The United States has spent a year attacking suspected drug boats at sea. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used an August visit to Panama to say the campaign is moving onto land, telling reporters that Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras had agreed to let American forces run joint operations against criminal groups inside their borders. He described the intended effect bluntly: "Like you saw with the strikes on the drug boats. Same effect on land. And so we're working with Ecuador. We're working with Colombia." Ecuador signed a comparable arrangement in March. The shift would put American personnel onto sovereign foreign territory across Latin America, a heavier commitment by far than firing on vessels in open water.
The maritime phase has been enormous and contested. Since January 2025, U.S. forces have killed more than 200 people in over 60 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, an effort human rights organizations have characterized as extrajudicial killing. Hegseth has defended the operations as "100 percent lawful under the laws of armed conflict," and warned in August that "the international left, along with their enabling left-wing media, is plotting to unlawfully assert International Criminal Court jurisdiction over US and partner military personnel." He credited the campaign with cutting drug-vessel traffic by roughly 65 percent in the western Caribbean, 60 percent in the eastern Caribbean and nearly half in the eastern Pacific.
The land phase is proving harder to arrange than the announcement suggested. Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo publicly denied that his government had agreed to anything, saying such operations would be illegal without approval from his congress. Honduras and Colombia did not respond to requests for comment on Hegseth's remarks, though Colombia had days earlier joined the U.S.-led hemispheric counter-narcotics coalition as its nineteenth member, and Hegseth said its new president asked the Pentagon to join Colombia's fight against narco-trafficking. Mexico, home to the cartels the administration names most often, remains outside the arrangement entirely; President Claudia Sheinbaum has refused to accept American forces on Mexican soil.
Traders watching for a confirmed operation have grown less certain. A Polymarket contract on whether U.S. personnel will directly carry out an anti-cartel action on foreign soil by September 30 trades near 33 percent, down from nearly 60 percent earlier in the week. The contract sets a deliberately high bar: strikes at sea and in airspace do not count, and neither does training, intelligence, logistics or advisory support to a partner force. Only direct American participation on the ground, confirmed officially or by overwhelming consensus of reporting, qualifies. A matching contract running through October 31 sits near 66 percent.
That gap between announcement and confirmation is the thing worth watching. Partner-led raids with American help in the background would satisfy the diplomacy without ever meeting that standard, and Washington has reason to keep its role quiet where consent is disputed. The clearer signals will come from Guatemala's congress, from whether Honduras or Colombia publicly acknowledges hosting American operators, and from whether the Pentagon claims a land action outright rather than describing it as a partner success.
