(Al Jazeera Media Network) The United States military announced that it has carried out three strikes against alleged drug-trafficking vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, killing at least 11 people.
US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees military activities in Latin America, said it conducted two of the strikes in the Eastern Pacific and one in the Caribbean as part of a campaign dubbed Operation Southern Spear. All three attacks were carried out late on Monday.
“Eleven male narco-terrorists were killed during these actions, 4 on the first vessel in the Eastern Pacific, 4 on the second vessel in the Eastern Pacific, and 3 on the third vessel in the Caribbean,” SOUTHCOM said in a social media post on Tuesday.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has been attacking what it says are drug-trafficking boats in the waters off South America since September 2 as part of a broader campaign against regional drug cartels.
But legal experts have condemned the campaign as a series of extrajudicial killings.
At least 145 people have been killed in 42 strikes since September, with Trump pitching the campaign as an effort to staunch the flow of drugs to the US.
But the identities of those killed have never been formally released to the public, nor has any evidence been released to substantiate the claims that they were connected to drug trafficking.
Families in Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago have stepped forward to claim the victims as their loved ones. Some of the suspected victims were identified as fishermen or temporary workers transiting from Venezuela to nearby islands.
Some of the families have taken legal action in a push for justice.
In December, the family of missing fisherman Alejandro Carranza filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and in late January, relatives of two Trinidadian workers — Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo — filed a wrongful death lawsuit in a US court in Massachusetts.
The Trump administration, however, has said it is in a state of armed conflict with drug-trafficking groups, several of which it has labelled foreign terrorist organisations.
But those claims have been rejected by international law experts who say that no armed conflict exists and that the Trump administration is instead using lethal military force against criminal activity.
Officials at the United Nations have called for the US to cease the military strikes, warning of violations of the UN Charter.
“None of the individuals on the targeted boats appeared to pose an imminent threat to the lives of others or otherwise justified the use of lethal armed force against them under international law,” Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said in October.
But the Trump administration has pressed forward with the bombing campaign despite criticisms of its legality. It has even pledged to shift to hitting drug-trafficking targets on land, as well as by sea.
“Turns out President’s Day – under President Trump – is not a good day to run drugs,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a social media post showing a video of vessels being struck.
