Defense and security officials from the 19 governments in the U.S.-led Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, known as A3C, met in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on October 26 and 27, where coalition leaders "reviewed and approved" a military campaign plan and a charter for running the coalition, U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said. The coalition itself is not new; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched it in March. The plan, drawn up by SOUTHCOM's commander and his staff, is classified and was not described in detail, The New York Times reported, adding that officials reviewed it in preparation for final approval; the Dominican defense minister said it runs to 2031. At the forum, a senior adviser to Hegseth said the United States and its partners strictly obey the law of armed conflict, and accused cartels of financing and running nongovernmental organizations that challenge U.S. strikes in court, a claim UPI reported he made without proof. Critics, including a United Nations special rapporteur, say the U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats, one of which killed five people in the eastern Pacific on the forum's second day, are unlawful killings.
What happened in Santo Domingo
SOUTHCOM, the U.S. military command for most of Latin America, co-hosted the meeting with the Dominican Defense Ministry "to operationalize" the coalition. Its announcement said ministers would "review a military campaign plan outlining their operational strategy and a governance charter defining how they will organize and convene as they implement the plan." Captions on SOUTHCOM's page on the Pentagon's DVIDS media site say only that the officials "reviewed a military campaign plan for the A3C," but a SOUTHCOM post on X on the forum's second day said that "coalition leaders reviewed and approved a campaign plan and a governance charter," as some Dominican and Spanish-language outlets also reported. According to the Times, SOUTHCOM's commander, Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan, and his staff wrote the plan; the SOUTHCOM post did not say whether the approval it described was final. Opening the forum, Dominican President Luis Abinader said, "If crime organizes internationally, the response of states cannot remain fragmented nationally," and urged members to turn agreements into defined responsibilities and verifiable results. The U.S. ambassador, Leah Campos, said each member would act under its own laws and that Washington is not asking any country to give up its sovereignty, the Times reported. (Quotes from Spanish are Profoundd's translations.)
What the A3C is
Hegseth announced the coalition at SOUTHCOM's headquarters in Miami on March 5. "Today, we launched a historic effort at @SOUTHCOM — the first ever America's Counter-Cartel Coalition (A3C)," he posted, adding, "The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is in full effect." A second forum met in Panama in August. Its members, besides the United States, are Argentina, the Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago; Mexico and Brazil are not members. SOUTHCOM says members will "target the network of criminal enablers who conduct unlawful finance, logistics, corruption and other activities" that cartels rely on. A U.S. task force created in August, Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, coordinates operations with partner countries. Donovan has said the United States plans to expand from striking boats to striking targets on land, and a handful of countries, including Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras, have agreed to joint strikes on their territory, the Times reported; the Dominican Republic has not announced such an agreement.
The legal argument
The administration says the United States is in an armed conflict with cartels it has designated as terrorist organizations. At the forum, Eric Geressy, Hegseth's senior adviser for strategy, said: "Let me establish our position with absolute clarity: The United States and every coalition partner assembled here strictly observed the law of armed conflict." In December 2025, after a closed-door briefing on a follow-up strike that killed two survivors of an earlier hit, Democrats in Congress said they were disturbed and Republicans said the strike was justified because the two might otherwise have continued to their destination, NPR reported. The Pentagon's own Law of War Manual gives "orders to fire upon the shipwrecked" as an example of a clearly illegal order; Adm. Mitch Bradley, who ordered the strike, told lawmakers the survivors were still trying to reach their comrades by radio and to corral drugs on the boat, according to lawmakers' accounts.
Geressy also said cartels "file spurious human rights petitions." "They want to collapse our operational tempo from the courtroom because they cannot survive it in the battle space," he said. The first major international legal challenge to the strikes, a petition, was filed on December 2, 2025, with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Organization of American States' human-rights body, by the family of Alejandro Carranza, a Colombian fisherman they believe was killed in a September 15 strike, citing his disappearance and the strike's reported location; Al Jazeera noted there is no definitive proof of who was aboard. Al Jazeera reported in January that the United States had presented no evidence against him, and that local outlets have reported he was accused in 2016 of stealing weapons from a police station; a human-rights activist following the case said he was never found guilty and the investigation was closed. At a commission hearing on the strikes in March, U.S. representatives argued that the commission lacks competence to examine claims based on the law of war and that the United States is not bound by the American Convention on Human Rights, the Guatemalan broadcaster Emisoras Unidas reported. According to the Dominican newspaper Listín Diario, Geressy urged partner governments to protect their commanders from prosecution and to keep exclusive national jurisdiction over their own troops, and the Times reported he said the State Department is setting up bilateral legal safeguards for coalition members.
The critics
On the forum's second day, SOUTHCOM announced a strike on a "go-fast vessel" in the eastern Pacific that killed five people. "Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel's active involvement in narco-trafficking," it said, without identifying those killed or presenting evidence. It was at least the 72nd such strike since September 2025, with more than 240 people killed, according to UPI and the Times; relatives of some of the dead say they were fishermen and farmers.
The evidence on who was aboard cuts both ways. Few bodies have been recovered, and there is scant physical evidence of debris or of the drugs the administration says the boats carried, The New York Times reported in May; some people interviewed for the same report said the lines between fishermen and traffickers can blur, with some fishermen taking occasional trafficking work in lean seasons. When the United States sent home two survivors of an October 2025 strike, Ecuador's attorney general's office released one, saying there was "no report of a crime" against him, while Colombian authorities said the other would face prosecution. Ecuadorian fishermen whose boats were attacked and who were handed to Salvadoran authorities had not been charged in the United States, El Salvador or Ecuador as of late May, NPR reported; Ecuador's president, Daniel Noboa, questioned the fishermen's motivations and location. Neither the command's description of those killed nor the relatives' accounts has been independently verified in the reports cited here.
Geressy told the forum that in 12 months the U.S. campaign had cut cartels' maritime corridors in the western Caribbean by 64 percent, Listín Diario reported; he cited no source for the figure. Ben Saul, the UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, has said there are reasonable grounds to believe the strikes are the crime against humanity of murder, and that there is growing evidence they have not been effective in reducing drug trafficking in the United States, UPI reported. Lawyers cited by the Times argue that the military may not deliberately target civilians who are not directly taking part in hostilities, even if they are breaking the law, and that drug trafficking does not amount to hostilities. A Times investigation found that Ecuador's military, in a joint operation with the United States in March, struck a dairy farm rather than a traffickers' training camp. At the coalition's launch in March, White House homeland security adviser Stephen Miller said cartels "can only be defeated with military power"; in the same Guardian report, David Marques of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety called the exclusively military approach "a very absurd simplification," saying, "Military power alone is not sufficient to deal with this challenge."
This article reflects reporting through Friday morning, October 30, 2026. Sources: SOUTHCOM on X, October 27; SOUTHCOM's announcement (also in the U.S. Embassy in Peru's Spanish translation) and its forum photo captions on DVIDS; Pete Hegseth on X; UPI, October 27; The New York Times via Infobae, October 28; Listín Diario; El Sol de la Florida; Infobae, October 29; 7dias; The Guardian, March 5; The New York Times via The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 31; CBS News, October 21, 2025; NPR, December 5, 2025, and May 26, 2026; Al Jazeera, January 16; Emisoras Unidas, March 13.
