The screams from the women and children pierce the air as the battering ram smashes through the front door of their home.

There’s shouting and all-round chaos as police officers – machine guns and pistols held out in front of them – pile inside.

Doors are kicked in, curtains ripped down, drawers are opened in bedrooms, and boxes and tables are overturned.

“There’s children here!” the women shout, as they all drop to the floor.

We are on a drugs raid in Guayaquil in Ecuador, and the police say they have good intelligence that this is the home of a drug dealer.

I have done dozens of embeds during my career covering Latin America’s drugs gangs, and it’s always deeply upsetting to see children caught up in it.

These are homes, and these are women and children, but their rights are trumped by their circumstances – they are poor, live in a rough area, and the likelihood is that one of their family members is part of a gang.

The police coming through their door is a fact of life for them.

What has changed here, though, is that the raids have increased, and will continue to.

Why? Because US President Donald Trump has launched a war against drug cartels – and is demanding that countries on his list of troublesome nations tow the line and join him, or face punishing sanctions or worse.

Ecuador doesn’t produce drugs, but it is used as a transit country by drug cartels in this region. Its ports are the gateway to sea routes north to the United States and west to Asia and the South Pacific.

It is for this reason that Ecuador is on Trump’s list. But Ecuador wants help combatting these criminal networks and has been co-operating with the US.

Trump has been sending resources and military muscle to Ecuador, and the US is planning to open a military base there.

In exchange, Ecuador’s security forces are raising their game to assure America that they are on the same page.

We witnessed this effort in real time, guided through multiple raids by a police officer with the call sign “Lynx”. He’s a former special forces officer now affiliated with the drugs squad, and he is something of a phenomenon.

“The United States [is] giving us money, guns, technology, and we are so happy about that,” he told me.

“It’s very important for the war.”

You could say that Lynx is in many ways the poster boy of the Ecuadorian police – he’s extremely confident, highly rated by his superiors and adored by his team.

Among his repertoire of skills, he is an expert drone pilot.

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I joined him in the car park of the police headquarters as he put up his drone and started spotting drug deals on the streets a kilometre or so away. We watched the screen on the controller as two transactions took place.

The multibillion-dollar drugs business is a vast global network, and by taking out the “small guys” as Lynx calls them, they hope to disrupt the chain higher up.

“We always grab the small guys, and they talk … give me that guy, he’s a bigger guy, and then we go, go, go,” is how Lynx describes taking out the chain.

They hope that any intelligence they can gather from the lower links will ultimately be valuable information they can pass on to the US to catch more important figures.

Lynx briefs his boss, and then we jump in our vehicles as the police try to track down the dealers. They find them – and the drugs they were selling – the next day.

The same day, we head to a notoriously dangerous hilltop neighbourhood with Lynx and the rest of the officers. They are looking for more drugs and dealers who will talk.

They arrest one man they say is a lookout – and as they search through piles of rubbish for drugs, they find bags of cocaine.

Lynx thinks we are being watched, so he sends his drone up again, this time to see what’s happening in the streets above us.

“Many people [are] up on the hill, like radars looking for us, and what we are doing, and they have an advantage because they’re higher up,” he says.

“We will take the evidence, and that guy is not the owner, he is just a lookout,” he says, pointing to the man in handcuffs on the floor.

“And then I’m going to take you next to where a big drug dealer is, a strong dealer.”

I ask Lynx if he thinks people who do drugs in London, New York, or Los Angeles – or anywhere really – think about him and his officers on the streets every single day.

“I think no, because they’re in the countries more powerful, smarter, if they really [knew] I think they would think no, it’s bad, because people are killing in poor countries for the drugs, for the drugs [they] are consuming,” he replied.

“Maybe they’ll think, oh I don’t have to do that.”

The haul of drugs, weapons, ammunition and money from the raids we joined is pretty impressive.

Bags of marijuana, kilo packets of cocaine cut for sale, alongside a kilo of pure cocaine paste. There’s also money, weapons and ammunition.

It’s something of a Latin American tradition to display the results of these raids.

Behind the table, also on display, are the alleged gang members.

Who they know is worth more than all the drugs in front of them, which is what the Americans want.

The US government is hours away from shutting down for the first time in almost seven years after last-ditch Senate votes on funding plans fell short.

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers deemed not essential for protecting people or property – such as law enforcement personnel – could be furloughed or laid off when the shutdown begins at midnight (5am UK time).

Critical services, including social security payments and the postal service, will keep operating but may suffer from worker shortages, while national parks and museums could be among the sectors that close completely.

Explained: What is a shutdown and who does it impact?

It comes after rival Democrat and Republicans refused to budge in their stand-off over healthcare spending.

A Democrat-led proposal to keep the government funded went down by 53 votes to 47 in the Senate, before the Republicans’ one notched up 55 in favour – five short of the threshold needed to avert a shutdown.

