US Southern Command announced on Wednesday night that it bombed another boat in the Eastern Pacific Ocean as the Trump administration continues conducting extra-judicial executions at sea in the waters of Latin America.
As usual, SOUTHCOM claimed without providing any evidence that the vessel was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” The command said that the strike killed a total of four “narco-terrorists,” a term the administration uses to justify executions without due process for an alleged crime that doesn’t receive the death penalty in the US.
According to numbers released by the Trump administration, the attack brings the total number of people killed in the bombing campaign to 99. So far, 25 strikes have been launched, and 27 boats have been destroyed, including 11 in the Caribbean near Venezuela, where the strikes started, and 16 in the Eastern Pacific.
The strike came after US War Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed that the bombing campaign would continue despite the scrutiny of the September 2 attack that involved multiple strikes to kill survivors. Hegseth also said that the video wouldn’t be released to the public. “Of course, we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” he said.
Some members of Congress are probing the September 2 strike to see if it was a war crime, but many legal experts say the entire bombing campaign is clearly illegal under international law. In an effort to rein in the strikes, a War Powers Resolution to block them was introduced in the House, but it failed in a vote of 210-216.
The House also killed a War Powers Resolution to block Trump from attacking Venezuela, a vote that came after he declared a “total and complete” blockade on all “sanctioned” tankers going into and out of the country. US military aircraft have continued flying near Venezuela’s coast, and there have been at least two near midair collisions involving civilian planes and US military planes flying without transponders on.
