The United Nations official charged with policing counterterrorism hammered Donald Trump's year of lethal boat strikes, warning they may be crimes against humanity.
In a September briefing note, UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul concluded the campaign amounts to "serial extrajudicial killings," counting at least 223 people killed in 68 strikes across the Caribbean and Pacific since September 2025.
He delivered a damning conclusion.
"There are reasonable grounds to believe that the reported 68 attacks that killed 223 people constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law," the note stated.
Saul also flagged several vessels sunk with no claim of responsibility, including the Ecuadoran fishing boat Fiorella, which lost eight of its 10 crew members to disappearance. That case reached the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearancesm and the prosecutor assigned to the boat cases is now dead. Alexandra Bravo was gunned down in Manta on June 14, 2026, when a hitman on a black motorcycle opened fire on her and her sister as they left a cafe. Both women were killed and her driver was wounded. Authorities have named no motive.
The note also documents a grim pattern at sea: survivors of initial strikes left to die despite known locations, and in at least one case, two shipwreck survivors targeted and killed. The administration has been accused of using "double tap" strikes, which legal analyst Ryan Goodman said killed people who were civilians.
The note also cited a mid-2026 DEA assessment finding the strikes failed to dent cocaine supply or price, echoing reporting that Trump's own DEA undercut his drug war claims. The campaign has largely ignored fentanyl, the top driver of US overdose deaths, which rarely crosses the sea from Venezuela.
The strikes have continued.
Over the weekend, US Southern Command announced a 69th strike, pushing the reported toll past 230. The dead, the note added, include fishermen, migrants and trafficking victims, among them the bus drivers and fishers named by investigators.
Goodman agreed with Saul's crimes-against-humanity finding, writing on X: "He is not wrong."