Unlike legislation, a simple majority isn’t enough to pass a government funding bill.

Following the votes in Washington DC on Tuesday night, the White House’s budget office confirmed the shutdown would happen and said affected agencies “should now execute their plans”.

It blamed the Democrats, describing their position as “untenable”. The opposition party wants to reverse cuts to the government’s health insurance programme, Medicaid, which were passed earlier this summer.

Senate majority leader John Thune, a Republican, accused the Democrats of taking federal workers “hostage”.

His Democrat counterpart, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, said the Republicans’ funding package “does absolutely nothing to solve the biggest health care crisis in America”.

Trump threatens layoffs

President Donald Trump was defiant ahead of the votes, and warned he could make “irreversible” cuts “that are bad” for the Democrats if the shutdown went ahead.

He threatened to cut “vast numbers of people out” and “programmes that they (the Democrats) like”.

“We’ll be laying off a lot of people,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

Tens of thousands of government employees have already been laid off this year, driven by the “DOGE” initiative that was spearheaded by Elon Musk upon Mr Trump’s return to the White House.

The last shutdown was in Mr Trump’s first term, from December 2018 to January 2019, when he demanded money for his US-Mexico border wall. At 35 days, it was the longest on record.

Mr Thune has expressed hope the latest shutdown will come to a much quicker conclusion, telling reporters: “We can reopen tomorrow – all it takes is a handful of Democrats to join Republicans to pass the clean, nonpartisan funding bill that’s in front of us.”

Before this week, the government had shut down 15 times since 1981. Most only last a few days.

The Senate will hold further votes on the Republican and Democrat stopgap funding bills on Wednesday. The former would fund the government through to 21 November.

What happens now?

Immigration enforcement, air-traffic control, military operations, social security and law enforcement are among the services that will not be brought to a halt.

However, should employees miss out on payslips as a result of a prolonged shutdown, they could be impacted by staffing shortages. For example, delays at airports.

Cultural institutions deemed non-essential, like national parks and museums, will be more directly impacted from the very beginning, with large cuts to the workforce.

The popular Smithsonian, for example, has said it only has enough funding to stay open for a week.

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The US defence secretary has said he is ending “woke” culture and political correctness, telling top brass: “We are done with that s***.”

Pete Hegseth said diversity and inclusion policies would be rowed back, with changes including “gender-neutral” or “male-level” fitness standards for everyone.

He also hit out at “fat troops” and said height and weight requirements would be brought in – as well as twice-yearly fitness tests.

President Donald Trump was at the event and told reporters beforehand he was prepared to fire any generals or admirals he disliked “on the spot”.

Speaking in Quantico, Virginia, he said the new approach was “bringing back a focus on fitness, ability, character and strength [because] the purposes of American military is not to protect anyone’s feelings”.

Mr Hegseth drove home that message as he said the days of “the woke department” were over.

“The era of politically correct, overly sensitive don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now at every level,” he said.

“No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or gender delusions,” added the newly rebranded secretary of war.

Mr Hegseth said the changes were not intended to stop women serving, but “physical standards must be high and gender neutral” for combat roles.

“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result… It will also mean that we mean that weak men won’t qualify because we’re not playing games. This is combat. This is life or death.”

Hundreds of US military officials from around the world had been summoned abruptly to the Marine Corps base without knowing why until Tuesday morning.

The gathering included admirals and generals called in from conflict zones in the Middle East.

Mr Hegseth told them grooming standards would also be raised, with beards, long hair and “individual expression” now prohibited – “the era of unprofessional appearance is over. No more beardos”, he said.

“We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans, but unfortunately, we have had leaders who either refuse to call BS and enforce standards or leaders who felt like they were not allowed to enforce standards,” the defence secretary added.

A review of how bullying and hazing are defined will also take place to “empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing”.

Toxic leadership has been suspected and confirmed in many military suicides in recent years, including the high-profile case of sailor Brandon Caserta who killed himself in 2018.

The changes unveiled on Tuesday follow the recent rebranding of the US Department of Defense as the Department of War.

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President Trump said last month the name sent a “message of strength” – and his speech on Tuesday also lauded America’s nuclear weapons capability.

However, he said people shouldn’t “throw around” the word.

“I call it the N-word. There are two N-words, and you can’t use either of them,” he told commanders.

“You don’t have to be that good with nuclear,” the president added. “You could have one-twentieth what you have now and still do the damage that would be, you know, that’d be so horrendous.”

He cited his repositioning of nuclear submarines in August in response to comments by Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev.

“We were a little bit threatened by Russia recently, and I sent a submarine, nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever made,” Mr Trump said on Tuesday.

“Number one, you can’t detect it. There’s no way. We’re 25 years ahead of Russia and China in submarines.”

“Frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else,” the president said of America’s nuclear arsenal.

“We have better, we have newer, but it’s something we don’t ever want to even have to think about.”