“Under [President Donald] Trump’s illegal orders, the US military conducted its third boat strike in five days against supposed drug smugglers, killing at least two. Each of these is a murder. Drug suspects should be arrested and prosecuted, not summarily executed,” former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote on social media Saturday in response to the news.
Friday’s strike marks the 57th by the Trump administration and raises the death toll from the boat-strike campaign, which experts say is illegal even if every boat targeted is ferrying drugs, to 192.
“What do you call a US citizen who smuggles drugs, SOUTHCOM? A ‘narco-terrorist’?” social media user Andrew Marinelli said in response to the Southern Command announcement. “If a US citizen [allegedly] drove drugs into Canada and they blew him away with a drone strike, would you accept it?”
The administration has also not provided evidence for its claims that the boats belong to drug traffickers, and relatives of the victims say at least some of those killed were simply on the water to fish.
Friday’s strike was notable in that it left behind a survivor and that US Southern Command said it had activated the US Coast Guard to conduct a search and rescue operation.
The announcement may reflect a response to backlash after news broke last year that, in the administration’s first such strike, commanders had ordered a vessel bombed twice when it became clear there were survivors, in keeping with Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s directive to “kill everybody.”
Despite scrutiny, the campaign has continued and even escalated in the past few weeks. There have been three such bombings since the beginning of May, according to The Intercept: One on May 4 in the Caribbean that killed two, one on May 5 in the Pacific that killed three, and the Pacific strike on May 8 that killed two. The reported survivor remains missing.
While the Trump administration claims the strikes have dramatically reduced the flow of illegal drugs into the US, evidence reveals this is not the case, according to an Intercept analysis published May 4.
For example, Trump claimed that drugs entering the US by sea had decreased by 97%, but the administration’s own data contradicts this claim, retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner told The Intercept.
Adam Isacson, the director for defense oversight at human rights group Washington Office on Latin America, said, “Really absurdly, there’s been no impact on flows of drugs toward the United States,” noting that Customs and Border Protection seized 6,000 pounds more cocaine at all US borders in the seven months following the strikes than in the seven months before.
As Sanho Tree, who directs the Institute for Policy Studies’ Drug Policy Project, put it, “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth.”
