Rubio says coalition will expand to more countries
Peru joined the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas at the close of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s three-country tour of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, which ended Thursday. President Keiko Fujimori announced her country’s entry alongside Rubio in Lima, expanding a coalition of over a dozen nations that U.S. officials describe as having adopted the Trump administration’s hard-line playbook for targeting narcotics traffickers and armed groups.
According to American officials, member nations can receive U.S. intelligence, equipment and surveillance technology, and sometimes work jointly with American troops. Regional security forces have bombed jungle encampments, captured drug kingpins and killed drug couriers with U.S. help, the officials said. The military alliance is taking shape a year after the Trump administration began bombing alleged drug-smuggling boats in the region.
The U.S. military has helped Ecuador bomb suspected drug traffickers along its border with Colombia, and Peru says it is eager to deepen military cooperation with American antidrug efforts.
Speaking at the presidential palace in Lima, Rubio said the coalition would continue to grow. “God willing, it will expand to even more countries,” he said. “There are criminal groups today that have more money and better military equipment than the military forces of a state.”
In Quito on Wednesday, Rubio said the United States would continue its drug-boat-strike campaign alongside allied operations. “We’ll still blow up ships if need be,” he said, “but our elite forces are operating alongside one another.” He added that countries in the region would increasingly take the lead on the front lines.
The Colombia stop centered on President Abelardo de la Espriella, who has pursued a hard-line security agenda — ordering airstrikes on armed groups — and met Rubio at a military compound in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla that he has converted into a presidential headquarters. De la Espriella’s wishlist for American firepower included upgraded aircraft, drones, radars, air defenses, cyber defenses and special-forces capabilities. “The threats of the 21st Century require new capabilities,” de la Espriella told reporters. “Criminals who don’t submit will be taken down.”
Colombian authorities say intelligence provided by the U.S. helped locate Perez at a mansion in the city of Riohacha, where an elite Colombian police commando unit conducted a raid on Sept. 4, killing Perez, his girlfriend and two alleged members of his syndicate. Perez had taunted de la Espriella with cellphone videos of himself riding his motorcycle along a beachside road with his girlfriend, telling followers in one clip, “We’re good, chilling.”
Hours after the raid, de la Espriella addressed the nation alongside the bodies of the dead stuffed in white bags. The video, posted on X, was the second time the Colombian president addressed the country alongside those killed in operations. The practice has alarmed de la Espriella’s political opponents and human-rights groups, who accuse him of displaying the dead as trophies and violating international rules that prohibit desecrating those killed in operations.
U.S. forces in June worked with Venezuela’s interim government, which American officials described as a new U.S. ally, to carry out a strike that killed the leader of the Tren de Aragua gang deep in the country’s southern mining territory.
Human Rights Watch said the U.S. security focus underemphasizes fighting money laundering and shifting crime dynamics in the region. Juanita Goebertus, the organization’s Americas director, cited a decision this week by Ecuadorean officials to eliminate judges from a specialized judicial unit focused on anticorruption and organized crime. “The same time we’re talking about security partnerships, we’re seeing a dismantling of the judicial tools to fight crime,” she said.
Analysts who study the region said the Trump administration’s strategy was heavily militarized in a region that has had difficult experiences with armed forces operating at home. “That goes to show you just how desperate leaders are to show progress fighting organized crime,” said Benjamin Gedan, director of the Latin America Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based policy group.
Crime ranked as citizens’ top concern in all Latin American countries except Argentina in a global Ipsos poll conducted in February, with respondents saying the problem was worsening in several countries. Two-thirds of Peruvian respondents said violence and insecurity was their biggest worry, and 43 percent said the same in Colombia.
In Peru, the Senate voted unanimously to summon the foreign minister to explain what the country was committing to by joining the Shield of the Americas and the extent of U.S. involvement. In Ecuador, human-rights groups have raised alarms over joint operations with U.S. forces following allegations of torture, arbitrary detention and destruction of local property.
Rubio’s trip carried an implicit warning to countries such as Mexico, whose government has drawn a firmer line against deeper U.S. military involvement in fighting cartels. “Eventually, that threat will have to be confronted,” Rubio said. “One way or the other.”