Hegseth Says Anti-Cartel Coalition Will Do ‘Bad Things to Bad People’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called on military leaders in Latin America on Wednesday to ramp up their fight against drug traffickers and join the U.S. military in operations against cartels.

Mr. Hegseth, speaking to civilian defense leaders and top generals from 18 other countries at a conference in Panama, doubled down on the Trump administration’s pledge to use military force in addition to law enforcement measures to combat drug traffickers.

The collective goal is “to degrade, dismantle and destroy narco-terrorist networks,” said Mr. Hegseth, speaking on the sidelines of a major U.S.-led regional training exercise in Panama.

With his typical bravado, Mr. Hegseth said the cartel-busting coalition’s motto would be, “We do bad things to bad people.”

The Trump administration has in recent months stepped up its cooperation with allies across Latin America to combat the drug trade. It created the coalition, part of the regional Shield of the Americas alliance, and convened its first meeting in March.

That month, Ecuador and the United States launched joint military operations against designated terrorist groups. In May, the Pentagon pressed Guatemala to agree to joint U.S. airstrikes and other military action inside its borders to target suspected drug groups.

Mr. Hegseth said on Wednesday that Honduras and Colombia had also agreed to allow joint operations.

Last week, the military’s U.S. Southern Command announced Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, setting up the infrastructure for an expansion of its war against drugs in cooperation with regional allies.

This new task force builds on a yearlong Pentagon campaign in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, where the military has conducted 66 boat strikes that have killed at least 221 people who it says, without presenting evidence, were trafficking drugs.

Legal experts have warned that the strikes are illegal, because the military cannot deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities, even if they are breaking the law. Trafficking drugs, they say, does not rise to the standard of hostilities.

On Wednesday, Mr. Hegseth ***erted that these strikes have decreased the number of suspected drug vessels by more than half in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. But a recent investigation by The New York Times revealed that cocaine, by far the top drug smuggled out of South America, is as easy to get in much of the United States as it was before the strikes began.

The United States also recently announced it was fast-tracking military cooperation with Colombia, where voters elected a right-wing president in June. The country could emerge as a key piece of the U.S. push against traffickers and organized crime in the region.

Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine and has in the past been a staunch U.S. ally.

For the last four years, however, relations between the two countries grew strained as Colombia’s leftist former president, Gustavo Petro, spoke out frequently against President Trump’s boat strikes and other policies toward the region.

For decades, U.S. policy in Latin America has centered on counternarcotics. Billions have been spent on military ***istance, crop eradication and more; leaders have pressed for hard-line security measures and extradition agreements.

In his second term, Mr. Trump has gone further, treating drug traffickers not as criminals but as enemy combatants.

Blaming cartels and drug gangs for America’s overdose crisis and for fueling violent crime, the Trump administration has added around 20 groups to its list of foreign terrorist organizations since 2025 — from major Mexican cartels to Ecuadorean drug gangs — and has authorized using lethal force against them.

Last year, Mr. Trump justified the military’s strikes on small boats by claiming that the United States was engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with traffickers that had been designated as terrorist organizations, and that smugglers for such groups were “unlawful combatants.”

The military’s most recent strike, which killed eight people, was on June 21. Pentagon officials say there has been a pause since then partly because military teams and equipment were diverted to help provide humanitarian relief to victims of the recent earthquake in Venezuela.

Now the Trump administration appears to be moving its efforts targeting armed groups in Latin America from international waters onto land.

To date, 18 countries have joined the Pentagon-led counter-cartel coalition: Argentina, the Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago.

The head of Southern Command, Gen. Francis Donovan, said in an online post on Aug. 3 that the coalition’s new task force would “take the fight to the enemy.”

Mr. Hegseth met with officials in Panama City during a visit in April 2025 and signed a bilateral security agreement with Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, a conservative who has been eager to negotiate with the Trump administration after facing threats over the Panama C***. Panama does not have an active military.

Nations that do not officially have agreements with the United States have nevertheless been the sites of highly publicized operations since Mr. Trump took office last year.

Mr. Trump applauded a C.I.A.-involved strike early this year in Mexico that helped kill Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the world’s most powerful drug trafficking organizations.

Mr. Trump also celebrated a strike in Venezuela that killed a leader of Tren de Aragua, a transnational group that he says has invaded the United States and perpetrated murders and other violence.

Experts say that organized crime and trafficking have expanded across the region in places where the government is absent and that illicit activities have spiked since the pandemic.

They caution, however, that past U.S.-led “drug wars” in the region have failed to curb the drug trade — and note that today, much of South America’s cocaine heads to Europe, not the United States.

Human rights groups also warn that militarizing the fight against armed groups risks increasing violence that threatens civilians.

Notably absent from the regional anti-trafficking alliance — and the conference in Panama this week — is Mexico, home to formidable cartels that traffic fentanyl and other deadly drugs into the United States. Like Brazil, which is not in the regional alliance either, Mexico is led by a left-wing leader, Claudia Sheinbaum.

Wary of the public backlash in a country with a long history of U.S. military intervention, and determined to protect Mexican sovereignty, Ms. Sheinbaum has stuck to a simple message: “Coordination but not subordination.”