The drugs (policies) don’t work

The ‘Shield of the Americas’ initiative is the latest manifestation of the militarised drug control framework that has failed to stem the narcotics trade even as it provides cover for authoritarian policies and US intervention in the region.

Carlos Ron

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ON 7 March, at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, US President Donald Trump inaugurated the ‘Shield of the Americas’ summit, convening right-wing leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean’s ‘Angry Tide’¹ around what he called a ‘counter-cartel coalition’. Washington’s recipe was stated plainly: ‘The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our military.’ Monroeism² is on the offensive, and the Angry Tide has become its shield – not against cartels, but against people-centred projects of national sovereignty.

The invited leaders – Milei of Argentina, Paz of Bolivia, Bukele of El Salvador, Noboa of Ecuador, Asfura of Honduras, Peña of Paraguay, Chaves of Costa Rica, Mulino of Panama, Abinader of the Dominican Republic, Ali of Guyana, Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad and Tobago, and President-elect Kast of Chile – are all to the right of the political spectrum. Conspicuously absent were the progressive leaders of Latin America's largest economies: Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Of Mexico, Trump declared: ‘The cartels are running Mexico. We can’t have that.’

The images from Miami stood in stark contrast to regional gatherings of the last two decades, where Latin American leaders met on equal standing to build frameworks for political coordination and cooperation – such as the Council of South American Defense and the South American Health Council under the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), for example. In Miami, the assembled presidents competed in a publicity stunt to see who would stand closest to Trump in the photograph or keep the commemorative pen with which he signed the agreements.

‘War on drugs’: A failed policy

It is alarming that this coalition commits to deeper collaboration with the United States on fighting cartels, given the balance sheet of US-led drug control. The Addicted to Imperialism study series, co-produced by the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research with the Lawfare Observatory, CEPDIPO and COCCAM,³ lays out the record with devastating clarity: after more than 50 years of the ‘war on drugs’, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) acknowledged before the US Congress that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels alone have ‘associates, facilitators and intermediaries in all 50 states of the United States’. This is the outcome of half a century of the most expensive and militarised drug control effort in human history.

The aggregate data confirms the verdict. In 2023, 316 million people consumed illegal drugs worldwide – a 22% increase from a decade prior. The US government has invested over $10 billion in counternarcotics efforts in Colombia since 1999, yet cocaine production more than tripled between 2013 and 2017. The study shows that between 2016 and 2022 – a period of intense US-Colombian cooperation – potential cocaine production in Colombia rose from 1,053 to 1,738 metric tons, while seizures and forced eradication also increased simultaneously. More eradication, more production. More cooperation, more cocaine.

No contemporary case illustrates this more starkly than Ecuador, whose president Daniel Noboa stood prominently at Trump’s event in Miami. As the Addicted to Imperialism studies document, Ecuador has been subjected to a process of foreign interference since at least 2017 – producing marked deterioration of the social rule of law and a progressive militarisation of public security across four structural axes: foreign interference, economic liberalisation and external debt, institutional deterioration, and the securitisation of social problems.

Under President Lenín Moreno (2017–21), Ecuador restored US security ties suspended by his predecessor Rafael Correa, rejoining US Southern Command exercises. Under Guillermo Lasso (2021–23), a memorandum of understanding was signed, modelled explicitly on Plan Colombia, with a projected budget of $3.1 billion over seven years – repositioning Ecuador as the top recipient of US foreign military financing in the region, with $310 million between 2022 and 2023, surpassing Colombia.

Under Noboa, after presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated during the 2023 campaign, General Laura Richardson of US Southern Command travelled personally to Ecuador to agree a ‘joint plan’ including the deployment of US military personnel with full immunity from Ecuadorian justice – the same conditions applied in Colombia, and immediately dubbed a ‘Plan Ecuador’. The homicide rate reached 47 per 100,000 in 2023. Noboa’s Plan Fénix deployed armed forces in city streets, built mega-prisons modelled on those in Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador, and sought a constitutional reform to permit foreign military installations – such as a base in the Galápagos Islands. The militarisation of public security has not resolved the crisis. It has deepened it, while subordinating Ecuador’s sovereignty to Washington’s hemispheric agenda.

Political pretext

The militarised drug war framework does not protect populations from narco-trafficking. It protects political elites from democratic accountability and normalises authoritarianism under the banner of security. Addicted to Imperialism documents that in 2008, 35% of Colombian senators and 13% of House representatives were under investigation for links to paramilitary groups that simultaneously ran drug-trafficking operations. The ‘war on drugs’ did not dismantle these networks. It provided them with political cover.

This is not surprising when we recall the framework’s origins. US President Richard Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor admitted decades later that the administration’s 1971 declaration of drugs as ‘public enemy number one’ had a different target: ‘The Nixon White House, after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. … We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’

On a regional scale, from Plan Colombia to the Shield of the Americas, the alleged combat against cartels has consistently served as a pretext for military spending, interventionism, and the displacement of populations from their territories. The most recent illustration is Venezuela: the abduction of its sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, was framed as an anti-drug operation – but swiftly revealed as a mechanism for reinserting Venezuela into Washington’s oil economy.

In 1826, Simón Bolívar convened the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama with a vision of extraordinary clarity: a confederation of Latin American republics acting collectively, guaranteeing their independence, and negotiating with great powers from a position of sovereign equality. The Angry Tide is today’s antithesis of that spirit. At Miami, Trump declared: ‘We will not allow foreign hostile influence to establish itself in this hemisphere – including the Panama Canal’ – while Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino sat in the audience and listened in silence. It is Monroeism at its most undisguised.

Latin America and the Caribbean – its movements, parties and progressive governments – needs a renewed regional agenda of sovereignty and concrete cooperation, including institutions capable of coordinating a sovereign response to the drug economy. The price of a kilogram of cocaine rises from approximately $1,500 at the point of production in Colombia to $20,000 in the United States. The producers – the peasant farmers – capture less than 1% of the global cocaine market’s value. Meanwhile, over 70% of the weapons fuelling cartel violence in Mexico are manufactured in and flow from the United States. The drug war, in its hyper-militarised version, creates the institutional framework for precisely the kind of health concerns, corruption and impunity it claims to be fighting.

The first quarter of this century offers proof that a different ambition produces results. Operación Milagro launched by the Cuban and Venezuelan governments restored sight to over 3 million people. The ALBA literacy programmes eradicated illiteracy in Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador. Regional unity with a true purpose of reaffirming sovereignty and guaranteeing a dignified life for the population must not be abandoned for failed policies and publicity stunts.                                              

Carlos Ron is Co-Coordinator of the Nuestra America office of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. He is a former Venezuelan diplomat. This article was produced by Globetrotter (globetrotter.media).

Notes

1.     Editor’s note: The ‘Angry Tide’ refers to the recent ascendancy of hardline right-wing political leaders in Latin America.

2.     Editor’s note: The Monroe Doctrine, first announced by US President James Monroe in 1823, claims the entire Western Hemisphere as Washington’s zone of protection and influence.

3.    https://thetricontinental.org/es/argentina/investigaciones/adictos-al-imperialismo/

*Third World Resurgence No. 366, 2026/1, pp 32-33