President Donald Trump‘s fight with the Latin American drug cartels is one of this administration’s success stories. The cartels have been forced into expensive evasion efforts. Corrupt politicians in Mexico are under unprecedented pressure. Venezuelan dictator and drugs chieftain Nicolas Maduro now lives in an American prison cell. And the United States has just restored a key counter-drugs alliance with Venezuela’s neighbor, Colombia.Brigitte Garcia’s death testifies to why this fight matters.Garcia was a 27-year-old nurse. She became mayor of a town on Ecuador’s coast by pledging simple improvements to people’s lives: clean water supplies and increased tourism. But in March 2024, Garcia and one of her staffers were shot in the back of their heads. The murders were part of a vicious cartel campaign to terrorize and enforce the corrupt loyalty of politicians across Ecuador. In August 2023, presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was similarly assassinated on cartel orders. As with Pablo Escobar’s 1989 murder of Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, and Mexico’s blight of journalist killings, history underlines a hard truth. Namely, that Latin American cartels seek to destroy democracy. The cartels thus pose a clear threat to stability and freedom in the Western Hemisphere.