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.”
“U.S. Southern Command’s counter-narcotics operations have driven record reductions in illicit maritime activity. 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,” one official said.
“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
U.S. officials declined to list updated totals for strikes and other actions carried out under the operation or give estimates for the amount of narcotics the campaign has prevented from flowing onto American streets.
In July, the Pentagon announced that U.S. Southern Command had spent roughly $820 million funding Operation Southern Spear. The Washington Examiner previously reported that the operation had struck 47 vessels in the Pacific, 17 vessels in the Caribbean, and two vessels in unknown locations, killing 218 mariners. The United States rescued four survivors from the 66 total vessels struck.