Four killed in latest US attack on alleged drug-smuggling boat in Caribbean

The United States has conducted its 47th attack on an alleged drug-trafficking vessel, this time killing four people.

Wednesday’s announcement brings the total number of people killed in the boat-bombing campaign, dubbed Operation Southern Spear, to approximately 163.

US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, described the attack as “applying total systemic friction on the cartels”.

“On March 25, at the direction of #SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” the command unit wrote on social media.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

No further details were provided to identify which “terrorist organisation” was involved, or who was on board the vessel.

As has been its custom, SOUTHCOM attached a brief, 15-second aerial video of the attack alongside its statement, showing a narrow boat bursting into flames.

The administration of President Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that lethal tactics are necessary to stop drug trafficking into the US.

Legal experts and human rights officials, however, have criticised the attacks on multiple fronts, describing them as a campaign of extrajudicial killing.

The boat-bombing campaign began in the Caribbean Sea on September 2 and expanded to the eastern Pacific Ocean in October.

In the seven months since the campaign began, only three survivors have been recovered from the waters following the bombings. Others have been lost at sea and are presumed among the dead.

The Trump administration also generated a wave of criticism after it was revealed that two survivors in the initial September 2 attack were killed in a subsequent “double-tap” strike as they clung to the wreckage of their boat, a seeming violation of both international and domestic law.

Critics have pointed out that even the Defense Department’s own manual says it is “inhumane” to attack shipwreck victims who have been disabled from fighting. The Trump administration has so far declined to publish video of the “double-tap” strike to the public.

A report in The New York Times also suggested that the Trump administration may have committed an act of perfidy, another war crime, by attempting to disguise a military plane as a civilian aircraft during the initial strike.

The campaign overall has been decried as an act of illegal aggression. Legal experts have emphasised that drug trafficking is considered a crime, not an act of war, thereby rendering lethal military action illegal.

The Trump administration has yet to publicly identify any of the victims killed in its boat-bombing campaign, nor has it released the evidence against those killed.

Some families in Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago have stepped forward to claim the victims as their relatives. The men killed, they say, were not “narco-terrorists”, as the Trump administration has claimed, but fishermen and informal workers transiting between Caribbean islands and South America.

On March 12, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held an inaugural hearing to address the human rights implications of Trump’s campaign.

“Regrettably, some American states have recently responded with ultra-violence that flagrantly violates human rights in a new phony war on so-called narcoterrorism,” United Nations special rapporteur Ben Saul told the commission.

“These unprovoked serial extrajudicial killings have no justification under international law and gravely violate the right to life. They are not actions in national self-defense, personal self-defense, the defense of others. They’re not authorised under international humanitarian law because no armed conflict exists.”

Already, the family of fisherman Alejandro Carranza has filed a complaint to the commission, alleging that his basic rights were violated by the boat-bombing campaign.

And in the US, relatives representing missing Trinidadian workers Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo have filed a wrongful death lawsuit in a Massachusetts federal court.

But the boat strikes are part of an increasingly militaristic push under the Trump administration to confront drug cartels and other organised crime networks in Latin America.

Since taking office for a second term, Trump has pushed to label cartels and other criminal groups as “terrorist organisations”.

In a memo to Congress last year, the president reportedly asserted that drug traffickers are equivalent to “unlawful combatants” in a “non-international armed conflict”.

But the Trump administration has yet to release its official justification for the attacks, as written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.