QUITO, Ecuador — For decades across Latin America and the Caribbean, U.S. drug enforcement officials have tried to cut off narcotics trafficking by intercepting boats, trucks and even horses laden with drugs and arresting the smugglers.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said those efforts are not bold enough. He has helped steer the Trump administration toward a much more aggressive — and deadly — tactic: use military force to destroy suspected drug boats and kill the people on board, without a legal process.
“Interdiction doesn’t work,” Rubio said at a news conference in Mexico City last week when asked about the U.S. attack on a boat in the Caribbean. President Donald Trump had boasted that the strike had killed at least 11 people.
“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” Rubio added. “And it’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now, I don’t know, but the point is the president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations.”
Rubio has cast himself as a top general in that war.
No senior Trump official has spoken more forcefully about the new campaign of violence against Latin American criminal groups and their allies. And no senior aide to Trump has as long a history working on Latin America policy.
Over 14 years as a Republican senator from Florida, Rubio pressed three administrations to go on the offense across the region. The son of anti-Communist immigrants from prerevolutionary Cuba, he was motivated by his loathing for the Castro government and its allies, notably Venezuela — a stance well rewarded by Florida’s sizable population of expatriates from those countries.
Now, as both secretary of state and White House national security adviser, he is seizing his chance to turn words into action.
Rubio has long sought the ouster of leftist strongmen in the region, particularly leaders of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, whose governments he has called “illegitimate.” He has also helped engineer the administration’s mass deportations of immigrants, including to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Rubio’s approach carries legal and political risks. He has not presented a legal rationale for the lethal strike on the boat. He has said only that the vessel posed an “imminent” threat even though it appeared to be turning around before it was hit multiple times by the U.S. military.
And the push for military action and the ouster of national leaders could draw criticism from a vocal wing of Trump’s movement that advocates greater military restraint in foreign policy. Those conservatives criticize “forever wars” and “regime change,” and some already view Rubio with suspicion, pointing to a history of “neocon” positions.
However, there are those Trump supporters and aides who applaud Rubio’s approach. They see him as reasserting an updated version of the Monroe Doctrine, an early-19th-century concept that justified U.S. intervention in Latin America.
Rubio hopes to “define a real new paradigm in the Western Hemisphere,” said Juan Gonzalez, who served as the top National Security Council official for the region in the Biden administration.
Gonzalez said Rubio’s scathing rhetoric — he has branded Nicaragua’s government “an enemy of humanity” — was meant to establish a “predicate” for further military action in the hemisphere.
His top target for now appears to be Venezuela, whose criminal groups the Trump administration has linked to the country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro.
Last month, Rubio ordered the State Department to increase a reward to $50 million for any information leading to Maduro’s arrest and conviction on U.S. drug charges.
During the first Trump administration, Rubio played a leading role in pushing the president to try to oust Maduro from power. Now, a recent U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean has prompted speculation over whether the administration will try to invade Venezuela and seize Maduro.
Rubio said last week that Maduro was a fugitive from American justice, after having been indicted by a grand jury in a New York federal court on drug trafficking charges in 2020.
“Nicolás Maduro is not a government or political regime,” Rubio told reporters in Quito, Ecuador. “They are a terrorist organization and organized crime organization that have taken over a country so that they can become the leaders, so that they can become billionaires. And that is why they were indicted by the courts in the U.S.”
‘Blow Up’ Criminal Groups
Rubio’s Senate record stands at odds with Trump’s approach to some key issues. So since joining the administration, Rubio has softened some of his hawkish views, at least in public, on issues such as Russia and the promotion of democracy.
But on Latin America, Trump and Rubio have long been in sync.
“Rubio and Trump dovetail particularly well on Latin America,” said Mike Watson, deputy director of the conservative Hudson Institute’s Center for Strategy and American Statecraft.
The two men share a drive to tackle what Watson called the region’s “chaos and disorder” in the form of narcotics and migrants.
“Under Secretary Rubio, the State Department is working to implement President Trump’s vision to make our region secure, stable and prosperous,” Tommy Pigott, the department’s deputy spokesperson, said when asked for comment for this article. “That means eliminating the cartels, ending illegal mass migration and pushing out China’s exploitative practices.”
When it comes to narcotics, Trump and Rubio cast the flow of fentanyl, cocaine and other drugs into the United States as a matter of national security that justifies the use of deadly force.
