EXCLUSIVE: America’s New Shadow War: How Washington’s ‘Drug Fight’ Risks Setting Latin America on Fire

The sight of the USS Gerald R. Ford cutting through Caribbean waters would once have signaled a regional crisis. Today, it’s just another day in the Trump administration’s new “anti-narcotics” campaign, a military buildup so aggressive that many Latin American observers, including Miguel Tinker-Salas, a Venezuelan historian and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, warn it could spiral into open confrontation.

For decades, Washington and Caracas have played a dangerous game of ideological brinkmanship, one that has now shifted from diplomatic hostility to armed posturing. What began as a slow collapse of relations has turned into something far riskier: a militarized standoff framed as a war on drugs, but driven by far deeper motives.

Since September, the US Navy has bombed at least nine vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, allegedly tied to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua criminal network. The administration says these were “narco-terrorist” boats; it has provided no evidence, no names, and no independent verification.

That’s where Tinker-Salas’s warning cuts through the official noise.

“Deploying the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford while continuing to bomb vessels in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific represents a dangerous escalation of US military involvement in Latin America,” he said in an interview with The Wyoming Star. “While today the targets are Venezuela and Colombia, tomorrow they might be Mexico, or Brazil, or any other Latin American country that President Trump dislikes.”

From Counternarcotics to Coercion

The White House insists its campaign is about drug interdiction. But fentanyl, the opioid killing tens of thousands of Americans, doesn’t come from Venezuela. It comes from Mexico and China. Venezuela’s exports, by contrast, are mostly cocaine bound for Europe, not the United States.

That makes the logic of the strikes deeply questionable. The US has essentially taken on the role of “judge, jury, and executioner,” as Tinker-Salas puts it, without offering either legal grounding or factual proof. Even if those killed were smugglers, “the penalty for drug trafficking is not an extrajudicial execution.”

Tinker-Salas argues this is less about drugs than optics: a show of power meant to project control abroad at a time of volatility at home. The Pentagon’s operations, from CIA authorizations to the use of B-52 and B-1 bombers near Venezuelan airspace, echo older habits of American interventionism dressed up in modern counterterror language.

Echoes of Empire

Tinker-Salas, who has written extensively on US–Latin American relations, calls this “a return to gunboat diplomacy through another name.” The warships and air patrols, he notes, are as much about psychology as firepower, meant to intimidate Caracas and test the political mood in neighboring Colombia, whose leftist president Gustavo Petro has publicly clashed with Trump.

It’s an old strategy with new branding: destabilize first, then justify escalation as defense. In practice, Washington’s hybrid campaign has already backfired, uniting even Maduro’s critics against what they perceive as another imperial overreach.

“The US administration is constructing a moral rationale that conflates narcotrafficking with terrorism and, by doing so, creates a pretext for unilateral use of force,” Tinker-Salas explains. “It is a narrative designed for domestic consumption as much as foreign coercion.”

Regional Tremors

The ripple effects are spreading fast. Colombia faces US sanctions; Mexico and Brazil have both called for restraint. Meanwhile, oil markets are reacting to fears that Venezuela’s modest production recovery could collapse under renewed sanctions and investor flight.

For much of Latin America, the symbolism is hard to miss. The region has seen this movie before, from the 1980s drug wars to Iraq-style “preemptive” interventions. But now, the risk is not just political blowback. It’s that a miscalculated strike could ignite a wider confrontation across an already unstable Caribbean basin.

As Tinker-Salas sums it up, “The administration’s logic opens the door to endless conflict under the guise of fighting cartels. Once that door is open, it’s very difficult to close.”

Hemisphere on Edge

The deeper story here isn’t just about Trump or Maduro. It’s about a new phase of hemispheric politics, one where the language of security hides the persistence of control. Whether this turns into another protracted US entanglement depends on what Washington wants more: stability or dominance.

History suggests those two rarely go together.