The deadly attack President Trump ordered early this month on what he said was a drug-smuggling Venezuelan boat was a “heinous crime,” Venezuela’s president said on Monday — just before Mr. Trump boasted of destroying a second boat.
Speaking to reporters in Caracas, the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, said that the Sept. 2 attack, which killed 11 people, violated U.S. and international laws. If the United States believed that the boat’s passengers were drug traffickers — as Americans officials have claimed — they should have been captured, he said.
Mr. Maduro called the action “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country” and said the United States was trying to goad Venezuela into a “major war.” The American goal, Mr. Maduro said, was “regime change for oil,” not drug interdiction, which the Trump administration has said is a main goal in the region.
Not long after he spoke, Mr. Trump announced on social media that the U.S. military had conducted another strike on Monday morning “against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists” in international waters, heading from Venezuela. The attack killed three people, he said. He justified the second strike, like the first one, by saying that cartels transporting drugs pose a threat to U.S. national security.
There was no immediate response from the Maduro government to the latest attack.
The day’s events marked a continued escalation in tensions between the two nations. The United States began moving warships and troops into the Caribbean near Venezuela in late August, a move Mr. Trump has said is aimed at countering drug trafficking and protecting American lives from illicit drugs like cocaine and fentanyl.
“BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” he wrote on his website, Truth Social.
In a statement, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump, in ordering the first strike, had “acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring poison to our shores.”
“Evil narcoterrorists are trying to poison our homeland as over 100,000 Americans die from overdoses every year,” she said, adding that Mr. Trump was “delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”
After U.S. forces bombed a boat on Sept. 2, Mr. Trump said that those on the vessel were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, and that they had been transporting drugs in international waters.
The New York Times later reported that the boat had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack began because the people onboard had spotted a military aircraft following them.
The Venezuelan government has released almost no information about the 11 men, and has claimed that a video of the bombing was fake.
The vast majority of cocaine in Latin America comes from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, and almost none is produced in Venezuela. While some cocaine headed to the United States leaves South America through the Caribbean, which borders Venezuela, most of it leaves through the Pacific, which borders Colombia, Ecuador and other nations, according to data from Colombia, the United States and the United Nations.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most recent public data, about 74 percent of cocaine shipments in 2019 were transported through the Pacific, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador, compared with 24 percent through the Caribbean.
Cocaine is a dangerous drug that can have serious consequences, according to public health experts. But fentanyl has a much higher overdose rate. Venezuela plays almost no role in the production and trade of fentanyl, which is almost entirely produced in Mexico with chemicals imported from China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department and the Congressional Research Service.
Many legal specialists, including retired top military lawyers, have called it a crime for the United States to summarily kill suspected smugglers as if they were wartime combatants, rather than arrest them and try them in criminal court. Drug trafficking is not an offense punishable by death in the United States, and Congress has not authorized a war against cartels.
In ordering the strikes on people it accuses of drug trafficking, Mr. Trump has used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, they say.
The White House has not provided a detailed legal rationale for strikes, but it has suggested that using deadly military force was permissible under the laws of armed conflict to defend the country from drugs because, the administration says, 100,000 Americans die annually from overdoses.
Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
Julie Turkewitz is the Andes Bureau Chief for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia, covering Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.
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