US Southern Command announced that its forces blew up another alleged drug-running boat in the waters of Latin America on Friday, killing at least three people.
SOUTHCOM said the boat was targeted in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and, as usual, the command offered no evidence to back up its claim that the small vessel was transporting drugs. It labeled the victims of the strike “narco-terrorists,” a term the administration uses to justify extrajudicial executions at sea for an alleged crime that doesn’t get the death penalty in the US.
The attack brings the number of boats the US has blown up since the bombing campaign started in early September to 44. According to the monitoring group Airwars, the strike brings the total number of people killed by the boat strikes to 147, a figure that accounts for people the US military said survived the initial strike and were never rescued.
Airwars and The Intercept reported last week that after the US bombed a boat hundreds of miles off the coast of the Mexico-Guatemala border on December 30, eight survivors jumped overboard and eventually died since a US rescue plane didn’t arrive in the area until about 45 hours later.
“SOUTHCOM doesn’t want these people alive,” an unnamed US government official told The Intercept. The official said that survivors create “complications and questions” for the US military and US intelligence agencies, and that it would be easier for them to drown.
Each person killed in the US bombing campaign has been classified as a civilian by Airwars since they are non-combatants and posed no threat to the US military at the time of the attacks.
The US military campaign in Latin America, dubbed “Operation Southern Spear,” also involved the attack on Venezuela to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, which killed at least 83 people, including four civilians.
