to air support, letting rebel forces on the ground handle the actual task of deposing Muammar Gaddafi. U.S. force posture in the Caribbean currently seems to be angling for something similar, knocking Maduro out of power without boots on the ground.

But in Libya, NATO’s dream of fomenting democracy on the cheap quickly proved fleeting as the power vacuum left by Gaddafi’s death rapidly degenerated into a civil war redux. In this way, the Libya case has been bound together with Iraq and Afghanistan as the three great sins of the United States’ global war on terror. Indeed, while Iraq has stabilized for now as an imperfect democracy, and Afghanistan today seems to have reached an equilibrium, however authoritarian, under Taliban rule, Libya is still struggling to simply tread water. Through this lens, anti-interventionists are looking at Maduro’s military posturing and arming of various militias to argue that a similar quagmire awaits the United States in Venezuela.

But when people speak of a civil war in Venezuela, it’s unclear how exactly they see the factional lines being drawn. Certainly, the Maduro regime has every incentive to portray itself as willing to fight to the last breath against the invading Yankee imperialists, but the National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB) have never fought a real war. Like most institutions in Venezuela, they are riven by corruption and highly atomized. At the unit level it seems more likely that troops will be loyal to whoever pays them best, or promises to pay them. Other militias and internal security forces are closer to criminal cartels than insurgents, dangerous to be sure, but likely more interested in collecting rents than waging guerrilla war.

It is true that Maduro has coup-proofed his security apparatus to the extreme, but displays of loyalty to an existing hierarchy are not particularly good predictors of a willingness to engage in protracted guerilla war once that leader is gone. Indeed, the more coup-proofed a force is, the worse it may be at the duties of actual soldiering. South Vietnam’s armed forces, for instance, were heavily coup-prone, and subsequently coup-proofed. They mounted fairly paltry resistance to the North Vietnamese once U.S. support dried up, and insurgent activity after the fall of Saigon was relatively minor. In Iraq, coup proofing helped keep Saddam in power after Desert Storm, but the onset of insurgency in 2003 was a tragedy with many fathers. The uncontrolled sectarian tensions that heaped fuel on the fire in Iraq don’t map well onto the human terrain of Venezuela.

The point of this is that expecting regime change to beget civil war because “that’s what always happens” ignores the fact that (1) civil war doesn’t always happen after regime change, and (2) there are structural factors you can point to in a society that precipitate internal armed conflict. On point #2 I don’t believe those factors are nearly as present in Venezuela as they were in Libya in 2011, or even Iraq in 2003. Of course, how regime change actually happens could change that, but overreliance on historical analogies flattens our ability to appreciate local nuances and risk factors that let us make better predictions.

Other commentators have warned that toppling Maduro would attract combatants from around the hemisphere, and potentially the world, to fight the United States. I am skeptical of these claims as well, first of all because, for the reasons described above, it seems profoundly unclear who exactly they would be fighting for. Second, we’ve seen left-wing anti-imperialist insurgencies in the Western Hemisphere before, and none of them seemed to draw an appreciable contingent of foreign fighters. While the United States would do well to reflect on the lessons of the Global War on Terror, it is not a one-to-one comparison with Venezuela.

This doesn’t mean I believe Venezuela will immediately become a zone of peace with Maduro’s fall. Instead, the collapse of the Maduro regime promises to benefit existing criminal actors, not ideological warring factions. While far from ideal, there is a world of difference between a state with resurgent criminal challenges, and a state at war with itself. We have current examples of the former in countries like Mexico and Ecuador, where organized crime seeks to coopt rather than topple the state. It is brutish, violent, and deadly for civilians caught in the crossfire, but still falls meaningfully short of the conflagration promised by those who lean too heavily on Libya as a historical antecedent.

Venezuela is not Panama

On the other side of the coin, the pro-intervention camp points to Panama as an example of how U.S.-led regime change can be effective. In late December 1989, the United States invaded and deposed dictator Manuel Noriega before departing the country at the end of January 1990. As interventions go, the invasion of Panama was highly effective. Opposition leader Guillermo Endara, who had by all accounts won the 1989 presidential elections annulled by Noriega, was recognized as the legitimate leader, and Panama has been a healthy democracy ever since. No civil war or protracted insurgency broke out, the United States was not dragged into a quagmire, and indeed, regional stability very likely improved post Noriega’s ouster.

