Trump's strikes on coke boats are missing the root of the problem
Every few weeks, another video circulates from the Caribbean: a plume of smoke over turquoise water, a small boat breaking apart under U.S. fire.
Washington now bombs narco-vessels — eight of them, as of this writing — claiming decisive victories in a televised war on drugs. Yet every detonation hides a deeper failure. The cocaine economy that sustains Colombia’s armed networks, and increasingly President Gustavo Petro’s political machine, does not live at sea. It thrives inland, across guerrilla encampments and jungle laboratories that function as ministries of production.
Until the U.S. redirects its effort from boats to the camps and corridors that feed them, it will keep winning headlines while losing the war — and paying for it at home in the form of rising American overdoses.
Petro's now-infamous exhortation in New York — urging U.S. soldiers to “disobey Trump and obey humanity” — was not improvisation. It was a psychological strike against allied command cohesion, an act so extraordinary that the State Department revoked his visa. At the same time, his flagship policy, known as "Paz Total," has not demobilized combatants inside Colombia. Rather, it has reorganized them.
Ceasefires have turned battlefields into rent-farms. Armed narco-guerrillas now tax mining, manage coca, and enforce curfews with pamphlets instead of bullets. The result is not pacification but a new division of labor: Petro governs the facade, while criminal franchises govern on the ground.
The data evince the scale of this reconfiguration. A United Nations’ survey placed coca cultivation at a record 253,000 hectares in 2023, with potential output up 53 percent year over year at 2,664 metric tons. Production is concentrated in three corridors that act as industrial command zones, where militias rule and divide their efforts between gold mining, extortion and cocaine production.
Colombia’s own oversight bodies have identified 287 municipalities in 29 departments at risk of illegal militia interference in elections and 492 violent acts against political and social leaders in 2024. The Fundación Ideas para la Paz reports that inter-group clashes rose 54 percent, even as attacks on state forces fell. The violence has not vanished — it has been rationalized. Candidates now campaign only with permission; ballots travel under escort; entire regions abstain from the vote out of fear. Petro’s “Total Peace” is the stabilization of coercion.
What happens in those corridors does not stay in Colombia. DEA and Office of National Drug Control Policy laboratories in the U.S. report cocaine purity above 90 percent in East Coast seizures through 2023 and 24, even as retail prices remain stable. That combination — high purity and flat price — is only possible when production surges faster than interdiction.
As a result, emergency rooms in Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore have recorded their sharpest spikes in cocaine-involved overdoses in a decade, many caused by cocaine laced with fentanyl intermediated through Mexican cartels. The cocaine boom unleashed by Petro’s permissive ceasefires has become an American overdose epidemic. What his government treats as “peacebuilding” in Catatumbo is being measured in U.S. morgues. Petro’s internal policy has created not only a narco-state in formation but a public health emergency north of the equator.
Washington’s drone strikes against smugglers appear forceful, but they are attacking the symptom, not the disease.
If the U.S. wants to change the outcome, it must attack the inland system of drug production. That means dismantling the laboratory belts, mining camps, and Venezuelan sanctuaries that sustain volume and political protection.
The tools already exist. The Global Magnitsky Act allows the U.S. to sanction treasurers, gold buyers, and political fixers who launder drug proceeds through mining fronts. Patriot Act Section 311 can cut off money-service businesses that channel cartel funds through the U.S. banking system.
The U.S.–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement permits penalties against regions that tolerate illegal mining or forced labor. And U.S.-funded Organization of American States and U.N. observation missions can protect Colombia’s 2026 elections in the municipalities at highest risk, using armored ballot transport, chain-of-custody tracking, and satellite surveillance of voting routes. Combined, these measures can collapse the industrial base that sustains the cocaine economy and reduce the flow of lethal purity now reaching American streets.
In the late 1990s, a Colombian government similarly ceded territory to insurgents in the name of peace. And much like today, the FARC militia took advantage to double extortion revenues and triple coca cultivation. Petro’s policy is different only in that today's cocaine economy is half again as large, and its reach extends through Venezuelan airstrips to Rotterdam and Antwerp.
Washington’s air campaign in the Caribbean offers drama but no real defense. Each destroyed boat removes a handful of traffickers and a few hundred kilos of cargo, but Colombia’s ramped-up production replaces it each time before dawn. The cocaine entering the U.S. today is cleaner, cheaper, and deadlier precisely because the inland factories remain untouched. The American overdose surge is not collateral damage — it is a direct result of a so-called Colombian "peace" that kills Americans by the gram.
Carlo J.V. Caro, who trained in international security at Columbia University, previously served as vice president of a real estate and sustainability firm.