Trump’s ‘narco-terrorism’ war in Latin America evokes Reagan – then as now, it’s more about fighting leftists than drug runners
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Peruvian army personnel during operations against alleged drug trafficking.<br>Cris Bouroncle/AFP via Getty Images, CC BY
https://theconversation.com/trumps-narco-terrorism-war-in-latin-america-evokes-reagan-then-as-now-its-more-about-fighting-leftists-than-drug-runners-284287
https://theconversation.com/trumps-narco-terrorism-war-in-latin-america-evokes-reagan-then-as-now-its-more-about-fighting-leftists-than-drug-runners-284287
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More than any other U.S. president in decades, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued military interventions in Latin America.
On Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism. In the months before the operation, U.S. Southern Command began targeting small, fast-moving boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The death toll from the continuing war on these alleged narco-terrorists has risen to over 200 people.
At the heart of these events is the Trump administration’s stated goal of combating drug trafficking organizations. The White House and State Department have designated a plethora of guerrilla groups, drug cartels, gangs and criminal enterprises as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
Washington has also expanded security ties with Ecuador and El Salvador, which are led by right-wing Trump allies. At the same time, the administration has pressured left-wing governments in Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil and Mexico to join the U.S. war on drugs or else risk Trump’s wrath.
When it comes to opening legal avenues for the application of armed force, the narco-terrorism label is useful. Indeed, it is how the Trump administration justified Operation Absolute Resolve to capture and indict Maduro. Yet Trump’s decision to pardon a right-wing ally – former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and related weapons offenses, appeared to some observers to be “at odds with Trump’s war on drugs.”
The history of that war on drugs, however, especially during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, shows that the narco-terrorism label has always been politicized. My research on Reagan and the drug war suggests that the nebulousness of the concept aided U.S. policymakers in achieving fundamentally anti-communist and anti-leftist political objectives.
Shining Path and the roots of narco-terrorism
Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde Terry first coined the term narco-terrorism in 1982 to describe the infiltration of Sendero Luminoso – or Shining Path – guerrillas into the drug trade.
An ultraradical offshoot of the Peruvian Communist Party, Shining Path was one of the most vicious insurgencies in Latin America. A truth and reconciliation commission later attributed at least half of the 70,000 conflict-related deaths and disappearances to the Maoist guerrillas in their campaign to overthrow the “bourgeois” democratic government. After the Peruvian army chased the guerrillas out of their home base in Ayacucho in the southern Andes, they moved north to the upper Huallaga Valley, the source of over half the world’s cocaine supply at the time.
The Peruvian police, together with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, created special counternarcotics units focused on crop eradication in the upper Huallaga. This strategy sought to reduce the supply of cocaine by eliminating its source, the coca plant. Peasant growers’ resistance to these operations fueled the Shining Path insurgency by providing recruits and creating an opening for the guerrillas to interpose themselves between the farmers and the police.
President Donald Trump signs a proclamation committing the U.S. to countering cartel criminal activity on March 7, 2026, in Doral, Fla.<br>AP Photo / Mark Schiefelbein
With the Cold War drawing to a close, a militarized drug war expanded under the administration of George H.W. Bush. As the federal counternarcotics budget nearly doubled, U.S. officials pressured the Peruvians to militarize their counternarcotics efforts, too. But it wasn’t until the Peruvian armed forces pursued a tacit truce with the traffickers that they were able to locate and capture Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán in September 1992 and dismantle the insurgency.
The Peruvian counterinsurgency succeeded due to a strategy that deliberately cut ties between the guerrillas and the drug traffickers. Essentially, the armed forces of Peru took control of the drug trade from the leftist guerrillas. U.S. anti-narcotics officials, together with their Peruvian police colleagues, were less than thrilled with this strategy – as were the tens of thousands of people who were caught in the crossfire. But for myriad U.S....