Cali, not Bogotá, hosted Colombia’s August 7, 2026 presidential inauguration. Abelardo de la Espriella gave his first address as Colombia’s president from a military garrison and set the terms of his next four years. “I reaffirm my intention to defeat without truce narcoterrorism—the criminal organizations that threaten Colombia’s freedom,” he said. He then sent the armed forces after criminal structures and closed his predecessor’s negotiations, telling the country that “the option of dialogue is completely exhausted.”
That vocabulary was not new here. Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa proclaimed an internal armed conflict on January 9, 2024, designated twenty-two gangs terrorist organizations, and kept the classification even as the Constitutional Court ruled repeatedly that Ecuador satisfied none of the legal tests for an actual armed conflict. Argentina’s Patricia Bullrich added Tren de Aragua to the national terrorist registry shortly after Washington did the same, posting that “narcoterrorism has no place in Argentina.” Paraguay’s Santiago Peña signed a decree pinning the same label on the Cartel de los Soles in August 2025, with a visiting U.S. delegation present. On July 14, 2026, Chilean deputies voted 115 to zero—with twenty abstentions from Communist Party and Frente Amplio deputies—to urge President José Antonio Kast to recognize Tren de Aragua as a transnational terrorist organization.
For all its current reach, the term began with one man four decades ago.
Credit for the coinage belongs to Peru’s Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Foreign Policy traces his first use to 1982, after Shining Path hit a prison and a police station, when he called what he saw “narco-terrorism — the union of the vice of narcotics with the violence of terrorism.” The SAGE Encyclopedia of Terrorism places the birth year at 1983 instead. The date stays unsettled because the idea underneath never firmed up. Experts remain split over whether the term “designates too broad a range of activities to be definitive.”
Elasticity proved to be the feature. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2002, DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson explained that his agency “defines narco-terrorism as a subset of terrorism, in which terrorist groups, or associated individuals, participate directly or indirectly in the cultivation, manufacture, transportation, or distribution of controlled substances and the monies derived from these activities.” Congress codified a variant at 21 U.S.C. § 960a in March 2006, carrying sentences of not less than twice the statutory minimum, up to life. Scholars such as John E. Thomas have predicted the statute “will increase the otherwise available sentence for individuals whose drug-terror connection is tenuous or nonexistent.”
Ronald Reagan’s White House turned the phrase into policy. War on the Rocks describes how the term “initially served as a rhetorical weapon with which to attack Cuba and Nicaragua” before evolving “as a way to portray communist insurgencies in Latin America as a national security threat to the United States.” When M-19 guerrillas stormed Colombia’s Palace of Justice in November 1985—destroying U.S. extradition requests and reportedly acting on Medellín cartel money—the framing crystallized into policy. Less than six months later, in April 1986, Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 221, declaring narcotics a national security threat and linking counternarcotics to counterinsurgency “in official U.S. policy for the first time,” as War on the Rocks detailed.
September 2001 completed the merger. At a December 14, 2001 bill signing, President George W. Bush offered a bargain, telling the country that “if you quit drugs, you join the fight against terrorism.” Abroad, he argued, that mattered because “it’s important for Americans to know that trafficking of drugs finances the world of terror, sustaining terrorists.” Two Super Bowl commercials carrying that message ran weeks later, priced by the Washington Post at roughly $3.5 million.
What began as directives and advertisements soon transformed into boots on the ground.
Bolivia came first. Operation Blast Furnace put 160 U.S. soldiers and six Black Hawks into the country in July 1986 to hit cocaine labs. Traffickers got advance warning and fled target areas before the operation began. By October, some 6,000 residents of Santa Ana de Yacuma had expelled 150 American soldiers and Bolivian police officers from the town. Three years later, more than 24,000 American soldiers entered Panama, and President George H.W. Bush named Manuel Noriega’s arrest on trafficking charges among his four stated war aims. That Noriega had drawn a CIA paycheck of $110,000 a year—and had worked alongside the Contras while simultaneously trafficking for the Medellín cartel—shows how selectively the narcoterrorism designation gets handed out.
Plan Colombia arrived in 2000. In August 2002, W. Bush signed legislation authorizing Colombia to re-direct U.S. aid previously earmarked for counterdrug operations to directly combat the FARC, the ELN, and the AUC, linking counternarcotics and counterinsurgency in official U.S. policy.
Afghanistan supplied the cleanest experiment. Beginning in November 2017, U.S. airstrikes leveled opium labs in Helmand, with commanders pledging the bombs would hit Taliban finances. David Mansfield of the LSE’s International Drug Policy Unit worked the aftermath on the ground and reached the opposite verdict, finding the official claims of an $80 million loss to drug traffickers “highly disputed” and the actual impact on the drugs trade and Taliban financing negligible.
That long lineage delivered its most aggressive application in 2025. Effective February 20, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Tren de Aragua, MS-13, the Sinaloa Cartel, and five other Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations—Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, Carteles Unidos, Cartel del Noreste, Cartel del Golfo, and La Nueva Familia Michoacana—adding the Cartel de los Soles that November. Prosecutors had indicted Nicolás Maduro on narcoterrorism counts in March 2020, charging him with running “a narco-terrorism partnership with the FARC for the past 20 years.”
The strikes started September 2, 2025. Figures released to Congress show Operation Southern Spear conducted sixty-two strikes destroying sixty-three vessels and killing 205 people by late May 2026. Formally announced in mid-November, the operation primarily targets small boats suspected of shipping narcotics in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Its mission statement stays classified.
The legal challenge came fast and stands unrebutted. Emory’s Mark Nevitt warned that “never before has drug trafficking been treated as terrorism, and there is a danger that with this rhetorical move, the Trump administration is attempting to open a new ‘forever war’ against an amorphous set of actors who are not in reality engaged in hostilities against the United States.” The International Crisis Group’s Brian Finucane needed one line for a SOUTHCOM press release: “That’s a lot of words for murder.”
Before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, United Nations Special Rapporteur Ben Saul accused Washington of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism,” and reminded the panel that “drug trafficking is a crime, not war.” He and Morris Tidball-Binz had already warned that “international law does not allow governments to simply murder alleged drug traffickers.” WOLA traces the killings to what it calls “the executive branch’s reckless use of the ‘terrorist’ label.”
Kast, Noboa, Peña, and de la Espriella did not invent this vocabulary, and they will not be its last users. Every fresh narcoterrorism designation narrows the space between a criminal suspect and a lawful target, and it narrows that space inside their own borders first.
