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war on drugs
'There Will Come a Day When He Faces Prosecution': Trump Condemned After US Murders Two More at Sea
"The summary execution of two more in an alleged drug boat brings the number of murders ordered by Trump to more than 210," noted one human rights defender.
Jun 22, 2026
Two people were killed, and six others survived, a strike on Sunday that the US military claimed—without providing evidence—targeted a boat full of "narco-terrorists," but that human rights defenders called another summary execution worthy of prosecution.
"On June 21, at the direction of the commander of US Southern Command, Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations," USSOUTHCOM said in a statement. "Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations."
"Two male narco-terrorists were killed during this action, and there were six male survivors," the statement added. "Following the engagement, USSOUTHCOM immediately notified US Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivors."
More lawless killing in the Trump administration’s boat bombing campaign.Real killing in a phony armed conflict with “narco-terrorists.”This strike reportedly left 6 survivors.US record for rescuing survivors alive is…not great.
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— Brian Finucane (@bcfinucane.bsky.social) June 21, 2026 at 11:28 PM
According to The Intercept's Nick Turse, who has tracked all of the reported US boat bombings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, there have now been 66 such strikes, which have killed 215 people and left 12 survivors, based on USSOUTHCOM data.
The fate of previous boat strike survivors is not completely clear. After one April bombing, the US Coast Guard told UPI that search-and-rescue operations were called off after no signs of survivors were found. Last October, President Donald Trump said two strike survivors were repatriated to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia, where they faced prosecution.
Survivors of some of the strikes have accused US forces of torturing them.
Relatives of people killed in previous US boat bombings, as well as officials in Venezuela and Colombia, have said that numerous victims were fishers who were not involved in the illicit drug trade.
In January, relatives of two Trinidadian fishers killed in the strikes filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit in Massachusetts.
"The summary execution of two more in an alleged drug boat brings the number of murders ordered by Trump to more than 210," former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said on social media. "There will come a day when he faces prosecution for these crimes."
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Trump Murdering People in Boats Is Not Stopping the Flow of Drugs Into US
Aside from proving woefully ineffective at reducing drug production and trafficking, Washington’s militarized campaign, carried out in conjunction with regional governments, also risks increasing extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians.
Jun 19, 2026
For the past year, the Trump administration has undertaken a lethal campaign of strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 200 people. It could soon gain a major new ally in this fight in Colombia, where the leading candidate in Sunday's presidential elections has promised to break with his dovish predecessor and wage an all-out war on drug trafficking.
As a regional war on drugs takes shape, there is no better time to ask the question: is a military campaign really the most effective way to stop the flow of narcotics from Latin America?
My new Quincy Institute brief addresses this question head-on, finding that the White House’s militarized “war on narco-terror” across the hemisphere is unlikely to produce durable results. In its place, I recommend a concrete road map for sustainably reducing Colombian coca production and cocaine trafficking to the US.
An analysis of 25 years of evidence since the the passage of the multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia aid package reveals that a winning strategy for fighting drug trafficking must bolster state presence, rural development, and the rule of law in drug-producing areas; sequence manual eradication campaigns alongside legally enforceable negotiations with some armed groups; and tackle more profitable nodes of drug supply chains while countering illicit financial flows.
Colombia—where over two-thirds of the world’s cocaine, and 90% of cocaine that enters the US, is produced—forms the nucleus of the Andean drug trade and is by far Washington’s’ most important counternarcotics partner in the Western Hemisphere. Yet nearly $15 billion in US security, counternarcotics and development assistance over the past quarter century has largely failed to curtail Colombia’s cocaine economy, which is now witnessing all-time highs in hectares under cultivation and potential production.
Past strategies, such as aerial fumigation with glyphosate, which was banned in Colombia in 2015, significantly reduced coca crop coverage in the early 2000s but failed to halt production. As farmers became more productive and adaptive, cultivation shifted to Peru, and the chemicals sprayed left indelible harm on the environment and public health.
