Trump Killing Spree Continues as Murder Count Rises to At Least 70 People

A top global human rights expert said Friday that President Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, "must be arrested and prosecuted" as the death toll in their military campaign in the Caribbean and Pacific, which has gone on for two months without congressional authorization, reached 70 people.

"It is illegal to treat drug suspects as combatants to be shot when there is no armed conflict," said former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. "Repetition doesn't change criminality."

Roth spoke out hours after Hegseth posted footage of the Department of Defense's latest strike in the Caribbean, which brought the number of vessels bombed to 18. The White House has said the boats were all operated by "narco-terrorists," but has provided no evidence publicly that they contained drugs or drug traffickers.

The Trump administration has also informed Congress that the US is engaged in an "armed conflict" with Latin American drug cartels, but Congress has not voted to authorize military action in the Caribbean or Pacific. The White House has claimed it does not need lawmakers' approval to carry out the attacks.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans, who control the chamber, voted down a bipartisan war powers resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional authorization to continue the boat bombings and to take further military action in Venezuela, where the president has insisted drug cartels are producing fentanyl and trafficking it to the US.

Federal agencies and the United Nations have found Venezuela plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl—a fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed in September when a reporter asked him about it—and is not a major producer of cocaine, though some cocaine is trafficked through the country after being produced in Colombia.

The footage Hegseth released on the social media platform X on Thursday was purported to show “a vessel operated by a designated terrorist organization" that was "trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean." Three people were killed in the strike.

"To all narco-terrorists who threaten our homeland: if you want to stay alive, stop trafficking drugs. If you keep trafficking deadly drugs—we will kill you," said Hegseth, who calls the DOD Trump's preferred Department of War, even though congressional approval is needed to officially change a federal agency's name.

As with previously released footage of some of the boat bombings, part of the boat that was struck was not visible in the surveillance video.

Latin American officials and the families of some victims have insisted that the people killed have not been involved in the trafficking of drugs. Venezuela's ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, is among those who have called the bombings "extrajudicial executions" of people who have never been proven to be a threat to the US.

The latest boat strike came as the Associated Press published an investigation into the identities of at least four people who have been killed in the bombings.

The victims, the AP reported, have included Robert Sánchez, a 42-year-old fisherman who made about $100 a month and hoped to eventually purchase his own fishing boat. Economic pressures in the impoverished Sucre state where Sánchez lived pushed him to help cocaine traffickers navigate the Caribbean.

Another man, Juan Carlos “El Guaramero” Fuentes, was struggling to feed his family after he lost work as a transit bus driver, which he had been for several years before his bus broke down. He turned to smuggling to make ends meet, and was one of many novices hired by high-level cocaine traffickers, who typically stay ashore while the impoverished "drug runners" travel through the Caribbean by boat.

One relative of a person killed in one of the boat bombings told the AP that the US government “should have stopped" their family member's vessel instead of striking it and killing those on board.

In the past, the US has treated drug trafficking as a crime to be dealt with by law enforcement agencies, with the US Coast Guard sometimes helping to intercept boats in the Caribbean if they were suspected of carrying drugs and arresting those on board, affording them a day in court.

"You save more lives when you stop a vessel and arrest those aboard, alive, if they're actually trafficking drugs," said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America on Thursday. "Instead of drowned bodies, you get useful intel about their criminal structures, their support networks, their finances, and future vessels."

The AP's reporting confirmed, said Isacson, that the Trump administration's boat strikes "are the equivalent of straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners."

"It satisfies some people's anger and bloodlust," said Isacson, "but hitting the poorest and most replaceable link in the chain does nothing to affect drug supplies."