BUENOS AIRES (dpa-AFX) - Defense and security leaders from 19 nations across the Western Hemisphere worked to advance a campaign plan to dismantle dangerous transnational cartels and narco-terrorist networks during an Americas Counter Cartel Coalition forum in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, earlier this week.
The forum convened senior defense ministers, military chiefs and public security leaders, including Gen. Francis L. Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, and Eric Geressy, the senior advisor to the secretary of war for strategy.
Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader addressed the conference.
During the forum, leaders spearheaded the development of an operational campaign plan and a governance charter. The goal is to establish how the coalition will coordinate multilateral cooperation, share information and intelligence, and conduct combined operations against narco-terrorist networks that threaten people, sovereignty and economic stability across the Americas and the Caribbean.
During his opening remarks, Geressy highlighted the successes of Operation Southern Spear, stating that operations have degraded narco-terrorist maritime corridors by 64 percent in the western Caribbean, 58 percent in the eastern Caribbean and 40 percent across the Galapagos axis.
'Make no mistake about the nature of our enemy. Transnational cartels are violent extremist organizations. They operate as the al-Qaida and ISIS of the Western Hemisphere,' he said.
Geressy warned the leaders that narco-terrorists are adapting to recent operational successes and are now using lawfare to 'attempt to paralyze our decisions.'
He also alerted the gathering that having lost parity on the physical battlefield, these cartels have opened an asymmetric line of effort - lawfare. 'It is the calculated weaponization of legal systems to achieve kinetic and operational effects,' he said.
The Americas Counter Cartel Coalition was launched at Southcom headquarters in Miami in March, where Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and defense and public security leaders signed an agreement pledging to work closely together to combat cartel and narco-terrorist networks.
Moving forward, the coalition nations aim to aggressively target what the leaders call 'criminal enablers' - the shadow networks that enable narco-terrorists to traffic drugs and spread violence throughout the Western Hemisphere through illicit financing, sophisticated logistics, arms procurement and public corruption.
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