At least one of the US military strikes on boats in the Caribbean over the past month and a half targeted Colombian nationals, CNN reported on Wednesday, citing two people briefed by the Pentagon.
The report said that a US strike in the region on September 19 targeted a boat that left Colombia. In a statement on the bombing, which marked the third on a vessel in the region, Trump claimed without evidence that the boat was carrying drugs and that it killed three “narcoterrorists.” He said the attack was carried out in US Southern Command’s area of responsibility, which includes the Caribbean and most of South America.
Notably, the September 19 strike was the only time Trump announced the bombing of a boat in the region and didn’t mention Venezuela. The CNN report said the boat was “suspected of carrying Colombians affiliated with Colombian terrorist organizations,” but the Pentagon was “unable to determine the individual identities of each person on the boats before they struck them.”
The lack of identification suggests that the US War Department doesn’t have the evidence to back up its claims about who it is targeting in the Caribbean. According to a report from The Associated Press, the Pentagon hasn’t provided Congress with any hard evidence to support its allegations about the vessels it has been bombing.
After the September 19 strike, Colombian President Gustavo Petro suggested that the strike may have targeted Colombians. “If the boat was sunk in the Dominican Republic, then it is possible that they were Colombians. This means that officials from the US and the Dominican Republic would be guilty of the murder of Colombian citizens,” he said.
Petro also suggested that a fourth US strike on a boat in the region targeted Colombians, a claim the White House strongly rejected. “The United States looks forward to President Petro publicly retracting his baseless and reprehensible statement so that we can return to a productive dialogue on building a strong, prosperous future for the people of United States and Colombia,” a White House official said in response.
According to numbers released by the Trump administration, since September 2, the US has bombed five boats in the region and has extrajudicially executed 27 people in the attacks. The US is also using combating drug trafficking as a pretext to push for regime change in Venezuela, and it may start launching direct strikes on Venezuelan territory soon.
