U.S. officials predicted that Operation Southern Spear, President Donald Trump‘s kinetic campaign against so-called narco-terrorist cartels in the Caribbean Sea, Pacific Ocean, and across Latin America, would continue through the end of his second term in office.
The Trump administration held a background briefing with reporters on Tuesday to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the campaign. Officials claimed that the operation’s strikes against and interdictions of alleged drug trafficking boats, on top of strikes against land targets, have “resulted in orders of magnitude less drugs coming into our communities.”
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“U.S. Southern Command’s counter-narcotics operations have driven record reductions in illicit maritime activity,” one official said. “That includes a 65% reduction in the Western Caribbean, a 60% in the Eastern Caribbean reduction, and a nearly 50% reduction in key areas of the Eastern Pacific.”
“President Trump made a promise to the American people that we will secure this country, we will defend our sovereignty, and take the fight to the cartels and narco-terrorists who have poisoned our communities for far too long,” that person added. “Every disputed route, every denied corridor, and every degraded network makes it harder, makes it more expensive and more dangerous for narco-terrorists to move their poison towards the United States of America.”
Furthermore, the administration claimed that a number of other Latin American countries have been compelled to increase their own military and police operations targeting cartels, including Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador.
“This is a region where the sustained application of resources to protect our interests results in material, physical security benefits to the United States that are, again, exponentially greater than the application of resources,” one U.S. official suggested. “This is a mission for the American people, where the question isn’t what does it cost us — the question is what do we gain from it? Because the gains are real, measurable, considerable, and growing with time.”
TOTAL PRICE TAG FOR OPERATION SOUTHER SPEAR NEARS $1 BILLION
In July, the Pentagon announced that U.S. Southern Command had spent roughly $820 million funding Operation Southern Spear. A U.S. official told the Washington Examiner that, to date, there have been 68 total kinetic strikes destroying 70 vessels: 65 go-fast boats, one semi-submersible, 3 “low-profile” vessels, and one refueling station, with 227 mariners killed in the strikes.
The official estimated that the strikes disrupted 347.9 metric tons of cocaine in fiscal year 2026, alongside 189 metric tons by partner nations. In total, the U.S. believes Southern Spear denied $8.8 billion in revenue to narco-terrorist organizations in FY26, on top of $11.5 the year prior. The official noted that the FY25 numbers were higher due to a surge in all interdictions, including at the U.S. Southern border following Trump’s January 2025 inauguration.
