You could be forgiven if your 2026 bingo card didn’t include Resurrect the Monroe Doctrine on Steroids.
Last year offered plenty of clues about where things were headed. A newly minted Trump Administration enabled Elon Musk to “feed USAID into a woodchipper,” eliminating many of the U.S. government’s soft-power tools honed over decades. The National Security Strategy explicitly referenced a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The Administration designated a dozen Latin American criminal cartels as terrorist organizations and launched Operation Southern Spear in September.
This year, the Administration carried out an abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and expanded boat bombings to the Pacific coast, killing at least 163 people as of publication. In Brazil, it is considering adding transnational criminal groups, the Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho, Brazil’s most powerful criminal organizations, to its growing list of foreign terrorist organizations. The latest move is talk of a “Greater North America,” extending from Ecuador to Greenland.
Early Results: Human Rights Violations and a Bombed Dairy Farm
As a land-based counterpart to Southern Spear, the U.S. military is now partnering with Ecuador to launch “Operation Total Extermination.” According to congressional testimony by the U.S. Southern Command, “This month, Ecuador became the first country to conduct joint land strikes in Latin America against cartel infrastructure, bringing collective hard power against cartels.”
Early results of “Operation Total Extermination” do not inspire confidence. A New York Times investigation revealed that the bombed “cartel target” along Ecuador’s northern border with Colombia was in fact a rural dairy farm. Several of the men detained in the operation allege being tortured via waterboarding and electric shock. This incident appears to be one more chapter in the counterproductive history of militaristic security strategies that generate human rights violations while leaving the structural causes for organized crime untouched.
The Amazon Pays the Price
Amazon Watch does not underplay the threat posed by these criminal organizations. In fact, we helped sound the alarm during the Biden Administration through the 2023 publication of a seminal report on criminal economies in the world’s largest rainforest. That research, and daily contact with Indigenous communities, revealed that criminal organizations were increasingly operating across borders and across illicit (and licit) industries like drugs, gold, and timber, among others.
From our perspective, the environmental and social impacts are severe and getting worse. “Informal” gold mining is being carried out at an industrial scale, leaving devastated landscapes in the middle of the rainforest. Violence has metastasized against both communities and individuals, including outspoken social leaders and environmental defenders.
This month, we will be detailing the pernicious threat the transnational criminal syndicates pose to Amazonian Indigenous peoples through a new report featuring emblematic cases in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The report will complement a delegation of Amazonian women leaders traveling to New York City to participate in the premier annual gathering of Indigenous peoples at the United National headquarters.
Who Does This Policy Actually Serve?
While questioning the Trump Administration’s “All Sticks and No Carrots” policy, we recognize that it serves certain interests clearly enough. It feeds the hard-line discourse of MAGA-aligned political movements angling to win presidential elections this year in Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. It offers the Administration a thin veneer of legality when carrying out airstrikes, though at least those in the Caribbean and Pacific are patently illegal both in domestic and international law. And it offers the U.S. a pretext for boots on the ground in a region where Chinese influence has grown, and where oil, critical minerals, and other natural resources are under dispute.
What it does not actually serve is addressing the flow of drugs and illegally sourced commodities, like gold, into the U.S. market. Nor does it serve the Indigenous communities caught in the crossfire between heavily armed criminal organizations and national militaries with dubious human rights records, backed by U.S. powers.
As advocated by 20 members of Congress in February, the U.S. should finally drive a stake through the heart of the obsolete Monroe Doctrine. In its place, a new “Good Neighbor” policy, built out of mutual respect with the countries of the region, must be constructed.
To actually confront the myriad of transnational criminal organizations, we must reinforce the hard work of strengthening democratic institutions, fighting corruption, advancing the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities caught in the crossfire, and supporting legitimate economic alternatives. And here in the U.S., we must reduce the consumer demand for drugs and other illicit products because they will continue arriving, no matter how many dairy farms the U.S. military destroys.
