The U.S. military has killed three men and destroyed another boat it suspected of running drugs in the Caribbean Sea, this one alleged to have been affiliated with a Colombian insurgency group, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Sunday.
It was the seventh boat known to have been attacked since early September as part of the Trump administration’s use of the military to kill people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were enemy soldiers in a war rather than arresting them as criminals. The latest strike took place on Friday, and Mr. Hegseth said in a social media post on Sunday that it targeted a vessel associated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group known as the E.L.N.
So far, the Trump administration has acknowledged killing 32 people in the operation, whose legality has been widely disputed by outside legal specialists.
“The vessel was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was traveling along a known narco-trafficking route, and was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics,” Mr. Hegseth wrote.
He did not provide evidence for his assertions. A 27-second aerial surveillance video that showed a boat on the water and then a fiery explosion accompanied the post.
The White House has told Congress that President Trump has “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with various drug cartels that his team has deemed terrorists, making the boat crews “unlawful combatants.”
Sunday’s announcement was the first time the Trump administration has specifically described the E.L.N. as a target of a strike. In previous attacks, the administration described the suspects as having ties to Tren de Aragua, a gang based in Venezuela, or no specific cartel.
The administration’s recent strategy of designating various Latin American drug cartels as terrorists has been disputed because the groups are motivated by profit, not ideology. But the E.L.N. is different. It is a Marxist guerrilla group, and the State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, during the Clinton administration.
Mr. Hegseth made the announcement soon after Mr. Trump had engaged in a new public dispute with Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, over social media.
On Saturday night, Mr. Petro accused the United States of murdering an innocent Colombian fisherman in a mid-September strike on a civilian boat; the United States claimed the boat was engaged in drug-running activity. On Sunday morning, Mr. Trump accused Mr. Petro of not doing enough to curb the production of illegal drugs in Colombia and said he was cutting off foreign aid his country.
Mr. Trump also called Mr. Petro “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs.” His administration has repeatedly called Mr. Petro’s counterpart in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro, the head of a drug cartel, and is openly considering a military operation to remove Mr. Maduro from power.
“Petro, a low rated and very unpopular leader, with a fresh mouth toward America, better close up these killing fields immediately, or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Sunday morning.
The exchange also occurred a day after the United States repatriated a Colombian citizen who was rescued from a U.S. military attack on Thursday on a semi-submersible vessel in the Caribbean. The man, Jeison Obando Pérez, 34, was hospitalized in Colombia with brain trauma and was breathing on a ventilator, Colombia’s interior minister, Armando Benedetti, said in a social media posting Saturday night. Once he is awake, the posting said, he will be “processed by the justice system for drug trafficking.”
Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, also introduced new language in his announcement, referring to the drug cartels operating in the region as “the Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.”
“These cartels are the Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere, using violence, murder and terrorism to impose their will, threaten our national security and poison our people,” he said. “The United States military will treat these organizations like the terrorists they are — they will be hunted, and killed, just like Al Qaeda.”
While that moniker echoed the names of actual regional affiliates of Al Qaeda, such as “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” it appeared to be an analogy; there is no such group in the Western Hemisphere.
After Al Qaeda attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, Congress authorized the use of military force against it, launching a long-running war against the terrorist group and its progeny. By contrast, Congress has not authorized any armed conflict against drug cartels or Marxist insurgents in Latin America who finance their operations with drug crimes.
Some Trump administration officials, including Marco Rubio, who is both the secretary of state and the national security adviser, have argued that designating a drug cartel as a terrorist organization brings with it the authority to use military force against it.
That is false as a matter of legal reality; the law that empowers the executive branch to deem foreign groups terrorists enables steps like freezing their assets and making it a crime to do business with them — not to attack them.
Colin P. Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, an intelligence and consulting firm, said that calling the cartels the “Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere” was a way for the Trump administration to frame this for its base. Mr. Trump ran on an antiwar platform in some ways, so relabeling cartels as terrorists and then taking that to the extreme, by making the Al Qaeda comparison, is a justification.
Mr. Clarke said that Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, did this recently “by equating Antifa with Hezbollah and ISIS.” He called it “another absurd comparison.”
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
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