US Military Strikes Kill 11 on Alleged Drug Boats in Caribbean and Pacific

US forces sank three alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific in attacks that left 11 people dead, according to US Southern Command, which oversees US military operations in Latin America. Officials said that of the 11 people killed, four died on the first vessel in the Eastern Pacific, four on a second vessel also in the Eastern Pacific and three on a third vessel in the Caribbean.

The strikes were carried out late Monday against alleged "narco-terrorists," at the direction of the commander of US Southern Command, Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan. "Intelligence confirmed the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and were engaged in narco-trafficking operations," Southern Command said in a statement, which was accompanied by a video showing the boats exploding after being hit by a missile. No US military personnel were injured in the operation.

The latest attacks bring the number of people who've been killed in boat strikes by the US military to at least 159 since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls "narcoterrorists" in early September. Since September 2, when the first attack on a vessel allegedly involved in drug trafficking was announced, Washington has acknowledged more than 40 strikes.

On Friday, US forces carried out another "lethal kinetic strike" on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific which left one survivor and two people dead. After the strike, the military said that it "immediately notified US Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system" for three people who survived the strike. The coast guard said in a statement that one of its ships recovered two dead bodies and one survivor and turned them over to the Costa Rican coast guard.

The new attacks came after the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford departed the Caribbean; it had been sent there in October as part of Operation Southern Spear, an anti-narcotics mission the Trump administration used to pressure Venezuela in the months leading up to the operation that captured president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in Caracas on January 3. The frequency of the strikes has notably ebbed since US forces in early January captured the Venezuelan president, who has been accused by the Trump administration of working with drug trafficking groups.

As with most of the military's statements on the strikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, US Southern Command said it targeted alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes. The military did not provide evidence that the vessels were ferrying drugs. The US has provided no evidence to back up its allegations that the boats it has struck have been carrying drugs.

The Trump administration has said the killings are lawful. In a statement to Congress, the White House said President Trump had "determined" that the US was in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that crews of drug-running boats were "combatants". Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the overall operation is aimed at removing "narco-terrorists from our hemisphere" and securing the US from "the drugs that are killing our people". Donald Trump has said the US is in "armed conflict" with cartels in Latin America as the military has been directed to pursue its campaign against the alleged drug traffickers. Trump has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the US, but his administration has offered little evidence to support its killing of what it claims are "narcoterrorists".

The strikes on suspected drug traffickers have been described as illegal by experts in international law. Some legal experts have said that the strikes could be illegal and violate international law by targeting civilians, with no due process. Numerous experts and several lawmakers — most of them from the Democratic opposition — argue that these are extrajudicial executions that violate international law and US law.

Critics have questioned the overall legality of the boat strikes as well as their effectiveness, in part because the fentanyl behind many fatal overdoses is typically trafficked to the US over land from Mexico, where it is produced with chemicals imported from China and India.

The Pentagon appears to have changed strategy since the first attack in September when it ordered a follow-on strike to kill survivors. Killing survivors has been considered a textbook example of a war crime since 1945, when the victorious allies in the second world war prosecuted a Nazi U-boat crew for killing shipwreck survivors.

Last week, a US Marine who fell overboard from an attack ship in the Caribbean became the first known American casualty in the Trump administration's operation targeting drug-trafficking boats.

In January, two families in Trinidad and Tobago filed the first lawsuit in US courts against the government in Washington over the deaths of two of their relatives in one of the US attacks on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean on October 14. The families of two Trinidadian men killed in a 14 October strike filed a lawsuit alleging the strike amounted to "lawless killings in cold blood; killings for sport and killings for theatre".