Latin America Divided Over Trump’s Drug War And Venezuela Gamble

As U.S. warships patrol Caribbean waters and alleged drug boats explode at sea, Latin America’s governments respond with a mix of outrage, enthusiasm, and nervous silence – exposing deep ideological rifts and a crumbling regional consensus on how to confront Venezuela.

Fragmented Reactions In A Fractured Regional Order

Given the long, painful history of U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean, you might expect governments across the region to present a united front against the Trump administration’s escalating campaign of strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels and the hinted prospect of regime change in Venezuela. Reporting by Foreign Policy shows almost the opposite. Reactions to Washington’s operations near Venezuelan waters have been inconsistent, cautious, and often contradictory, even as the strikes raise huge questions about international law, civilian casualties, and the future of Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

Ideological divides go some way to explaining this patchwork response. Left-wing leaders in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil have been the most outspoken critics of the U.S. campaign, though even among them the tone varies sharply. Meanwhile, right-leaning governments in places such as Paraguay, Argentina, and Ecuador have generally aligned themselves with Washington’s narrative, even mirroring U.S. decisions to designate the Venezuela-based Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization. Yet even Trump’s closest ideological allies, including El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, have conspicuously avoided cheering the boat strikes in public—though Foreign Policy notes reporting that suggests Salvadoran territory may be quietly hosting U.S. planes involved in the operation.

For Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, an international relations scholar and provost at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, this disjointed picture is historically unusual. Today’s level of fragmentation among Latin American states is “the most dramatic in the last half-century,” he told Foreign Policy. The region has never been perfectly aligned-any glance at 20th-century coups, revolutions, and ideological swings confirms that there were moments when governments coordinated to push back against Washington, sometimes at real cost.

He points to the Contadora Group in the early 1980s, when Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela collectively tried to negotiate peace in Central America amid US-backed proxy wars. Today, by contrast, he sees “no major arena where Latin America could join efforts.” The Union of South American Nations has, in his words, been “destroyed.” CELAC, once touted as a US-free political forum for the region, is “useless.” And the Organization of American States appears too worried about economic retaliation from Donald Trump to mount a forceful critique of the strikes.

That fear of U.S. economic punishment is one of the most important, if rarely stated, drivers of how leaders position themselves. This is a president who threatens tariffs on a whim, rails against migration from Latin America, and has already shown a willingness to wield aid and trade as political weapons. Few governments want to be the next test case.

Leftist Firebrands, Pragmatists, And The Politics Of Crime

The moral and legal stakes are, for some, high enough to justify an open confrontation with Washington. The Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, condemned in stark words the strikes of the boats, accusing the Trump Administration of “murder” and denouncing what he said were unilateral executions in international waters. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have also criticized the actions and the display of U.S. force in the Caribbean, though with a notably softer tone.

The difference reflects not just ideology but political style. As Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations told Foreign Policy, a fight like this is Petro’s “bread and butter.” He built his career as a firebrand willing to say unpopular things about U.S. policy and Colombia’s own establishment, and he seems prepared to accept a serious rupture with Washington to maintain that stance. Trump’s retaliation was swift: aid to Colombia, traditionally one of Washington’s closest regional partners, was slashed, and the U.S. president publicly smeared Petro as an “illegal drug leader.” Petro has not backed down so far.

Sheinbaum and Lula are far more circumspect. Both lead large economies deeply intertwined with the United States and already embroiled in contentious trade disputes and tariffs. Their denunciations of the strikes are barbed but restrained—sufficient to appease their domestic constituencies, suspicious of U.S. militarism, without risking punitive economic retaliation. Freeman calls them “more cautious, pragmatic people,” aware that their electorates care at least as much about growth, jobs, and inflation as about abstract questions of international law.

That pragmatism is rooted in a complex political reality. As Freeman himself notes, for most citizens in the region, the significant U.S. interventions of the past are distant history. The last time the U.S. launched a major military operation in Latin America or the Caribbean was more than two decades ago. Many young voters have no living memory of it. Their daily anger is directed at crime, corruption, low growth, and the failures of their own elites—not at Washington’s Cold War sins. For those leaders, seeming “soft” on organized crime or indifferently tolerant of drug cartels is political poison.

Cheerleaders, Quiet Allies, And The Maduro Problem

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, who has emerged as perhaps the most enthusiastic defender of the U.S. campaign. While Caribbean Community leaders issued a joint declaration reaffirming the region as a “Zone of Peace” and stressing that the fight against drug trafficking must respect international law, Persad-Bissessar refused to sign on. Instead, she welcomed the U.S. military buildup and, in reported comments to Foreign Policy, said of smugglers that the United States should “kill them all violently.”

