Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Ongoing U.S. military strikes against alleged drug trafficking boats in Latin America and the Caribbean raise the question of the most effective and least lethal way to prevent deadly narcotics from entering the United States. As the Trump administration increasingly views U.S. relations in the Western Hemisphere through the lens of combatting “narco-terrorism” and ramps up military operations against newly designated foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) in the region, understanding the lessons learned from decades of drug control policy and mapping out more productive approaches to combatting irregular armed actors and dismantling the illicit economies sustaining them could not be more urgent.
The Quincy Institute held a discussion with prominent drug policy and organized crime experts as they discuss the key issues at stake in the administration’s militarized war on “narco-terror” in the Western Hemisphere and more effective ways to reduce regional threats to U.S. national security. We heard from Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, co-director of the Corruption, Networks, and Transnational Crime Research Center (CONTRA) at George Mason University, Isabel Pereira Arana, senior coordinator for Drug Policy at the Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia), and Lee Schlenker, research associate in QI’s Global South program. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft and senior advisor at the QI, moderated.
Ongoing U.S. military strikes against alleged drug trafficking boats in Latin America and the Caribbean raise the question of the most effective and least lethal way to prevent deadly narcotics from entering the United States. As the Trump administration increasingly views U.S. relations in the Western Hemisphere through the lens of combatting “narco-terrorism” and ramps up military operations against newly designated foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) in the region, understanding the lessons learned from decades of drug control policy and mapping out more productive approaches to combatting irregular armed actors and dismantling the illicit economies sustaining them could not be more urgent.
The Quincy Institute held a discussion with prominent drug policy and organized crime experts as they discuss the key issues at stake in the administration’s militarized war on “narco-terror” in the Western Hemisphere and more effective ways to reduce regional threats to U.S. national security. We heard from Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, co-director of the Corruption, Networks, and Transnational Crime Research Center (CONTRA) at George Mason University, Isabel Pereira Arana, senior coordinator for Drug Policy at the Center for Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia), and Lee Schlenker, research associate in QI’s Global South program. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft and senior advisor at the QI, moderated.
