France has intensified its fight against drug trafficking in the Caribbean, deploying additional security resources to its overseas territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced the assignment of 13 investigators to the anti-narcotics office, 12 mobile gendarmerie squadrons, two nautical brigades, a new ballistics laboratory, coastal radars and long-range drones to monitor roughly 700 kilometres of shoreline. Overseas Minister Manuel Valls said the measures send a “clear message” that the state will not cede ground to traffickers. Paris’s move follows a broader military buildup led by the United States, which has ordered an Amphibious Readiness Group headed by the USS Iwo Jima—carrying about 4,500 sailors and marines—plus three guided-missile destroyers and a nuclear attack submarine to waters south of the Caribbean, close to Venezuela. Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and the Dominican Republic have publicly endorsed the U.S. deployment, which Washington says is aimed at disrupting cocaine routes from Colombia and Venezuela to North America and Europe. U.S. law-enforcement officials underscored the campaign’s legal dimension after Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, co-founder of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to drug-trafficking, money-laundering and weapons charges that carry mandatory life sentences. Attorney General Pamela Bondi and Drug Enforcement Administration chief Terry Cole said the conviction “decapitates” the cartel’s leadership and vowed to continue “hunting” senior traffickers, citing ongoing probes into suspected air bridges moving narcotics from Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. Regional authorities say the Caribbean has become a critical trans-shipment hub for cartels such as Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles and the remnants of the Sinaloa organisation. By combining maritime interdiction, expanded policing and high-profile prosecutions, France and the United States aim to cut off trafficking routes and curb the surge in violence affecting Caribbean states and territories.