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MEXICO CITY — At a summit of Latin American leaders, President Donald Trump mused over the best way to take on the "bloodthirsty cartels." It was simple, he said.
"We'll use missiles," he said at the March event. "They're extremely accurate - pew - right into the living room. That's the end of that cartel person."
This month, he realized that ambition with the precision strike that killed Héctor "El Niño" Guerrero, the accused leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The "lethal kinetic strike," as Trump described it, found Guerrero ensconced in a small shack deep in the Venezuelan countryside - and brought to the Trump administration's campaign against criminals in Latin America another tactic more often employed against Islamist militant groups in the Middle East.
The administration has designated more than a dozen of the region's criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Where U.S. border forces once limited themselves to intercepting boats suspected of carrying drugs to the United States, the military has instead been firing without warning on such vessels, including those not obviously headed for the U.S., killing more than 200 people.
Now the targeted killing of Guerrero, without due process and in a foreign country, has further blurred the line between how the U.S. government views Islamic terrorist networks that plot violence against Americans and criminal groups that more often want to sell them drugs. His death was less like the capture of a Latin American drug lord than the remote-controlled assassination of a jihadist leader.
"This is a huge deal," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told CBS News this week. "The founder and leader [of Tren de Aragua] … we were able to identify where he was and kill him, just like we would kill al-Qaeda or ISIS, and we did in the Middle East. We treat these foreign terrorist organizations the same way."
Targeted killings have been a feature of the U.S. campaign against Islamist extremist groups for decades. Al-Qaeda leader Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was killed by targeted drone strike in Yemen during the George W. Bush administration in 2002. President Barack Obama ordered the drone strike that killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. In both cases, officials defended the attacks as acts of anticipatory self-defense, not extrajudicial killings or simple murder.
The strikes have long been among the most controversial elements of America's war on terrorism.
"I've been saying this since Clinton - only law enforcement methods are lawful against terrorism," said Mary Ellen O'Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. Guerrero "is a prime example of someone who should have been arrested and tried."
The Trump administration hasn't cast his killing as self-defense but as revenge for violence officials say has been committed in the United States by undocumented Venezuelan immigrants they allege have ties to Tren de Aragua.
"I pledged to expel these monsters from our Country, and bring Justice to the families of those they slaughtered," Trump said in a social media post announcing the strike. "With this action, the United States Military has brought retribution for them, their families and their loved ones."
Patrick Weaver, Hegseth's deputy chief of staff, underscored the point: "The death of Nino Guerrero sends a clear message to Latin America. There is no refuge for narco terrorists in our hemisphere."
In a statement to The Washington Post, the White House suggested it would continue to use targeted killings against criminal groups in Latin America. Spokeswoman Olivia Wales said the administration viewed terrorists who commit violence to advance a political agenda, and criminals motivated by profit, through the same counterterrorism lens.
"The United States will continue to identify and neutralize any groups that have the intent and capability to plot attacks against Americans - whether it's deadly cartels that have poisoned millions of Americans or Jihadists," she said in a statement. "Terrorists of any kind will not be allowed to find safe harbor here at home or attack us from abroad."
The Pentagon declined to comment.
While some have described Guerrero's killing as a watershed moment, former State Department attorney Brian Finucane says it wasn't the first.
That came weeks after the Trump assumed office when, in one batch, the State Department listed eight additions to its list of foreign terrorist organizations - all of them based in Latin American and accused of drug trafficking.
"It was an unprecedented step," said Finucane, who specializes in the law of armed conflict. "It was pretty clear that this would feed into the repurposing and reframing of the war on terror paradigm to alleged narcos and cartels and criminal groups in Latin America."
A month later, the administration sent 238 Venezuelan migrants it accused of ties to Tren de Aragua to a megaprison in El Salvador. Then came the boat strikes against suspected members of "narco-terrorist" groups, which Trump officials often don't identify. In March, the U.S. military, in partnership with Ecuadorian authorities, bombed what they alleged was a drug camp. Officials from both countries this week vowed to strengthen ties.
James Story, the top U.S. diplomat to Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, was surprised by Guerrero's killing.
"Instead of doing what we used to do, which was work with partner agencies and build coalitions, and the local governments would be the ones to prosecute the operation, we are now the ones pulling the trigger," he said. "And for me, how does this policy evolve?"
The Trump administration has added nine more Latin American criminal groups to the list of foreign terrorist organizations, including, this month, Brazil's two largest gangs. U.S. forces so far have launched terrestrial strikes only in countries that have authorized them, but Story expressed concern that the mission could expand.
"What happens when there is an election where people are uncomfortable with us doing this - would we violate their sovereignty?" he said. "Or if there is a drug trafficker in Mexico - and I'm not sympathetic to drug traffickers - but are we going to hit someone in Mexico without the government's approval?"
Trump described asking Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum for such approval.
"I said, 'Let me eradicate the cartels,'" he said at the March summit. Sheinbaum, he said, declined. "We have to eradicate them," Trump continued. "We have to knock the hell out of them."
Paulina Silva Rodriguez, a Sheinbaum spokesperson, said the Mexican president's position has always been clear: She wants "cooperation" in the fight against cartels, not "interference."
Analysts have long cautioned against fighting criminal groups by removing their leaders. The kingpin or decapitation strategy has routinely backfired, research has shown, fomenting more violence as rivals battle to fill the vacuum but rarely debilitating drug trafficking networks.
"There has not been one military action since the Nixon administration that has curbed drug trafficking," said Raúl Zepeda Gil, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "With drug trafficking, you always find a few months later there is another organization taking the routes and moving the drugs. This has been happening over and over again for 70 years."
In some instances, an organization that loses its leader might become stronger. After the arrest of Colombian drug lord Dairo Antonio "Otoniel" Úsuga in October 2021, crime analyst Jeremy McDermott said, the "much more competent" Jobanis de Jesús Ãvila Villadiego took over and rapidly expanded the Clan del Golfo.
"Historically, the kingpin strategy has led to fragmentation and greater violence, and in some cases it's actually been counterproductive," said McDermott, co-founder of the think tank Insight Crime. "It's much more mediatic than strategic."
It's unclear how losing Guerrero will affect Tren de Aragua. While he was the gang's "most visible" figure, the Venezuelan journalist Ronna RÃsquez said, its structure is decentralized and significant leaders remain.
"So what will happen now?" asked RÃsquez, author of a 2023 book on the gang. "I think we'll see a fragmentation."
His death, analysts said, is likely to do little to deter Venezuelan transnational crime. At the end, McDermott said, "Niño Guerrero was just a guy in a hut."
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