Drug cartels spent decades treating Latin America like their own private playground.
Washington mostly looked the other way while Communist China bought up the neighborhood.
But President Trump just sent one Army unit south that the cartel bosses never planned for.
The Mountain Soldiers Trading Snowdrifts for Snakes
The Pentagon has started moving a 600-soldier battalion from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, New York, and into Latin America, according to a New York Times report.
These are soldiers who usually train for brutal upstate winters. Now they’re headed for a jungle warfare facility in Panama, where the heat, the bugs, and the pit vipers do half the teaching.
From Panama, the battalion will move on to train partner forces in Colombia and Honduras.
And that might not be the whole job. Military officials told the Times the troops could help special operations forces who advise local militaries as those militaries raid suspected drug traffickers. The 10th Mountain soldiers could also ride to the rescue if those special operators get into a jam.
Several hundred more soldiers from the same division will help staff a brand-new command in Miami built around Western Hemisphere operations, an anonymous military official told the paper.
US Southern Command wouldn’t confirm a word of it. A SOUTHCOM spokesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation the command doesn’t discuss troop deployments or operational movements because of operational security.
Fair enough. Cartel bosses read the newspaper too.
The Army brought its Panama jungle school back to life earlier this year after a 25-year break. Somebody in the Pentagon clearly decided the “Green Hell,” as the Army calls the place, still had a few lessons left to teach.
Reapers Swap Somalia for South America
The 10th Mountain deployment caps off a busy few months for the military in this part of the world.
In late September, American special forces teamed up with Ecuadorian law enforcement and took down a drug trafficking ring with ties to Mexican cartels. In early October, the Pentagon sent 500 troops to the Rio Grande Valley along the US-Mexico border.
Then the drones showed up.
The military moved MQ-9 Reaper drones, the same aircraft that spent years hunting jihadists in Africa, down to South America. Ecuador’s Defense Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo said two of them have already started flying in Ecuadorian airspace. Colombian officials announced over the summer that their country would take three.
SOUTHCOM commander Francis Donovan didn’t rule anything out when the Wall Street Journal asked about future operations against the cartels.
“These could include ground strikes, arrests or the destruction of hideouts,” Donovan said.
That’s a far cry from the old routine of joint exercises, handshakes, and group photos. General Joseph A Ryan, who leads the Army’s Western Hemisphere Command, has said training in the region will shift away from simple relationship-building and toward the skills that actually take on the cartels and the groups Washington has designated as terrorist organizations.
Communist China Grabbed the Backyard While Washington Napped
General Ryan didn’t sugarcoat how the US ended up here.
“We have ceded economic dominance in the region to an adversary, and that is a fact,” Ryan said at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting in Washington, DC.
He went on to describe the military’s job now as winning back ground the country gave away, everything from “maritime and land, human terrain, cognitive terrain.”
That’s a remarkable admission from a sitting Army general. And he’s right.
For decades, Latin America sat somewhere near the bottom of the Pentagon’s priority list. Politicians in both parties poured money and attention into nation-building projects on the other side of the planet. Communist China noticed the empty chair and pulled it up to the table. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative spread ports, loans, and infrastructure deals across the region while Washington argued about Kabul.
The cartels filled whatever space the Chinese Communist Party didn’t. Transnational organized crime ran wild, and American families paid the bill in the form of fentanyl, trafficking, and overrun border towns.
President Trump has warned about Beijing’s footprint around the Panama Canal since before he took the oath a second time. Plenty of Washington types laughed it off as bluster. Nobody laughed after his capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro in January.
But the bigger point gets lost in the coverage. The Monroe Doctrine dates to 1823, and the idea behind it never expired. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood. Protecting it doesn’t count as some faraway adventure. It counts as home defense.
The Usual Hand-Wringers Already Have Their Talking Points Ready
Predictably, the worriers have started clearing their throats.
Adam Isacson, an analyst at the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America, warned that operations near the Colombia-Venezuela border could invite retaliation, including attacks on oil infrastructure. He also cautioned that even governments hungry for tougher security can only hand over so much authority before their voters sour on it.
Maybe. But that argument skips over something important. Voters across Latin America keep electing leaders who promise to crush criminal gangs and restore order, according to the Times’ own reporting. Ecuador and Colombia didn’t get bullied into taking those Reapers. Their governments signed up.
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum offers the counterexample. She has worked with Washington on security while pushing back on any US military role against cartels inside Mexico. That’s her call to make. It also leaves the cartels with one less country where they have to look over their shoulders.
And here’s the part the critics never quite explain. The cartels don’t respect borders, treaties, or press releases. They respect force. For years, they operated on the assumption that the US would complain, maybe hand out some aid money, and then go back to worrying about Eastern Europe.
That assumption just got a lot harder to hold onto.
Nobody should expect this to wrap up fast, either. Training partner forces takes time, and a new command in Miami signals the Pentagon plans to stay for the long haul. The drones, the jungle school, the border troops, and now the 10th Mountain all point the same direction.
It may turn out that the Pentagon is still sketching this strategy as it goes. That’s probably true of any campaign in its early innings. But the direction itself isn’t a mystery.
President Trump promised to put America’s own hemisphere first. The men and women of the 10th Mountain are packing bug spray to prove he meant it.
Sources: The Daily Caller News Foundation; The New York Times; Bloomberg Government; The Wall Street Journal; Military Times; Air & Space Forces Magazine; Task & Purpose; Voz; APA