For the last four decades, “narcoterrorism” has served to legitimize and promote massive military interventions, substantially funded by the United States, and a public security approach based on the war paradigm, to the detriment of political solutions. In this way, the region north of the Andes became the initial laboratory for this strategy.
Under the pretext of combating narcoterrorism, the U.S. greatly expanded its military presence in the region, especially after the 1990s. This expansion, however, was not unilaterally imposed. It was made possible by a strategic partnership with local elites, especially the armed forces, who already held considerable political influence in the Andean countries. This arrangement created a dynamic in which the security interests of the U.S. superseded countries’ own national security agendas. From there, the idea of narcoterrorism spilled over into destabilization campaigns by the U.S. in the Middle East at the beginning of this century.
In both the Andean region and the Middle East, the U.S. employed a similar strategy: It accused a country or a group within that country of drug trafficking; this accusation then served as a pretext to claim that local insurgents were financing their operations through drug exports to the United States.
The accusation led to a series of operations by the U.S. Army and its Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). And finally, through alliances with local leaders, agreements were made to establish U.S. military bases in the region, carrying out all kinds of interventions.
It was against this backdrop that Brazil emerged as a new, perhaps the ultimate, laboratory for the narcoterrorism doctrine.
By the mid-2020s, the strategy had been internalized and weaponized by Brazil’s resurgent far right, which saw in the label a dual-purpose tool: Internationally, it was a bridge to secure alignment with, and potential intervention from, the U.S.; domestically, it served to reframe public security as a war of national defense, thereby legitimizing unprecedented state violence and the persecution of political adversaries.
This shift shaped strategy as well as rhetoric, marked by concrete legislative proposals, direct lobbying of U.S. officials to designate Brazilian criminal factions as terrorist organizations, and the overt emulation of punitive models like those of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Brazil thus ceased to be a peripheral observer of this geopolitical playbook and became its active protagonist, setting the stage for the doctrine’s most devastating domestic application.
Ultimately, equating drug traffickers with terrorists became a way to enable U.S. intervention in a country, but also to help pave the way for government projects that aimed to persecute opponents and promote mass incarceration, fatal police violence, and the extermination of a section of the poor population.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. were a watershed moment that redrew the boundaries between public security and national security — not only in the U.S. but globally.