PANAMA CITY—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood before civilian defense leaders and generals from 18 countries in Panama on Wednesday and declared a new motto for the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition: "We do bad things to bad people." The problem was that the motto was not new.
Photographs from Feb. 2008 show Prince Harry, then serving in the British Army during his second deployment to Afghanistan, wearing a hat with an American flag on the front and that exact phrase on the back. Versions of the saying have circulated for years on unofficial military-themed shirts, patches, stickers and hats, many of them still available for purchase.
Hegseth made the announcement after touring the U.S.- and Panamanian-run Jungle Operations Training Course near the Panama Canal. Speaking directly to the assembled defense officials, the 46-year-old Army veteran—who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan—framed the phrase as an expression of intent. "That's the mentality I want to have inside this room," he said.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment about whether Hegseth knew the motto had been in use for nearly two decades before Wednesday's announcement.
The ACCC held its first meeting in March. It operates under the broader Shield of the Americas alliance, which the Trump administration assembled earlier this year to coordinate military and law enforcement pressure on drug trafficking networks across the Western Hemisphere. The coalition's stated mission, as Hegseth described it, is "to degrade, dismantle, and destroy narco-terrorist networks."
Wednesday's meeting produced one concrete expansion: Honduras and Colombia agreed to participate in joint military operations with the United States against suspected drug trafficking organizations, joining Ecuador and Guatemala, which had already signed on. The additions extend the coalition's operational reach further into South America and Central America, regions that serve as both production zones and transit corridors for narcotics bound for the United States.
Notably absent from the alliance are Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and Canada. Mexico is the primary land corridor for fentanyl and other drugs entering the United States. Brazil is South America's largest country. Venezuela, under President Nicolás Maduro, has been designated by U.S. authorities as a state that facilitates drug trafficking. Canada shares the longest land border with the United States. The coalition, as currently constituted, is composed primarily of right-wing governments.
Hegseth put the coalition's purpose in blunt terms. "For too long, bad people did bad things to good people inside the United States of America and across Central and South America," he said. "We are going to empower great Americans and great partners to do really good stuff and be very capable at bringing violence against drug cartels and designated terrorist organizations, because we're dead serious about securing the homeland."
The Trump administration has used the designation "narco-terrorist" to describe organizations like the Sinaloa Cartel and MS-13, a classification that widens the legal tools available to the executive branch, including the possibility of military action under statutes typically reserved for foreign terrorist organizations. That legal architecture is what gives the ACCC's joint operations language its teeth: member nations are not merely sharing intelligence but agreeing to conduct coordinated military actions against trafficking networks.
The coalition's membership geography tells a political story. Governments in Ecuador and Guatemala have pursued aggressive domestic crackdowns on organized crime. Honduras under President Xiomara Castro has a complicated relationship with U.S. security cooperation, making her government's inclusion notable. Colombia, which produces the majority of cocaine that reaches American streets, joining the joint operations framework is the most operationally significant expansion announced Wednesday.
Hegseth's role as the public face of the ACCC meeting fits a broader pattern in the Trump administration's second term: using the Defense Department as the primary instrument of border and drug policy, an approach that has expanded Pentagon involvement in areas traditionally handled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs and Border Protection, and the State Department.
The motto controversy is unlikely to affect the alliance's operations, but it illustrates a recurring dynamic in how the administration presents its security initiatives—large framing, sometimes imprecise on the details. Whether the phrase came from a hat sold online or from a classified special operations tradition makes no difference to its operational utility. What matters, administration officials would argue, is that 19 countries showed up to the meeting in Panama.
