JOHN KOUFOS: Trump’s ‘Shield of the Americas’ could help defend us from cartels

In my first career, I stood in courtrooms as a defense attorney dealing intimately with the fallout of organized crime and gang violence. I have cross-examined operatives, analyzed thousands of pages of gang intelligence and witnessed firsthand the brutal efficiency of transnational syndicates. If my time immersed in the legal trenches of the gang world taught me one undeniable truth, it is this: cartels do not respect international borders. In fact, they weaponize them. For too long, the jurisdictional lines on a map have served as the greatest defense strategy for the world's most violent criminal organizations.

We have treated multinational, multibillion-dollar criminal enterprises as localized law enforcement problems. Fortunately, the landscape of international justice is shifting. The U.S.-led "Shield of the Americas" initiative, which recently designated eight major criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations, is fundamentally rewriting the playbook on how we dismantle these syndicates.

There remains one critical holdout, Brazil, whose president is not expected to join this critical coalition. Indeed, the re-election of incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva all but ensures an increase in organized criminal activity in Brazil.

To understand the necessity of this initiative, one must understand how modern cartels operate. In the courtroom, you quickly realize that the street-level gang members, like the MS-13 triggermen or the Tren de Aragua enforcers, can be the lowest rung on a massive, sophisticated corporate ladder.

These organizations operate with the logistical precision of Fortune 500 companies. They manage complex supply chains, launder money through intricate global financial networks and employ specialized cells for enforcement, distribution and corruption.

At times, our legal framework has been outmatched by their agility. A drug shipment might originate in the Andes, be financed through a front company in Central America and be distributed by local gangs in American cities. When law enforcement attempts to build a case, they can hit a variety of bureaucratic obstacles and challenges sharing evidence, securing extraditions or tracing illicit funds across different countries. The cartels know this and deliberately structure their operations to exploit operational disconnects between regional governments.

By officially designating eight major cartels and gangs, including the Sinaloa cartel, the Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG) and Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, the U.S. government dramatically altered the legal reality.

The terrorist designation unlocks a completely different enforcement arsenal. It allows for the immediate freezing of assets, imposes severe penalties for anyone providing "material support" and authorizes deep, aggressive disruption of their financial networks.

You cannot arrest your way out of a cartel problem — you must disrupt the business itself. By targeting their money and imposing serious consequences on the seemingly legitimate financial institutions that launder it, the Shield of the Americas strikes at the absolute core of cartel power. It equips law enforcement to fight proactively and focus on strategic dismantling of cartel financial infrastructure.

Equally crucial is the initiative’s mandate for unprecedented intelligence sharing and military coordination. Currently, countries like Argentina, El Salvador, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay and Chile are participating in the Shield of the Americas.

This will help break down silos where one law enforcement agency has one piece of the puzzle, while authorities in Colombia or El Salvador hold the rest. Without a streamlined mechanism to share that data, the kingpins remain untouchable.

The Shield of the Americas facilitates the real-time sharing of actionable intelligence among partner nations. This means that a cartel operative’s communications intercepted in Lima could be instantly used to disrupt a trafficking route in Central America and ultimately support a federal indictment in New York. Furthermore, joint military coordination ensures that the sheer firepower of these cartels could be matched.

The final critical piece of this initiative is Brazil, South America’s largest nation.

Brazil is a continent-sized nation with its own deeply entrenched criminal organizations, most notably the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho. These groups have grown into major forces in the global drug trade, forging alliances with international cartels and expanding their reach far beyond Brazilian borders. Unfortunately, the current government has abstained from joining the U.S.-led effort, which is expected to continue in light of the recent presidential election.

Brazil’s participation would have a tremendous impact. The cartels would lose one of their most significant safe havens and operational hubs in the hemisphere. A unified front stretching from the U.S.-Mexico border down to the Southern Cone would squeeze transnational syndicates from every direction. It would close the geographical and jurisdictional gaps they have exploited for generations.

The human cost of cartel operations is staggering. Hundreds of thousands of American lives have been lost to cartel-linked fentanyl overdoses, while communities across Latin America have been destabilized by extreme violence and corruption.

The Shield of the Americas represents a profound modernization of our approach to international justice. By recognizing these cartels for the global terror threats they are, strangling their finances and uniting the hemisphere's law enforcement and military resources, we are finally fighting the battle on equal footing.

If more nations commit to this alliance, we will not just be managing the cartel problem; we will be systematically dismantling it. The cartels have operated globally for decades. It is long past time the law did the same.