OUR DAILY THREAD: When Extermination Isn't Enough
Beerbong Hegseth's mandate
THE SET-UP: Donald Trump officially launched his Counter-Cartel Coalition (CCC) at the first “Shield of the Americas” summit held (of course) at his Doral Golf resort on March 7th:
“The heart of our agreement is a commitment to using lethal military force to destroy the sinister cartels and terrorist networks once and for all. We'll get rid of them. We need your help. You have to just tell us where they are. We have amazing weaponry, as you probably noticed over the last short period of time.”
The “last short period of time” most likely refers to the War on Iran he was then-gleefully waging alongside Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. But he could’ve also been referring to his summary executions at sea. He’s racked-up quite a pile of dead, nameless men with that opaque, specious campaign. Or he could’ve been crowing about the airstrikes and “discombobulating” raid that captured Venezuela’s President and its oil, gold and fertilizer.
Hell, he could’ve been talking about the 172 times his regime has bombed Somalia over the last fourteen months.
He’s up to 46 airstrikes so far this year and, if the past is any guide, he’ll quickly break his record of 219 strikes he set during his four years.
Don Jr. and Eric like to gratuitously kill leopards and elephants and various threatened species. But it sure seems like Dad prefers the thrill of killing “the most dangerous animal” of all. While promoting his CCC to the leaders of twelve of the seventeen states in the Shield of the Americas, he became downright effusive about the kinetic force at his disposal:
[S]ome of you are in danger. I mean, you're actually in danger. It's hard to believe. But we're working with you to do whatever we have to do. We'll use missiles. If you want us to use a missile, they're extremely accurate.
How about that? It’s Dial-A-Missile with your host, Donald Trump! Just give him a call, give him a target and Palantir will find them and the optimum moment to exterminate them. Voila! Problem solved. Remember that he implored leaders from a number of South, Central and Caribbean nations to “just tell us where they are” because “we have amazing weaponry” and we’re ready to be your geopolitical exterminator.
And if you think “exterminate” is hyperbole?
Just a few days before the CCC was launched at Doral, the Department of War launched “Operation Total Extermination” with the Ecuadoran military. Yup, not just ‘extermination,’ Pete Hegseth’s War Department accepts nothing less than TOTAL extermination. Here’s how Assistant Secretary of War Joseph Humire described it in his opening remarks to the House Armed Services Committee on March 17th:
On March 3, the DoW supported, at the request of Ecuador, bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border. The joint effort, named “Operation Total Extermination,” is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S., setting the pace for regional, deterrence-focused operations against cartel infrastructure throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Hegseth’s War Department “released a video of a massive explosion” that, according to a new report by The New York Times, supposedly captured “the destruction of what they said was a drug trafficker’s training camp in rural Ecuador.” There’s just one problem. The Times found that the target they sought to exterminate wasn’t a cartel:
The military strike appears to have destroyed a cattle and dairy farm, not a drug trafficking compound, according to interviews with the farm’s owner, four of its workers, human rights lawyers and residents and leaders in San Martín, the remote farming village in northern Ecuador where the strike took place.
And although Hegseth posted the aforementioned video on X with a bold warning to the Western Hemisphere: “now bombing Narco Terrorists on land.” The Times also found a problem with that:
And though the Pentagon said at the time that it had “executed targeted action” against the site at Ecuador’s request, U.S. troops had no direct involvement in the strike shown in the video, according to four people with knowledge of the operation, three of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
Frankly, it is probably a good thing they lied about it because the story reported by the Times is not pretty:
Workers on the farm told The Times that Ecuadorean soldiers arrived by helicopter on March 3, doused several shelters and sheds with gasoline and ignited them after interrogating workers and beating four of them with the butts of their guns. Three of the workers, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation by the government, said the soldiers later choked and subjected them to electrical shocks before letting them go.
