Welcome to the News Hour. The Trump administration launched a major military and diplomatic escalation in its new war on drugs today,

sending an aircraft carrier to Latin America and sanctioning Colombia's president.

Today's announcements come as the U.S. has increasingly targeted political leaders it opposes across the region,

and as the military has launched an unprecedented number

of deadly strikes in the Caribbean, here's Nick Schiffran with more. Today in the Caribbean,

another boat incinerated by a U.S. missile, the 10th U.S. strike since early September

on what the administration calls drug boats, including three strikes this week alone.

Hours later, a major military expansion.

The Pentagon announced the deployment of the Gerald Ford Carrier Strike Group with more

than 6,000 service members to, quote, disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and

dismantle transnational criminal organizations.

The cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere.

Yesterday, President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegeseth compared their efforts

against drug cartels to the global war on terror against groups including al-Qaeda and ISIS.

If you reframe how you understand the world in our own hemisphere, that's exactly what these

foreign terrorist organizations are.

And so we will track them, we will map them, we will network them, and we will hunt them

and kill them.

Just yesterday, the U.S. flew B-1 bombers off the coast of Venezuela.

U.S. officials say they're trying to pressure Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and senior military

leaders who the U.S. accused of running a narco state by reducing the revenue they received

from drugs.

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