At dawn, the Pacific rolls in quietly along the ragged Baja coast. Far offshore, a hulking silhouette with no beacon shows on fishermen’s phones as a blank space — a ship without a public identity. Onshore, the talk is not of naval tactics but of missing cousins, extortion at warehouses, and a fentanyl economy that has hollowed out ordinary life from Sinaloa to Sonora.
In recent months, that quiet has acquired a new intensity. U.S. special operators, intelligence officers and vetted Latin American units have been working in tandem on missions that rarely earn a headline but steadily reshape the region’s security map. The methods are familiar: sea-based staging, precision targeting, and partnerships that thrive in the shadows. The justification is, too — mounting overdose deaths in the United States, a criminal marketplace that adapts faster than bureaucracies, and governments that need help but cannot always ask for it openly.
A Covert Architecture, Rebuilt
The blueprint is not new. A decade and a half ago, a covert assistance programme in Colombia fused American signals intelligence with Colombian air power to strike at FARC commanders in the jungle. The lesson Washington drew from that chapter was straightforward: intelligence saturation plus local ownership can degrade powerful networks without a large U.S. footprint.
Pieces of that model have migrated north and west. Along Mexico’s Pacific rim, American operators have worked with select Mexican units to map stash houses, choke points and maritime corridors. Offshore platforms — converted commercial ships with helipads and boat bays — provide access without the political cost of permanent bases. The appeal is obvious: approach by sea, act with speed, leave little trace.
Yet the politics remain fraught. Publicly, Mexico City bristles at the suggestion of foreign hands on domestic security. Privately, channels stay open because the alternative — more fragmentation, more violence — is worse. That tension defines the current moment: an active partnership that must be denied to survive.
The Limits of Decapitation
The results are mixed by design. Leadership strikes have removed notorious figures and disrupted logistics, but they do not dissolve the economics of narcotics. When a cartel faction splits, violence often spikes; when a route is blocked, another appears. Maritime interdiction pushes traffickers into semi-submersibles and container blends. Intelligence must relearn the target set with each adaptation.
Mexico’s experience carries a second caution. After the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal of the last decade — when thousands of firearms slipped across the border under a flawed U.S. sting — trust has been brittle. Every joint operation must clear a higher bar of legal and political scrutiny. Every misstep risks a backlash that sets cooperation back years.
Haiti’s Warning
If Mexico shows the strain of cooperation, Haiti shows the price of collapse. The 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse — a plot entangling Haitian-Americans, Colombian veterans and a Miami security firm — exposed a marketplace where private force is cheap, and rules are negotiable. The prosecutions have advanced, but the country’s security has not: gangs have overrun districts of Port-au-Prince, and foreign missions struggle to gain traction. For outside actors, Haiti is a reminder that the line between “stabilisation” and meddling can vanish overnight — and that once the state recedes, it is very hard to coax back.
The Temptations of the Freelance Coup
Venezuela’s 2020 “Operation Gideon,” an amateurish bid by ex-soldiers to spark an uprising from a beach landing, was never a U.S. government project. It was, however, a diplomatic problem — a spectacle that fed a convenient narrative in Caracas and complicated serious diplomacy. For Washington, the lesson was plain: rogue adventurism can undermine carefully built, lawful cooperation elsewhere.
Why the Sea Matters
The new geography of this shadow war is maritime. Ships operating without transponders can hover near coastlines for days, launching small craft or helicopters beyond the sightlines of journalists and the reach of airport manifests. For host nations, sea-based access spares the political pain of a new base on land. For planners, it offers flexibility: come in close, act fast, step back into deniability.
That maritime turn pairs with data-heavy targeting. Analysts assemble “packets” that mix phone metadata, shipping records, port video, and human reporting. The strongest cases line up a window — a narrow, predictable moment when a financier appears, a truck moves, or a warehouse loads. The strike, when it comes, is brief. The message is not cinematic; it is logistical: this node no longer functions.
Law, Oversight and the Public’s Patience
The legal footing matters. Cross-border targeting, proxy units and private contractors each carry different risks under national and international law. Latin American publics, conditioned by a history of heavy-handed outside involvement, have a long memory. So do victims of cartel violence who want safety and dignity, not just raids that make for a compelling brief.
That is why the most durable gains have come where three conditions align: clear political ownership by the host nation; transparent oversight that outlives any one administration; and hard, unglamorous work on the economics of crime — from precursor chemicals to money laundering to ports. Precision without policy becomes whack-a-mole. Policy without precision becomes rhetoric.
What Endures
Taken together, the pattern across the region is neither a full-blown “new war” nor a handful of disconnected stunts. It is a campaign of access and attrition: accumulate small advantages, remove critical people and places, make the next shipment a little harder, the next alliance a little riskier, the next route a little longer. That is not a slogan; it is maintenance — and it demands discipline from all sides.
There is also a quieter truth. The secrecy that shields these operations from politics also muffles debate about ends and means. Officials can point to seizures and arrests. Families in Tijuana or Culiacán judge success by whether their children get home safe and whether the calls for “fees” stop coming. In Washington, legislators watch overdose statistics and ask for quicker results. Those measures do not always move in unison.
A Global South View
For countries like India, which confront their own coastal vulnerabilities and illicit flows, the lessons travel. Integrated maritime surveillance and inter-agency fusion matter more than heroics. Port controls and financial intelligence can do as much damage to a trafficking network as a night raid. And when private security enters the picture — as in Haiti — guardrails must be tight, or today’s solution becomes tomorrow’s scandal.
The Dawn After
Back on the Baja coast, the ship on the horizon is just a smudge. The fishermen shrug; they have seen stranger things. In town, a warehouse owner counts his losses and a mother checks her son’s phone location for the third time. Somewhere far from shore, a helicopter touches down on a dark deck, rotors spooling to silence.
This is how a shadow war reads when you are living in its margins: not as headlines or code names, but as a daily calibration of risk and relief. The strategy, for now, is to keep acting just out of view — and to hope the gains, though quiet, add up to something that ordinary people can feel when they lock their doors at night.