Her government recently allowed a U.S. warship to dock in Port of Spain despite protests outside the U.S. Embassy and public unease about the strikes. The political gamble is clear: Persad-Bissessar is betting that close alignment with Trump now may pay off later—especially if Maduro falls and new, more favorable energy deals become possible.

Maduro has retaliated by tearing up energy agreements with Trinidad and Tobago, and accusing the prime minister of turning her country “into an aircraft carrier for the U.S. Empire against Venezuela.” Yet the Venezuelan leader is hardly a sympathetic figure in much of the region. Foreign Policy cites polling indicating relatively high support in Latin America and the Caribbean for a U.S. military intervention to unseat him—higher, in fact, than support for such a move among U.S. respondents.

That sentiment is rooted not in abstract ideology but in lived experience. Millions of Venezuelans have fled economic collapse and political repression, straining social services and labor markets from Colombia to Chile. As James Bosworth of political risk firm Hxagon told Foreign Policy, many in the region view Maduro as a dictator and would “be thrilled to see him gone,” believing only the U.S. military has the capacity to make that happen.

Bosworth also says that, for the average Latin American citizen, the infamous record of past U.S. interventions is a matter read about, not lived. The last major U.S. operation in their midst is something they have read about, not experienced. The immediate, visible crisis is Venezuelan migration and domestic insecurity—not Grenada or Panama. That helps explain why overt opposition to the U.S. strikes can be politically risky, especially when opponents can weaponize any perceived softness on organized crime.

Brazil’s Lula epitomizes this bind. After a police raid in Rio de Janeiro became the deadliest in the country’s history, he termed it a “massacre.” Yet polls show that a majority of Brazilians support the raid as a necessary response to crime. If even a left-wing icon like Lula faces backlash for questioning domestic security operations, it is easy to understand why leaders might hesitate to loudly criticize U.S. attacks framed as targeting “narco-terrorists.”

A Fading Rules-Based Order And Latin America’s Gamble

But the regional gamble on silence carries real risks, even as domestic politics pushes many leaders toward cautious, if not supportive, stances. The United States has conducted at least 19 strikes in waters off Latin America—first in the Caribbean Sea, more recently in the Pacific—killing at least 76 people since early September, per figures cited by Foreign Policy. Those operations are “unacceptable” and a violation of international law, says the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, while legal experts in Washington and beyond question both their legality and their effectiveness in curbing drug flows.

The fallout is already visible. The Dominican Republic postponed the 2025 Summit of the Americas, explicitly citing “profound divisions” that make constructive dialogue impossible. European Union leaders pulled out of an EU-CELAC summit in Colombia amid Petro’s public clash with Trump. Analysts like Christopher Hernandez-Roy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies warn that the military buildup could hammer key economic sectors, from tourism in islands such as Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad and Tobago—where cruise ships and resort visitors may shy away from a militarized Caribbean—to fishing industries that sustain coastal communities.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration insists it is targeting “narco-terrorists” who are supposedly poisoning the United States while offering little hard evidence that those killed really are high-level traffickers, or that the strikes are disrupting supply chains in a meaningful way. Mixed messages from Trump and his aides about whether the real goal is to topple Maduro only deepen suspicions that drug policy is a pretext for regime change. The sheer size of the U.S. force assembled in the Caribbean encourages that reading.

Maduro sees both danger and opportunity, calling for a unified regional Latin American and Caribbean response against the U.S. military presence. So far, that call has gone largely unanswered. For Tokatlian, this silence is alarming. He said he was shocked by the lack of legal and diplomatic “defensive positioning” by regional governments—not just about what is happening now, but about what might still come if Washington escalates.

This, in his view, is just another indicator that the rules-based international order is “dying.” The Russian invasion of Ukraine is one example; a possible U.S. strike on Venezuela’s territory could be another. “We do not have constraints today vis-à-vis the question of the use of force,” Tokatlian warns. Any U.S. military action clearly designed with the ouster of Maduro as its objective, he argues, would become still another entry in an emerging list of cases where great powers decide that norms and laws are optional.

For Latin America, the cost of today’s fragmented response may not be immediately apparent. But by failing to collectively define red lines now—on sovereignty, on targeted killings, on the limits of counter-narcotics operations—governments in the region may find that tomorrow they have little standing to protest when those same tools are turned on them. As Foreign Policy’s reporting makes clear, the war on alleged drug boats is no longer just about Venezuela’s future: It is a test of how much of the old international rulebook Latin America is willing, or able, to defend.

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