… The escalated campaign takes place against the backdrop of the U.S.-led “Shield of the Americas,” a hemispheric “anti-cartel coalition” inaugurated in March that now boasts the participation of 19 countries. Ecuador has been among the most gung-ho about joining forces with the U.S. to launch “anti-cartel” raids, with such impressive feats to show for it as the joint bombing of a drug trafficking compound that turned out to be a dairy farm.

This month, the New York Times(10/14/26) was the first to report that the U.S. had begun deploying a shit ton of troops to Latin America, and that a “new jungle training facility” in Panama was receiving “the first elements of a 600-soldier battalion from the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, NY.” The Times also mentioned the Defense Department’s “recent movement of several MQ-9 Reaper drones from Africa to Colombia and Ecuador.”

The article’s subhead—“The Pentagon is expanding its fight against drug traffickers, even as the plans recall a long and bloody history of U.S. intervention in the region”—leaves us with the expectation that we might be hearing something about, I dunno, the long and bloody history of U.S. intervention in the region. And yet the only reference to that history in the body of the article occurs in a single sentence that is a modified replica of the subhead:

But the prospect of U.S. operations on Latin American soil has raised concerns about sovereignty, and has recalled a long and bloody history of U.S. intervention in the region…

… As president, Uribe oversaw what came to be known as the “false positives” scandal, in which potentially more than 10,000 Colombian civilians were slaughtered by members of the Colombian army, who disguised the corpses as left-wing guerrillas in order to accrue promotions and vacation time. The Uribe administration then used these ostensible battlefield achievements to petition the U.S. for yet more aid.