New US attack against a boat in Caribbean waters. The US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, announced this Saturday through his account on
“Today, at the direction of President (Donald) Trump, the War Department conducted a lethal kinetic attack against another drug trafficking vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) in the Caribbean“, Hegseth indicated in a brief statement in which he assured that the ship in question was registered by the White House intelligence services “for its participation in narcotics smuggling.”
The three fatalities were the only three occupants of the boat that, according to the Defense representative, “was traveling along a known drug trafficking route and was transporting narcotics“.
“These narcoterrorists are bringing drugs into our country to poison Americans in their own land, and they will not succeed. The Department will treat them exactly the same as we treat Al Qaeda. We will continue to track them, locate them, search for them and eliminate them,” Hegseth said.
This new attack intensifies the military and rhetorical escalation that has triggered an open confrontation between the US president and his Colombian and Venezuelan counterparts, Gustavo Petro and Nicolás Maduro, respectively. All of this in the context of a larger US military operation against the alleged drug boats operating in the Caribbean and which NGOs such as Amnesty International have called “illegal.”
The United Nations has also denounced that there is “no legal justification” for carrying out these bombings and has warned that – based on the “very scant information” provided by the US authorities – “none of the individuals on the attacked ships (to date) represented an imminent threat”, which is why it has called for a “rapid, independent and transparent” investigation of each and every one of the attacks, with a view even to prosecuting and condemning those who have violated the law.
