Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday that the United States is prepared to carry out additional military operations across Latin America similar to the recent strike in Venezuela that killed Tren de Aragua leader Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as “Niño Guerrero,” signaling a potentially broader campaign against cartels and transnational criminal groups in the hemisphere.
Speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, Hegseth said the Venezuelan interim government had invited U.S. military forces onto its territory to help eliminate the founder of the Venezuelan-born criminal organization, marking one of the clearest acknowledgments yet of direct U.S. military involvement inside Venezuela.
“They invited our military in because they have a foreign terrorist organization on their soil in Tren de Aragua,” Hegseth said. “The founder and leader — we were able to identify where he was and kill him, just like we would kill al-Qaeda or ISIS.”
When asked whether Americans should expect similar operations in countries such as Ecuador and Guatemala, where Washington has expanded security cooperation, Hegseth offered an unequivocal answer.
“Yes, they should,” he said.
Hegseth said the operations would be conducted under a new regional security framework called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C), which seeks to coordinate U.S. military and intelligence capabilities with partner governments across Central and South America to target cartel and gang leadership.
“It’s called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, A3C, and we’re forming it with partner governments all around Central and South America to go after, defeat and destroy foreign terrorist organizations [and] drug cartels,” Hegseth said.
The remarks suggest the Trump administration increasingly sees transnational criminal groups not as traditional law-enforcement targets but as terrorist threats warranting military action, similar to U.S. campaigns against Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the Middle East.
“We treat these foreign terrorist organizations the same way,” Hegseth said. “Just like we do with drug boats when we identify they’re run by those FTOs.”
President Donald Trump announced Friday that U.S. Southern Command had carried out a “swift and lethal kinetic strike” that killed Niño Guerrero, the founder of Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization U.S. authorities say expanded throughout Latin America and into the United States.
Guerrero, 42, had been one of the most wanted criminal figures in the hemisphere. Washington had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture and accused him of transforming Tren de Aragua from a prison gang centered in Tocorón prison into a sprawling transnational network involved in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, human trafficking and migrant smuggling.
Hegseth tied the success of the operation directly to President Trump’s January capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, arguing that the move fundamentally altered regional geopolitics.
“President Trump had the foresight to seize Maduro, change the relationship,” Hegseth said. “Now Venezuela, through our partnerships, we’re killing foreign terrorist leaders who have terrorized the American people.”
The strike reflects the dramatic transformation in U.S.- Venezuela relations since Jan. 3, when Maduro was captured in a U.S.-backed operation and removed from power. His capture ended years of open hostility between Washington and Caracas and opened the door to unprecedented security cooperation.
Following Maduro’s removal, then–Vice President Delcy Rodríguez assumed power as interim president and began working closely with Washington on efforts to stabilize Venezuela, including joint operations targeting criminal organizations.
According to Hegseth, countries across the region are increasingly willing to work directly with U.S. forces, combining American military capabilities with local intelligence and security resources to target criminal networks.
“All those countries you named are stepping up to work on partnerships with the United States,” he said, adding that the goal is to “hunt terrorist networks in our own hemisphere.”
Hegseth compared the emerging strategy to the U.S. counterterrorism campaigns in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, where American forces spent two decades targeting jihadist leadership through intelligence-driven operations and precision strikes.
“Just like we showed we were very good at with ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Middle East for 20 years,” he said.
He also portrayed the strategy as a revival of the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century U.S. policy asserting Washington’s primacy in the Western Hemisphere. In characteristic Trump-era language, Hegseth jokingly referred to it as the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reference to Trump.
“It’s an incredible reinforcement of the Monroe Doctrine — now the Donroe Doctrine,” Hegseth said. “We’re taking back control of our hemisphere.”
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