The newly formed Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (ACCC), announced at the recent Shield of the Americas (SOTA) Summit, promises to upend decades-old agreements between Latin American and Caribbean island nations. The coalition creates a unilateral military framework inclusive of only countries with far-right leaders who appease Trump. In isolating the majority of the region and its largest economies, the White House is driving a wedge between many countries that have worked together for decades to build coalitions.
The recent targeting of an alleged cartel leader near the border between Ecuador and Colombia highlights how tenuous the situation can become very fast. Immediately after the attack, it was evident that Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa used this coalition of military forces to target Indigenous communities that are opposed to his policies. The operation marks how easily a leader like Noboa can manipulate White House policies under the guise of counternarcotics operations.
The raid occurred just days before the SOTA summit, as if it were meant to highlight what the coalition is offering. Days after the attack, Ecuadorian media outlets visited the location and found “no evidence of trenches, shooting ranges, or traces of an alleged clandestine military infrastructure,” as had been alleged. Sean Parnell, the Assistant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said on Twitter that it was an “operation against a narco-terrorist supply complex … disrupting their operations and logistics.”
Within days, the truth began to surface. While Noboa declared that they destroyed a training ground for drug traffickers, reporters only found “horses, cows, and donkeys” when visiting the area. Some of the victim and witness testimony is harrowing. They described soldiers landing on a riverbank and ambushing farm workers, with one saying, “They tied my hands and feet and then hung me up. They put me in a bucket of water, as long as I could stand it… they kicked me, they hit me with the butt of a gun.” Another said, “They were looking for someone we didn’t know… they told us to hand things over, but we had nothing to hand over.”
Four farmworkers allege that they were taken to a “tiny room” where they were doused with water and shocked with a Taser by soldiers seeking information. The Alliance of Organizations for Human Rights denounced “the bombings, burning of homes, arbitrary detentions, torture, and threats against the civilian population by the Ecuadorian Armed Forces during the ‘Toral Extermination’ operation.” An on-site human rights monitor said, “The testimonies gathered describe acts of torture and cruel treatment against rural workers. These incidents must be investigated urgently, independently, and impartially.”
The New York Times later verified that the attack destroyed a dairy farm, not a drug camp. In addition to leaving border communities in Ecuador horrified and wondering if they could be next, Colombian President Gustavo Petro admonished the operation after an unguided bomb fell on the Colombian side of the border. He later accused the Ecuadorian government of bombing targets inside Colombia after “27 charred bodies” were found inside Colombian territory. Petro argues that Colombian forces or cartels could not have carried out the deaths because neither has armed planes. He noted that the unexploded bomb that was found was only “100 meters from the home of an impoverished family.”
Border relations between the two countries have always been somewhat tense, largely due to the presence of various cartels on either side of the border. However, it should be noted that Ecuadorian forces had been conducting counternarcotics operations in other parts of the country and suddenly shifted to an operation along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border just before the SOTA summit. Considering Colombia, the fourth-largest economy in Latin America, wasn’t invited to the SOTA summit, it is also somewhat suspicious. The optics aren’t good.
Additionally, Colombia has major elections on May 31, with a runoff scheduled for June 21. Of the fourteen candidates running, it’s shaping up to be a three-way race between Iván Cepeda (Petro’s successor), Abelardo de la Espriella (far-right), and Paloma Valencia (centrist). With Trump’s history of meddling in Latin America’s elections, it would come as no surprise that the recent actions by Ecuador are politically tied to the upcoming election. Both de la Espriella and Valecnia have shown support for Trump’s “counternarcotics” operations.
The violent, militaristic measures being employed by the United States and its chosen partners in the region also threaten economic alliances, treaties, and geopolitical agreements. The Pacific Alliance, focusing on the free movement of goods between Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru; MERCOSUR, an economic agreement between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia (Venezuela is suspended); The Andean Community, focusing on trade between Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru; the Central American Integration System, coordinating politica and economic polices in Central America, are all at risk as a result of instability.
The most potentially impactful agreement affected is the Rio Agreement, the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance. The pact, signed in 1947, is often referred to as the U.S.’s first experiment in collective security that would later serve as the blueprint for NATO. While the treaty was intended to counter Soviet influence in the region, and after Eisenhower ignored it to oust Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954, it would serve as a tool to resolve intra-American disputes in the 1950s and 60s. It has since been mostly ignored, thanks in large part to the U.S. supporting the British over Argentina in the Falklands War in 1982.
What was once an “if you attack one, you attack all” agreement between countries in the Americas was almost instantly relegated to the dustbin of history once the U.S. began reneging on the deal. The potential for such an agreement is immense. However, much like NATO, it requires that each country stay out of another’s internal politics, something the United States has historically refused to abide by and has used to destabilize much of the world.
The primary risk posed by the current Trump administration is to regional sovereignty and stability, putting at great risk various multilateral agreements and non-interventionist policies between countries. These potentially destabilizing policies could lead to a fractured hemisphere that includes the United States. Economic downturns in Latin America and the Caribbean have direct and indirect impacts on North America. The U.S. and its selected Latin American partners, using a military strategy that transcends borders and national sovereignty, only promise to create turmoil on a scale exponentially greater than that of what the U.S. did in Ecuador.
In a region where authoritarians are coalescing, dangerous times are ahead.
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