..and…
Village residents said Ecuadorean helicopters returned to the farm three days later, on March 6, and appeared to drop explosives on the farm’s smoldering remains. It was at that point, they said, that Ecuadorean soldiers recorded the footage that U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said captured the bombing of a traffickers’ compound.
Sadly, it all sounds eerily similar to the tactics exported around the hemisphere by the now-renamed School of the Americas … which is really what this Shield of the Americas is rehashing—an alliance between ruling elites and well-armed US patrons. But it gets tricky when the death squads you train, arm and direct end up raping and killing five American nuns working as missionaries.
The problems with Operation Total Extermination portend many more to come. What happens when a leader uses US kinetic force to target his or her political enemies, or someone they just don’t like? What happens when the intelligence is just wrong and you take out a dairy farm … or a girl’s school?
We don’t yet have a definitive answer on the provenance of the intelligence used to target the girl’s school in Iran, but the Ecuadorean government said “it had relied on U.S. ‘intelligence and support’” to target the farm, which it claims was used to train “about 50 drug traffickers.”
That, in turn, raises questions about the intel Hegseth’s lethality-minded War Department is using to target the alleged “narcoterrorists” Hegseth ghoulishly stalks at sea. Or the intelligence they used to target the “ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria” Trump proudly announced he’d bombed on Christmas Day to stop attacks on Christians.
Not surprisingly, though, reports quickly called into question the efficacy of bombing Jabo, a village in the Sokoto state in northwestern Nigeria. Here’s CNN:
While parts of Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups including Lakurawa–which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to suspected affiliations with [the] Islamic State–villagers say Jabo is not known for terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim majority.
There’s American power—winning hearts and minds with bombs.
Amazingly, when pressed by Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) about the number of land strikes like Operation Total Extermination, Assistant Secretary of War Humire said, “I don’t have an exact number.”
He didn’t know? Or did he know, but simply refuses to say?
That’s the biggest red flag of all—the profuse lying and repeated incompetence makes it hard to know if the regime is lying to you or simply in over its head. Obviously, it is both at the same time. And the regime is marching to the tune of two men who’ve fallen in love with the destructive power at their disposal. Trump himself said the renaming of the Defense Department was in part because he wanted to be offensive. And he’s certainly accomplished that mission.
Unfortunately, his mission is expanding.
So, too, is his appetite for destruction.
As he told the leaders at his Shield of the Americas summit:
The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries. We have to use our military. You have to use your military. You can't fight these people with ... And you have great police. You have some great police, but they threaten your police, they scare your police. You're going to use your military. In many cases, our forces have already been working closely with yours and the United States looks forward to deepening and expanding that cooperation in the months ahead.
While everybody’s understandably focused in Iran, Trump is quietly turning the Western Hemisphere into a protection racket while, at the same time, using Venezuela’s oil and fertilizer to mitigate the impact of his war on Iran.
I am becoming convinced Venezuela’s decapitation was anticipatory of the Iran War.
And there is no doubt that this presidency is going to be dominated by a strangely unrepentant love of organized violence and of technologically advanced ways of killing people.
At one point during his summit statement, Trump coughed-up a simple solution to persistent problem of narcoterrorists: “We have to eradicate them.”
Back in the first village to fall victim to these marching order, Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of intelligence for Ecuador’s Army, told the Times:
“What the army did was attack that house, or farm, and destroy it in its totality.”
I could’ve been a house, or it could’ve been farm. Either way, Hegseth must’ve been ecstatic to find out it was destroyed “in its totality.” - jp
Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin America Are Just the Beginning
https://theintercept.com/2026/03/23/trump-operation-total-extermination-ecuador-colombia-cuba/
‘Americas Counter Cartel Coalition’: Inside the US strategy to combat narco terror, confront China, other foes
https://www.foxnews.com/world/americas-counter-cartel-coalition-inside-us-strategy-combat-narco-terror-confront-china-other-foes
The Holes in Trump’s ‘Shield of the Americas’
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trump-us-latin-america-shield-of-the-americas/