The U.S. Is Still Killing People In Illegal Boat Strikes

Last week, the U.S. military killed eight people and stranded six others in three illegal boat strikes, bringing the total number of people killed by “Operation Southern Spear” to at least 215. The ongoing campaign—allegedly targeting drug smuggling—has long ceased to be major news, fading, like so much else, into the constant background hum of inconceivable violence wrought by the current administration. Tracking the carnage is made easy by the military division that conducts the strikes, which posts its snuff footage on Twitter, alongside kill counts. 

Being bombed at sea is a gruesome way to die. Those not immediately blown apart or burned alive likely die slowly, left to drown while clinging to flaming wreckage. No one responsible for the strikes has publicly presented any evidence of drug smuggling. The first attack potentially killed a boat full of human trafficking victims, and two senators recently leaked that a boat doesn’t actually have to carry drugs or weapons at all to be targeted. It’s enough just to sail along “known narco-trafficking routes.”   

It’s illegal under U.S. and international law to deliberately kill civilians who pose no imminent threat of violence, even if they are smuggling drugs or otherwise breaking the law. This is called “murder” most of the time, and a “war crime” if it occurs during armed conflict. The White House’s argument of choice is that the dead are not civilians at all, but combatants in a fake war against “narcoterrorism.” In a statement, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said “these decisive strikes have been against designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores,” and that “the President will continue to use every element of American power” to fulfill his campaign promises to end the overdose crisis and stop the flow of criminals and drugs into the country.

It’s worth noting that the crisis of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. has been fueled by prescription opioids, heroin, and fentanyl. Neither heroin nor fentanyl are trafficked on boats from South America, which, if they carry drugs at all, are more likely to smuggle cocaine. None of this matters to the federal government, of course. Three months into the campaign, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists,” before following up the threat with an AI-generated image of Franklin the turtle. 

The Justice Department defines narcoterrorism as the collusion between “traffickers, terrorists, and insurgents” to “use funds obtained from drug trafficking to exert military, political, and economic pressure” against their targets. The war on narcoterrorism, then, is not against any one country, but an ever-shifting permutation of gangs and cartels. Shortly after taking office, Trump designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization. It wasn’t long before ICE was citing Chicago Bulls apparel and random tattoos as evidence of TdA affiliation, and indiscriminately rounding up citizens and noncitizens alike for being gang members. 

Narcoterrorism also served as the justification for capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who Trump said led “Cartel de los Soles,” a—you guessed it—drug smuggling terrorist organization. Once Maduro was safely jailed in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center and the U.S. seized control over 100 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, the Justice Department dropped its claim that Cartel de los Soles was any sort of organized group at all, let alone a high-powered cartel. Makes sense, given that Cartel de los Soles, which references the sun insignia on Venezuelan military uniforms, is just a slangy allusion to military drug corruption. 

Trump touts Maduro’s capture as one of his greatest achievements, going so far as to tell Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that he wanted the outcome of his lethal immigration crackdown on the state to mirror the military operation against Venezuela. Walz told MS NOW it was “strange” that Trump “saw an operation in Venezuela against a foreign nation in the same context he saw an operation against a U.S. state and a U.S. city.” Trump’s comments make clear that to him, there’s no difference between enforcing the law and waging war. Strikes at sea, ICE detention at home. There are no borders in this war, just context-dependent means of violence and domination. 

There’s a certain kind of temptation to condemn Trump for “focusing too much on foreign affairs”—if “focusing” is the word we want to use for the boat strikes, genocide, a war of choice against Iran, the strangulation of Cuba, and capturing and killings heads of state. A recent Politico survey found that 47 percent of Americans, including 41 percent of those who backed Trump in ’24, say the government is “too focused on international issues and not enough on domestic ones.” But narcoterrorism collapses these boundaries entirely, in an elegant encapsulation of the last 50 years of American history. It tells the story of a war on drugs at home that fueled the creation of the largest system of jails and prisons in the world, where people detained by a security force created in the wake of 9/11 are left to rot and die. 

A backward glance reveals that each president made his own signature contributions to this moment, from Reagan accusing the Sandinistas of trafficking drugs to Obama making significant and major innovations in redefining civilians as combatants. A former top lawyer in George W. Bush’s Justice Department told the New York Times that Trump’s shamelessness is what sets the boat strikes apart from the transgressions of his predecessors. “Nixon tried to keep his criminality secret, and the Bush administration tried to keep the torture secret, and that secrecy acknowledged the norm that these things were wrong,” said Jack Goldsmith, the former Bush DOJ lawyer. “Trump, as he often does when he is breaking law or norms, is acting publicly and without shame or unease. This is a very successful way to destroy the efficacy of law and norms.” It’s the doing away with the theater of a legal framework, scaffolded by “norms,” that makes Trump different. But the raw materials of narcoterrorism are old, paradigmatic, bipartisan wars—on drugs at home and terrorism abroad—that together combine into one telling campaign. In 1990, Trump said that the only way to win the war on drugs is to legalize them, then capture and regulate the market. Somewhere between then and now, he realized that some wars are not meant to be won. Rather, the war on narcoterrorism is one that cannot be lost.