US Southern Command announced on Monday that its forces bombed another alleged drug-running boat in the waters of Latin America, marking the 30th strike since the campaign began on September 2.
SOUTHCOM said the boat was targeted in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and claimed, without providing any evidence, that it was “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
The command said that the strike killed two “narco-terrorists,” a term the Trump administration has used to justify the executions at sea that don’t involve a trial or a judge for an alleged crime that doesn’t receive the death penalty in the US.
The latest killings bring the total number of people extra-judicially executed by the US military at sea to 107. The Pentagon has never provided evidence to back up its claims about what the boats were carrying and has admitted it doesn’t know the identities of all the people it is killing.
A total of 31 vessels have been destroyed in the bombing campaign, as one of the 30 strikes destroyed two boats that were alongside one another. Out of the 31 boats that have been destroyed, 20 were hit in the Eastern Pacific, and 11 were targeted in the Caribbean near Venezuela as the bombing campaign began as part of the US push to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
“[President Trump] wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said in an interview with Vanity Fair on November 2. At that point, the majority of the boats the US had blown up were in the Caribbean, and it had just started hitting vessels in the Eastern Pacific.