Panama in this way offers a useful counterfactual for advocates that regime change in Venezuela would not be nearly as bad as the naysayers claim. Like Maduro, Noriega was seen as a narco-dictator, who had grown rich by taking a cut of the profits from the drug trade to the United States (reports that this may have been facilitated by Cold War-era U.S. administrations notwithstanding). Like Venezuela, the opposition in Panama delivered an upset win in elections the regime had hoped to convincingly steal, delegitimizing the dictatorship and weakening its ability to rally society around the flag in the face of foreign intervention. Finally, it bears reminding that in pure geographic and cultural terms, Venezuela is also much closer to Panama than Iraq or Libya.

But these similarities are outweighed by major differences. Whereas Panama was an authoritarian, but ultimately functional, state, Venezuela is a country suffering from more than two decades of institutional rot. The Venezuelan state has become progressively more and more hollowed out by corruption, desperation, and incessant penetration by organized crime. In 1989, Panama had one of the highest GDPs per capita in Latin America, today, Venezuela’s economy is struggling to crawl out of death spiral years in the making. It is also worth noting that Venezuela is larger and more decentralized than Panama. While Operation Just Cause was able to concentrate on the centers of gravity around the canal and Panama City, and the U.S. had access to permanent military facilities to pre-position forces, Venezuela’s vast and inaccessible interior provides strategic depth for irregular forces to withdraw to.

There are some who argue that removing Maduro will cut off the head of the snake, and without his backing, the criminal groups that previously benefitted from his patronage will wither on the vine. I disagree with this assessment. It’s unclear to me what support these groups are receiving now from Maduro that they could not live without. Certainly, groups like the ELN and FARC dissidents are grateful that Venezuela acts as a safe haven for them to withdraw to, but I have serious doubts as to whether an opposition-led Venezuela would be able to extirpate them.

Would the post-Maduro Venezuelan security forces, facing simultaneous reckonings over corruption, human rights abuses, and loyalty to the new government, really be able to take the fight to non-state armed groups in the periphery? The last time the FANB tried to do so, when Maduro sought to quash the FARC dissident forces in Apure, it suffered a bloody nose. While an opposition-led Venezuela may be able to reform the security services to better combat criminal groups in Venezuelan territory, potentially with U.S. assistance, this process would take time, money, and strategic vision. In the immediate aftermath, it seems more likely that criminal groups who are active in areas with already weak state capacity would see regime change chaos as an opportunity to further entrench themselves.

Venezuela is Venezuela

Perhaps one of the lessons from looking at Libya and Panama is that strategy matters when it comes to changing a regime. In Libya, a fragmented coalition snowballed from civilian protection to regime change seemingly by accident, then hoped it could wash its hands of the affair while others picked up the pieces. In Panama, the United States benefitted from unity of command, a clear goal that from the outset envisioned the removal of Noriega, and overwhelming force in-theater. To be sure, Operation Just Cause also benefitted from structural factors both internationally and within Panama that made the transition easier, but the United States was also better prepared to capitalize on these.

The problem, in my opinion, with U.S. rhetoric around regime change in Venezuela does not inspire confidence about a long-term strategic vision for the country. Instead, it seems to be the result of a tug-of-war within the Trump administration over counternarcotics policy, with a side of sunk cost fallacy for good measure. The optimistic scenarios that some have painted of a regime change in Venezuela to me therefore require some wishful thinking as to the kind of operation the United States is willing to conduct. It seems more likely that if the United States intervenes in the first place, it will be a more haphazard affair. Of course, if Trump announced tomorrow he was establishing a $100 billion fund for the reconstruction of Venezuela and willing to deploy U.S. advisors to assist the transitional government’s security efforts, my doubts would be allayed, but I’m not holding my breath for that.

Regime change is not a single event, it is a host of contingencies, responses, and reactions that are infuriatingly hard to predict. I know saying things are complicated is neither a particularly courageous nor analytically useful stance, but still it bears repeating, especially when discourse is drifting towards flattening all complexity and contingency into binary “for” and “against” camps. We all could do with a better dose of humility in our analysis, and history can still be one of our best guides when it comes to this. Instead of arguing which case studies capture the entirety of Venezuela, we can combine what we know about Venezuela today, with more precise historical analysis.