Shield of the Americas Summit: Militarization, Ecuador and the War on Drugs We've Already Lost
Shield of the Americas gathering on March 7th, 2026.
Image by the White House.
On April 5th, at the Trump National Doral Miami, President Trump gathered leaders from twelve Latin American and Caribbean countries to launch what he called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, a "brand-new military coalition" that would "eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region." The setting was theatrical and the ambition enormous. If history is any guide, it was also something we have seen before.
The Shield of the Americas Summit is one of the clearest expressions yet of what has come to be known as the Donroe Doctrine: a security-forward, ideologically curated approach to hemispheric engagement that rewards alignment and punishes independence. The administration's National Security Strategy had already outlined this agenda, and the Summit was its first operational step, with a focus on countering cartels across the Western Hemisphere. Trump pointed to recent actions that align with this rhetoric, like the capture of Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges and the killing of El Mencho, as proof that the strategy works. But this security agenda is only as coherent as the partners it assembles, and the guest list at Doral was carefully designed.
Trump's strongest regional allies were present at the summit: Javier Milei of Argentina, Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador. Notably, Colombia and Mexico were absent, the two countries most directly implicated in cocaine production and trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. Their absence is not incidental. Both are governed by leftist leaders who have been openly critical of the Trump administration and stand apart from the right turn reshaping much of the region today. This detail signals that the coalition is less a programmatic response to a regional crisis and more a strategic exercise in building a bloc of ideologically aligned governments. It appears that the offer of cooperation is real, but ideologically conditional.
Of all the countries present, Ecuador is the most instructive case study and the most uncomfortable one. In just a few years, Ecuador has gone from a relatively peaceful country to one of the most violent nations in Latin America, with a homicide rate of 50.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. President Noboa has attributed much of this to the fact that approximately 70% of the world's cocaine now moves through Ecuador's Pacific ports, a reality compounded by the country's use of the U.S. dollar, which eliminates the currency conversion that might otherwise make money laundering traceable.
The U.S.-Ecuador security relationship has moved fast. On March 2nd, the head of U.S. Southern Command flew to Quito. The following day, Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces launched joint operations against what Washington designated as terrorist organizations. A week later, the FBI opened its first office in the country. And on April 7th, the USS Nimitz, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, arrived off Ecuador's coast as part of the Southern Seas 2026 naval deployment, with Ecuador's Defense Minister and Foreign Minister on board for a visit that the Defense Ministry described as "consolidating a new level of military cooperation between both countries." The pace is striking.
What is equally striking is what sits just beneath the surface of this partnership. President Noboa's family banana export company, Noboa Corporation, has had shipping containers caught up in major cocaine shipments to the Balkans. Intercepted communications from Balkan traffickers described having exclusive rights to use those containers, with one message referencing a 950-pound drug shipment. None of this has been addressed in the framing of Ecuador as a model partner in the war on drugs. And Ecuadorian voters, for their part, rejected a referendum that would have allowed foreign military bases to return to the country. However, Noboa has largely proceeded to work around this "No" vote of over 60% of the population of Ecuador through bilateral arrangements.
This is not the first time the United States has poured resources into a Latin American country in the name of fighting drugs, and the results of that precedent are worth examining carefully. Plan Colombia, launched in 2000, channeled over $10 billion in U.S. assistance, primarily defense equipment and training, into the country over more than a decade. It also included aggressive aerial spraying of coca crops with glyphosate, a strategy that, according to expert analysis, had an effectiveness rate of just 4.2%—meaning that to destroy a single hectare of coca, thirty-two had to be sprayed, at a cost of approximately $57,150 per hectare eliminated, compared to the roughly $450 that same hectare was worth in coca leaves. Coca growers, for their part, developed countermeasures within months.
The human cost was also significant. The pressure placed on the Colombian military to produce results contributed directly to the phenomenon of "false positives", the extrajudicial killing of over 6,000 civilians, whose bodies were dressed up and presented as enemy combatants to inflate kill counts. The false positives are the documented consequence of a militarized, results-driven approach to a structural economic problem.
In the meantime, the structural problem did not go away. Colombia went from 160,000 hectares of coca in 1999 to 96,000 in 2015, a reduction that Plan Colombia's proponents cite as success. But by 2023, UNODC reported 253,000 hectares, the highest ever recorded. Part of what happened in between is directly relevant to Ecuador's current crisis. The 2016 peace accord with the FARC demobilized a guerrilla organization that, for all its violence, had imposed a brutal but relatively organized structure on the cocaine trade, effectively controlling who grew, who processed, and which routes were used. When that structure dissolved, dissident factions that rejected the accord, alongside pre-existing criminal organizations like the ELN and the Clan del Golfo, moved quickly to fill the territorial vacuum. Competing groups fought for control of those same routes, violence surged, and trafficking pressure moved southward along the Andes. Ecuador, sitting between Colombia and Peru, the two largest cocaine producers in the world, absorbed much of that displacement. The crisis Noboa is now partnering with the U.S. to address is, in part, a downstream consequence of the last major U.S.-Latin America anti-drug effort.
If Plan Colombia is our closest point of comparison for what U.S.-Latin America anti-drug cooperation looks like, what should we expect for Ecuador?
The Shield of the Americas Summit did not address U.S. domestic drug consumption, which remains the largest in the Western Hemisphere and the demand-side engine of everything the coalition claims to be fighting. It did not address U.S. weapons flows into the region either. Mexico's Defense Secretary confirmed that, since October 2024, nearly 80% of seized firearms in Mexico came from the United States. And it did not explain why, just weeks before it convened, President Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a man convicted by a U.S. federal jury of conspiring to import over 400 tons of cocaine into the United States between 2004 and 2022, on the grounds that he had been treated "unfairly." For a coalition built around fighting drug trafficking, the contradictions are hard to ignore.
Those contradictions extend beyond Washington as well. Ecuador has spent the first months of 2026 escalating tariffs on Colombian goods, from 30% in January, to 50% in February, to 100% in April, citing Colombia's alleged failure to implement concrete border security measures to stem drug trafficking across their shared border. Colombia has rejected those accusations, noting that it conducts regular joint counter-narcotics operations with Ecuadorian forces, and has responded by halting energy exports to Ecuador, a critical supply during droughts when the country's hydroelectric capacity runs dry. Two neighboring countries that share a border and a cartel problem are now in an active trade dispute, and the framework that was supposed to unify the region's anti-drug effort has done nothing to resolve it.
That is the other story of the Shield of the Americas: a security agenda built on ideological alignment rather than strategic coherence that tends to fracture the region as much as it unifies it.
Fifty years into the war on drugs, the drugs are winning. Not because enforcement is useless, but because enforcement alone, without addressing the U.S.’s insatiable demand for cocaine or building the institutions that make communities resilient, produces a cycle: a dramatic moment of state action, a wave of retaliatory violence, and then a gradual return to the structural conditions that made the trade possible in the first place. Ecuador today, like Colombia before it, is being asked to absorb the costs of that cycle. Fortunately for the cartels, a coalition announced at a golf resort in Miami is unlikely to break that cycle.