The US military campaign against vessels manned by civilians allegedly involved in drug trafficking continued this Tuesday with a new extrajudicial attack, the eighth reported since September. The novelty this time is that the latter occurred in the waters of the Pacific Ocean,
The news was reported on Wednesday at noon (Washington time) by CBS, which reported, citing two anonymous official sources, that the US military killed “two or three” crew members on this occasion, bringing the number of victims of the eight extrajudicial operations to at least 34 people. Later, other American media echoed the incident.
Official confirmation has not yet been made, which has been provided in previous attacks by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who personally authorizes these operations, or by the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
The announcement comes two days after Hegseth broke the news of the seventh attack on Sunday. So the target was a boat that U.S. authorities link to the National Liberation Army, a Colombian guerrilla group that the United States has considered a terrorist organization since the 1990s. In a post on They killed three people.
The Secretary of Defense also stated that the operation, whose objective was Colombian, and not, as until then, Venezuelan, took place in international waters and within the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command, which includes the Caribbean Sea. In that area, a deployment with few precedents has been developed in recent weeks, which includes a dozen ships of
The Trump Administration considers that the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels. Arguing that the narcotics these criminal gangs traffic kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, they understand that these alleged drug movements are “armed attacks.”
Senators from both parties oppose the fact that Trump has declared war against these organizations, and not against a country, and that he has invoked a law from the 1970s that gives him the power for 60 days to maintain these operations without the approval of Congress, which end at the beginning of November and can be extended for 30 more days.
Over the weekend, the president of the United States also confirmed the sixth extrajudicial operation of a campaign that began in early September. On that occasion the target was a shallow submersible boat. The army killed two civilians and two others, a Colombian and an Ecuadorian, survived.
Both were repatriated to their countries, and the Prosecutor’s Office of that country did not find evidence to accuse him of any crime.
[Noticia de última hora. Habrá actualización en breve].
