The U.S. Southern Command confirmed on Thursday a new lethal strike in international waters of the Eastern Pacific, where a unit of the Joint Task Force Southern Spear destroyed a vessel operated, according to Washington, by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Four crew members, all men, were killed in the bombing.
The strike, carried out under the orders of U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, is part of the most aggressive campaign of lethal operations that the United States has launched in the Caribbean and the Pacific in decades.
According to the official tweet from Southern Command, the boat was sailing along a "known drug trafficking route" and was transporting illicit cargo.
The publication did not provide exact coordinates but confirmed that it was a kinetic attack, meaning a direct explosive impact on the target offshore.
A pattern of increasingly lethal attacks
Thursday's bombing adds to a series of recent operations, also ordered by Hegseth, in which dozens of people have died without prior judicial proceedings.
On November 16, the U.S. destroyed another boat in the eastern Pacific, leaving three men dead, in an action that Washington described as part of an offensive to cut off drug trafficking maritime routes.
Days earlier, on October 30, a similar attack killed four alleged narcoterrorists, which at the time was reported as the twelfth operation of the year.
Both actions were presented by the Pentagon as precise strikes against transnational criminal organizations. However, the cumulative toll has already exceeded dozens of fatalities, in a pattern that organizations and critics describe as a policy of "shoot first and ask questions later."
Shocking reports: executions of survivors
The climate of tension surrounding these operations intensified further following the report published by The Washington Post and CNN, which stated that two survivors of a boat attacked on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela may have been executed from the air, despite not posing an immediate threat.
According to that report, eleven people were aboard the vessel; the first missile nearly destroyed it completely, but two men survived, clinging to the wreckage. The subsequent instruction was said to be "kill everyone."
The Trump administration had never acknowledged a fact like this. Hegseth, however, responded by accusing the press of fabricating stories and argued that the attacks are “effective,” “lethal,” and in accordance with U.S. and international law.
The growing U.S. military presence, which includes the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and thousands of troops in the Caribbean, keeps Nicolás Maduro's government on high alert. Caracas has responded with armed mobilization and accusations of "imperial threat."
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