American ships are turning the Caribbean into a zone of unpunished executions
The American war on drugs has just entered a new, darker phase. Since early September, the U.S. military has been carrying out airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, formally as part of an operation against “narco-terrorists” from Venezuela and the region. In these attacks, according to official and media reports, more than eighty people have already been killed, and more than twenty vessels targeted. In Washington they speak of defending U.S. national security; in Caracas, of piracy and extrajudicial executions. Meanwhile, somewhere between these two propagandas, float the bodies of fishermen and poor young men who never had a chance to explain who they were and what they were doing on those boats.
The anger of part of the American and Western public over revelations that the Pentagon allegedly fired at survivors of one of the sunken “narco-boats” is entirely understandable. If it is true that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded that “everyone” on the boat be killed, and then also the survivors in the water, then we are not talking about military operations but about pure execution. But this same outrage now comes from the very circles that only a few years ago celebrated Obama as a peaceful president, a liberal humanist, the bearer of the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the hypocrisy that James Bovard rightly points out in his piece for Counterpunch, where he connects Trump’s campaign of killings in the Caribbean seas with the practices normalized precisely by Barack Obama.
Let us recall what Obama actually did. His administration dramatically expanded the use of drones and targeted killings, from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. He introduced in practice what Bovard calls the “PowerPoint death parade” — weekly meetings in which presentations went through the biographies of suspects, and the president personally decided who would be liquidated next. At one point the White House even publicly acknowledged that there existed a list of American citizens who could be killed without trial, and the criteria for being placed on that list were declared a state secret. The courts, as in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, simply refused to intervene, declaring the president’s right to kill without judicial review a “political question.”
What was at the time presented as “sophisticated counterterrorism” was essentially the erasure of any distinction between the battlefield and the rest of the planet. If the world is a global battlefield, and the president the supreme commander in an endless war against a vaguely defined enemy, then anyone, anywhere, at any moment can be declared a legitimate target. Obama wrapped this in legalistic jargon about “process and careful assessments,” but the essence was brutal: the executive branch granted itself the right to take life without a court. In this it enjoyed silent or open support from Congress, most of the media, and — most devastatingly — the majority of the liberal public in the United States.
Bovard rightly recalls how, during Obama’s tenure, the U.S. public was sold the narrative that drones were almost infallible, that they “almost never” killed civilians, and that the president, in his allegedly rational, technocratic approach, served as a kind of moral filter deciding over life and death. In reality, documents later published by NBC and other media showed that all military-aged men in a strike zone were simply declared “combatants,” unless proven otherwise after the fact. That means the verdict was: you are guilty until it is posthumously proven that you are not. Who can prove that from the grave?
Now we see the very same legal and political framework in the Caribbean, only under a different slogan. Instead of a “war on terror,” we have a “war on narco-terrorism.” Instead of bearded suspects in the mountains of Pakistan, the targets are anonymous people on wooden and rubber boats somewhere between Venezuela, Colombia, and the Caribbean islands. Trump and Hegseth claim they are members of the Tren de Aragua gang and other terrorist organizations, even though they have not presented serious evidence, and experts warn that the key drugs affecting the United States, such as fentanyl, do not come from Venezuela at all.
If one accepts the logic that every boat leaving Venezuela is a potential “narco-bomb” headed for the U.S., then anything is permitted. Sinking without warning, firing on survivors, ignoring the jurisdiction of coast guards and courts of the states in whose waters this is happening. The public is soothed with terms like “kinetic action,” but the reality is very simple. A state that calls itself “the world’s guardian of law and order” has granted itself the right to play the role of executioner, jury, and judge in one across the seas of Latin America.
It is especially cynical when Western media today criticize these operations as if they were some radical break with “normal” policy. Of course Trump is vulgar, arrogant, and openly threatening. His public statements — like “we’re just getting started with killing narco-terrorists” — reveal what previous administrations were doing with much more stylized rhetoric. But the substance is the same: imperial rule by force, not the rule of law. Obama put a nice liberal wrapper on that right; Trump stripped it to the bone. Both therefore deserve condemnation, as does the system that created them.
One should not ignore the racial and class dimensions of this story. The people dying on these boats come from the social bottom of Latin America. They are poor fishermen, small-time smugglers, migrants, young men fleeing despair. In the case of Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza, whose family has launched a legal battle, there is serious suspicion that he was a civilian, not a “narco-terrorist.” But in the eyes of Washington and most corporate media, these people are invisible anyway. If you get the identity wrong — no matter, the statistics will count them as “enemy fighters.”
From our region, it is hard not to imagine the reversed scenario. What would happen if, for example, the Russian or Chinese navy began sinking ships in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming they were “defending their national security” from some cartel? Or if Iran were to strike boats in the Mediterranean with drones because smugglers allegedly transport drugs to Tehran there? Instantly there would be talk of aggression, piracy, terrorism; an emergency session of the Security Council would be demanded, and the media would be full of moral panic. When Washington does it, then it is, as they say, “a complex legal situation.”
This is why the value of texts like Bovard’s in Counterpunch lies precisely in reminding us that Trump did not “stray” or deviate from the path, but is the logical continuation and radicalization of an order that Obama cemented and earlier administrations built for decades. Those who today, from liberal positions, pretend to be shocked by Trump’s Caribbean ventures, but yesterday celebrated the “cool” President Obama who sent drone-launched missiles at peasants in Yemen, participate in maintaining that order. Their outrage is selective — aimed at style, not at the structure of violence itself.
If we can learn anything from this episode, it is that imperial violence is always continuity, rarely rupture. To condemn Trump while remaining silent about Obama is to miss the core of the matter. But likewise, to criticize only the Americans while at the same time accepting the role of NATO and EU operations means turning our head from our own responsibility. If we want a world in which warships do not patrol as floating guillotines, then we must break with the very logic of the imperial modus operandi, not just with the individuals currently carrying it out.
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