During his visit to Ecuador, Rubio said the Trump administration was ready to help partner governments “blow up” criminal groups.
“There’s long been a bipartisan consensus around treating cartels as a law enforcement matter rather than a military matter,” Watson said. “Trump and Rubio are no longer treating this issue that way. They are happy to use the military.”
Rubio has driven that policy by officially designating 10 drug cartels and gangs with ties to Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations — a State Department legal category typically applied to political militant groups such as al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah.
And while past U.S. presidents have discussed migration from Central and Latin America mostly in social and economic terms, Rubio has embraced the notion that the flow of people also “poses a national security threat.”
Citing the experiences of own parents, Rubio once argued for more compassionate federal immigration policies before shifting right on the issue, which is perhaps the one most dear to the Republican Party’s base.
Rubio and his aides argue that migrant trafficking will ebb if crime groups and their allies in governments are dismantled, and that clamping down on migration will choke off a key income source for the gangs.
In keeping with Trump’s imperial approach to the Western Hemisphere, Rubio wants to roll back Latin America’s growing economic ties with China. For years, he spoke of Beijing’s global influence as a security threat, though he has tempered that language recently as Trump seeks a summit with China’s leader.
After becoming secretary of state, Rubio began his first official trip with a visit to Panama, where he toured the Panama Canal and pressed Panamanian leaders over the operation of two ports on the waterway by a Hong Kong company. Following Trump’s threats to seize control of the canal, the company agreed in March to sell the ports to a U.S.-led investment group, although the Chinese government has objected.
Rubio also raised the issue of China’s presence during his second trip to the region, visiting Jamaica, Guyana and Suriname in March.
And Rubio is on a mission to bolster the standing of right-wing figures in the region. He has taken up a pet cause of Trump: the defense of Jair Bolsonaro, the conservative former president of Brazil who was officially charged with plotting a coup. Rubio announced on social media Thursday that the United States would respond to the decision earlier that day by Brazil’s Supreme Court to convict Bolsonaro and sentence him to 27 years in prison.
Rubio has tried to quell concerns among some leaders who worry the United States is once again flexing its imperial muscle. In Mexico, where Rubio has designated several cartels as terrorist groups, President Claudia Sheinbaum has warned Washington for months against any attempt at unilateral U.S. military action on Mexican soil.
During his visit to Mexico City last week, Rubio stressed that the two governments had “reached a level of historic cooperation” in recent months — one he said “respects the integrity and the sovereignty of both countries.”
Drugs and Deportations
As a senator, Rubio was a passionate champion of human rights and the rule of law abroad.
In a speech a decade ago, he called for a U.S. foreign policy built on military and economic strength, along with “clarity regarding America’s core values,” which he said included “a passionate defense of human rights” and “the strong support of democratic principles.”
But in going on the offensive in Latin America, Rubio has muted those views.
In addition to the boat attack, Rubio has played a major role in other aggressive policies that encompass actions without due process, including the deportation of hundreds of people he and the president say are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based gang that they have designated a foreign terrorist organization. A vast majority did not have criminal records or clear, documented links to the gang, and courts have blocked further summary removals for now.
Under a deal Rubio reached with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in February, many of those deported have been sent to a prison that human rights groups call dangerous and “inhumane.”
Rubio has flatly dismissed the criticism as “anti-Bukele propaganda.”
A U.S. government document released in court this week said the Trump administration agreed to pay $4.76 million to El Salvador to temporarily accept up to 300 “members” of Tren de Aragua.
Rights groups have also harshly condemned Bukele’s government more broadly for what they call mass detentions, torture and a crackdown on democratic institutions.
His approach, though, has drastically reduced once-rampant crime and gang activity in the country.
That makes Bukele a model leader, in Rubio’s view.
After visiting Panama in February, Rubio traveled on to El Salvador to greet Bukele. The 44-year-old president, who projects a casually cool image, wore aviator sunglasses and a shirt unbuttoned low on his chest as he hosted the American diplomat at his bucolic lakeside compound.
Later that day, Rubio hailed Bukele for transforming El Salvador from a country “known for violence” into “one of the most secure in the hemisphere.”
The key, Rubio said, was Bukele’s leadership, and “the difficult decisions that had to be made.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2025 The New York Times
