A U.S. military strike killed three people and blew up a boat in the Caribbean Sea on Friday, the U.S. Southern Command said, raising the death toll in the Trump administration’s five-month-old campaign against suspected drug smugglers at sea to 133.
The attack was the first known strike in the Caribbean Sea since early November and the 39th disclosed by the U.S. government in the campaign, according to a tracker maintained by The New York Times.
The announcement on Friday was accompanied by an 11-second video clip that appeared to show a missile striking the middle of the boat as it traversed open waters, and destroying it.
The command said, citing unspecified intelligence, that the boat had been following “known drug-trafficking routes in the Caribbean” and that it was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.
Whatever its activities may have been, a broad array of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the U.S. strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings — because the military cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts.
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.
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