US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth. The Trump Administration's military campaign has killed at least 57 people in the waters off Central and South America. The strikes have been widely criticised as illegal. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times
Since September, United States President Donald Trump has authorised a series of military strikes on boats he has said were being used to smuggle drugs from South America, summarily killing at least 57 people.
The latest strikes, on four boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, killed 14 people, according to the Trump Administration.
The military campaign has raised regional tensions and represents a major shift in US policy, which long treated maritime drug smuggling as a law enforcement matter.
A broad range of experts in laws governing the use of armed force have said the strikes are illegal, and the Administration has offered tenuous legal rationales while releasing little evidence to support its smuggling allegations.
Here’s a look at the strikes (all local time):
September 2: The US military carried out its first strike on a Venezuelan boat in international waters, killing 11 people who Trump said were “terrorists” transporting narcotics to the US. He claimed that the individuals were members of Tren de Aragua, a gang the Trump Administration has designated a terrorist organisation.
According to US officials familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the boat appeared to have turned around before the attack, after people on board apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking them.
Legal specialists said the revelation had further undercut the Trump Administration’s claims that the strike was legally justified as self-defence.
On September15, President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela called the strike a “heinous crime”, saying that it was a “military attack on civilians” and that, if the US believed the boat’s passengers were drug-traffickers, they should have been captured, not killed.
Maduro, an authoritarian leader who was indicted on drug-trafficking charges in the US during Trump’s first term, said the US was trying to goad Venezuela into war.
September 15: Not long after Maduro spoke, Trump announced that the US had carried out its second strike. Trump said the strike had targeted a vessel that had left Venezuela and was in international waters, and that it had killed three people he described as “extraordinarily violent drug-trafficking cartels and narco-terrorists”.
Weeks later, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia accused the US of murder, saying that one of the men killed in the strike was an innocent Colombian fisherman named Alejandro Carranza.
September 19: A third strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea killed three men, Trump said. He accused them of trafficking narcotics but did not provide further details.
Days later, the Dominican Republic said it had recovered cocaine from a boat that was recently destroyed in a US airstrike but did not specify when the strike had occurred.
Dominican officials said it was the country’s first joint operation in the Caribbean Sea with the US against “narco-terrorism.”
October 3: US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that a US military strike had killed four men on a boat in international waters near Venezuela.
He said that the men had been “affiliated” with one of the cartels and gangs that the Trump Administration has designated as foreign terrorist organisations but did not offer further details.
Petro later said that the boat had been carrying citizens of his country, adding that “a new war zone has opened up”.
The October 3 strike was the first carried out after the Trump Administration had notified Congress that the US was engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with various Latin American cartels and that suspected smugglers would be considered “unlawful combatants”.
October 14: Trump announced a fifth strike that killed six men who he said had been transporting narcotics. One of those killed was Chad Joseph, a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago, according to his family.
Family members said Joseph was a fisherman who had been living in Venezuela in recent months, not a trafficker. They said one of Joseph’s neighbours had also been on the boat.
The day after Trump announced the strike, which he said had occurred off the coast of Venezuela, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration had secretly authorised covert CIA action in that country.
Hours later, Trump, whose top aides have been pushing to oust Maduro from power, said the US was considering strikes on Venezuelan soil.
“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he said.
October 16: The US military struck a semisubmersible vessel suspected of being used to smuggle drugs, killing two people.
Two survivors were detained aboard a Navy ship, the first time the US found itself holding prisoners in what the Trump Administration has treated as a military campaign.
Rather than bring them to the US for prosecution or hold them in longer-term military detention, the Administration soon repatriated the survivors to their respective countries, Colombia and Ecuador, averting legal and logistical dilemmas.
Trump said the survivors were being returned to their home countries to face “detention and prosecution”.
Officials in Colombia said their citizen would be “processed by the justice system for drug-trafficking” after recovering from his injuries. Ecuadorian officials decided not to charge the other survivor and released him.
The same day as the strike, the military commander who was overseeing the operation, Admiral Alvin Holsey, suddenly stepped down, less than a year into his tenure as head of US Southern Command.
The reason was unclear, but one current and one former US official, who both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said Holsey had raised concerns about the strikes.
October 17: The Trump Administration killed three people in a seventh strike on a boat, according to Hegseth.
He said the boat had been affiliated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group known as the ELN, which the US designated as a terrorist organisation in 1997. He did not provide evidence for his assertion.
October 21: The Trump Administration expanded its campaign for the first time beyond the Caribbean Sea, with a strike that killed two people in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Hegseth said the boat was “known by our intelligence” to have been involved in drug-smuggling and had been carrying narcotics, although he did not provide any details. A US official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the strike had taken place off the coast of Colombia.
October 22: Hours after announcing the October 21 strike, Hegseth said the military had struck another vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing three men.
Again, Hegseth said the boat had been “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling” but did not provide further evidence. “These strikes will continue, day after day”, he posted on social media.
October 24: Hegseth announced that overnight in the Caribbean Sea, the US military killed six people on a boat that he claimed was operated by Tren de Aragua and carrying narcotics. He cited US intelligence but offered no other evidence.
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat al-Qaeda,” he wrote on social media.
Hegseth also ordered the deployment of the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford as well as its accompanying warships and attack planes to waters off Latin America, the Pentagon announced.
October 27: The US military killed 14 people in three strikes on four boats in the eastern Pacific, Hegseth said, bringing the total number of known strikes to 13.
It was the deadliest day since the campaign started. Hegseth said that Mexican authorities had “assumed responsibility for co-ordinating the rescue” of one survivor but did not release further details.
He said the vessels had been moving along “known narco-trafficking routes and carrying narcotics,” but did not release any evidence.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Anushka Patil
Photograph by: Doug Mills
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