LIMA, Peru—The U.S. military has helped Ecuador bomb suspected drug traffickers along its border with Colombia.
Peru says it is eager to deepen military cooperation with American antidrug efforts.
In Lima, Peru’s new President Keiko Fujimori announced to applause that her country was joining the Shield of the Americas, a U.S.-led coalition of over a dozen countries that has adopted the Trump administration’s hard-line playbook for taking on drug traffickers and armed groups. A sprawling military alliance that reaches from the Caribbean across the Andes to the Pacific is taking shape a year after the Trump administration began bombing alleged drug-smuggling boats in the region. The tactics are sometimes unapologetically and intentionally brutal, like President Trump’s drug-boat campaign , designed to send a message that narcotics traffickers now face local forces backed by U.S. firepower. The emerging coalition is a bloc of largely right-wing governments across the region that could receive U.S. intelligence, equipment and surveillance technology. Sometimes they work jointly with American troops. On a swing through Colombia, Ecuador and Peru that ended Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio highlighted the campaign alongside a trio of Trump-friendly leaders. He ticked off his wishlist for American firepower: upgraded aircraft, drones, radars, air defenses, cyber defenses and special-forces capabilities.
Two-thirds of Peruvians in the poll said violence and insecurity was their biggest worry while 43% said the same in Colombia.
Regional security forces are bombing jungle encampments, capturing drug kingpins and killing drug couriers with U.S. help, American officials said. “God willing, it will expand to even more countries,” Rubio said at the presidential palace. Increasingly, he said, these countries could take the lead on the front lines. “We’ll still blow up ships if need be,” Rubio said Wednesday in the Ecuadorean capital of Quito, but “our elite forces are operating alongside one another.
“There are criminal groups today that have more money and better military equipment than the military forces of a state. On Tuesday, Rubio met with de la Espriella at a military compound that the Colombian president has turned into a presidential headquarters in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla.
