AP Illustration / Peter Hamlin
The United States military killed three more people on Friday in their 39th boat attack in six months, according to a tracker maintained by the New York Times. All told, the strikes by US forces have killed at least 133 people in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.
President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained, often without evidence, that they are targeting the boats as an anti-drug smuggling measure. Though, even if people on these boats were confirmed to be transporting drugs, a broad array of legal specialists have held that the “strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings” because the military “cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts,” the Times reported on Saturday.
An 11-second video of the Friday strike, posted by US Southern Command, shows what appears to be a missile hitting a boat in open waters, with a caption claiming without further evidence that the three people killed were “narco-terrorists.”
The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy organization, wrote on Friday that those killed by the US military at sea “are denied any due process whatsoever,” and that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “are asserting and exercising an apparently unlimited license to kill people that the president deems to be terrorists.”
The boat attacks have been accompanied by social media posts that include videos of the strikes, including by Hegseth and Southern Command. Multiple of the previous deaths came from a secondary attack on people who were alive after initial strikes, as confirmed by the White House.
“I can’t imagine anyone, no matter what the circumstance, believing it is appropriate to kill people who are clinging to a boat in the water,” Michael Schmitt, a former Air Force lawyer and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College, told the Associated Press in December. “That is clearly unlawful.”
Friday’s strike follows increased US military operations in the region, including the administration’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in early January. According to Venezuela’s Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López, US forces killed 83 people during the Maduro operation, including multiple civilians. Trump subsequently claimed that his administration will run the country and control their oil.
“Just as the U.S. killings of those aboard targeted vessels are entirely premeditated and intentional,” the Washington Office on Latin America wrote on Friday, “the ongoing attacks at sea appear designed to normalize killings at President Trump’s discretion, both within the U.S. military chain of command and in the eyes of the American people.”
