U.S. strike on a Caribbean boat kills four and takes the year’s toll to 227
Southern Command said Tuesday’s attack hit a go-fast vessel on a known trafficking route. It released no names, no cargo evidence and a seven-second video. Human Rights Watch and UN experts call the campaign extrajudicial killing. A Pacific strike two days earlier killed two.
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The U.S. military said it killed four people on Tuesday in a strike on a boat in the Caribbean that Southern Command called a go-fast vessel on an established narco-trafficking route. The command posted a seven-second video of a moving hull and a flash. It named no one on board and published no evidence of a cargo. The statement said “confirmed intelligence” showed the boat was in the traffic.
Associated Press tallies at least 227 dead in 68 strikes since the administration began targeting people it calls narcoterrorists about a year ago, mostly in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. A strike in the Pacific two days earlier killed two and ended a pause of more than two months. Gen. Francis Donovan, who leads Southern Command, said Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere would “hunt, disrupt, and defeat these narco-terrorist networks.”
The legal file the video does not close
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and independent UN experts have called the boat campaign unlawful extrajudicial killing. The Pentagon does not bring the dead to a court. It also does not, in most of these notices, show the drugs it says were on the water.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said this month in Panama that Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras had agreed to joint operations against criminal groups on land. That would move the same method off the sea. Tuesday’s four deaths are the latest number in a campaign whose evidence stays inside the command.
