With the second strike on a boat in the Pacific, US President Donald Trump has expanded the military campaign in the international waters. At his orders, the US military has so far killed at least 37 persons after declaring them ’narcoterrorists’ — without identifying them or sharing any evidence.
With the second strike on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, US President Donald Trump has expanded the military campaign in the international waters. He also suggested he could launch military strikes in other countries.
At Trump’s orders, the US military on Wednesday struck a second boat in two days in the eastern Pacific Ocean and killed three persons onboard. So far, the US military has killed 37 persons in international waters in nine strikes after declaring them as “narcoterrorists”.
The US military has not identified any of the persons it has killed or provided any evidence that those boats were carrying drugs.
In a post on X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US military “carried out yet another lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organisation (DTO)” at Trump’s orders — he did not name the purported terrorist organisation. As with previous strikes, he claimed that the boat was “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling” that was on “a known narco-trafficking route and was carrying narcotics”.
Earlier on Tuesday, the US military had similarly struck another boat in the Pacific and killed two persons.
The previous seven US strikes —that began on September 2— were all in the Caribbean Sea.
Trump suggests he could launch strikes on foreign soil
After the second strike in the Pacific, Trump on Wednesday said he would soon order strikes against land targets abroad, according to The New York Times.
Trump claimed that the US military strikes on boats had pushed drug smuggling onto land routes and said he would “probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we are doing” before launching those strikes on foreign soil. He, however, stressed that he did not need congressional permission for such strikes.
“We will hit them very hard when they come in by land. They haven’t experienced that yet, but now we are totally prepared to do that,” said Trump.
Trump did not name any countries that he would attack in the name of the ongoing anti-drug campaign. But his actions and deployment of several thousands of troops, several warships, at least one submarine, and fighter planes and bombers in the Caribbean Sea around Venezuela has led to concerns that the entire campaign against boats is a pretext for an armed intervention to oust Venezuela’s longtime ruler Nicolas Maduro.
While Trump has claimed that he has the authority to order summary killings in international waters as if those purported drug-traffickers were enemy soldiers in a war, legal scholars and former officials have said that such an approach violates both the US policy and international law. As per the longstanding US policy, suspected drug-traffickers in international waters are intercepted by law enforcement agencies like the Coast Guard and brought to US soil for prosecution — not killed without identification or evidence.
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