Surges in US military aid, particularly under the aegis of Plan Patriota, led to the professionalization of Colombian security forces, improved their aerial and intelligence capabilities, and brought the FARC guerillas to the negotiating table. But this approach also fueled instability near military bases — as extrajudicial killings by security forces and paramilitary violence rose to unprecedented levels — and failed to meet its counternarcotics objectives.
The “kingpin strategy,” meanwhile, focused on extraditions of drug bosses. This tactic, which soared under President Alvaro Uribe as he sought to demobilize Colombia’s largest paramilitary organization and has continued to this day, has produced the fragmentation, expansion and specialization of newer criminal outfits, contributing to increased cocaine production as groups devised new trafficking routes and illicit rents to exploit, from gold mining to extortion, kidnapping, wildlife trafficking, and human smuggling.
Other approaches, however, have proved more successful and are correlated with modest declines in coca cultivation, potential cocaine production, and trafficking to the US, particularly in the late 2000s and following the signing of the 2016 peace accords between the government and the FARC.
The strongest recipe for slowing the drug trade has focused on incentivizing viable economic alternatives to coca and reducing the power and influence of illicit armed actors. Under initiatives like the Plan de Consolidación Integral de la Macarena, Familias Guardabosques, and Colombia Transforma, Colombian authorities have boosted state presence, invested in rural development, and bolstered rule of law in drug-producing areas, all while maintaining a credible security posture focused on improving public safety.
A complementary approach involves manual coca eradication campaigns. While time consuming and sometimes risky for communities and security forces alike, these efforts have proven effective when sequenced by first establishing police presence and investing in productive infrastructure and services before forcibly — or, ideally, voluntarily — uprooting coca plants. When combined with strategically designed and legally binding, enforceable negotiations with some armed actors in localized settings — as the administration of President Gustavo Petro has pursued more recently as its Total Peace plan flounders — this approach can incentivize armed groups to pursue industrial-scale eradication themselves. They do this by tying non-compliance to credible threats of targeted offensives.
Lastly, later-stage drug interdictions, increased inspections of larger vessels, and enhanced regulatory integration and coordination against money laundering and other illicit financial flows are essential for stemming cocaine trafficking to the US and disrupting the global networks underpinning it. Fortunately, this approach continues to occur alongside the expensive, legally questionable, and likely ineffective boat strike campaign, which could explain why even top administration officials admit it’s “not the answer … [or] the most effective tool."
These lessons have clear implications for Colombia’s next president and US drug policy moving forward. A balanced strategy is bound to yield more favorable outcomes for both left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda, who seeks to follow Petro’s negotiations with armed actors and voluntary illicit crop substitution programs, and right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who seeks to accelerate low-level arrests and increase the military’s role in targeting drug production and trafficking.
To date, neither the left’s hesitation to implement a credible supply-side counternarcotics agenda nor the right’s militarized approach to curbing coca cultivation has led to durable results. In fact, the lack of a viable, well-articulated strategy strengthens the hand of irregular armed actors, exacerbates a deteriorating security landscape across the country, and gives the Trump administration greater leverage to dictate its preferred approaches, regardless of their empirically poor outcomes.
Despite the US administration’s insistence on applying “systemic friction” to designated foreign terrorist organizations across the hemisphere, this overly militarized strategy is already leading groups to adapt to new illicit industries, divert trafficking routes, diversify economic portfolios, and expand operations to new subregions, resorting to more covert and asymmetrical forms of violence against states and competitors, as a recent surge in drone activity in Colombia has shown.
Aside from proving woefully ineffective at reducing drug production and trafficking, Washington’s militarized campaign, carried out in conjunction with regional governments, also risks increasing extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians, fueling insurrectionary and anti-US sentiment, undermining the rule of law across the hemisphere, and reversing years of progress in Latin America’s fraught civil-military relations.
Ultimately, without credible government presence, viable economic opportunities, and even rudimentary judicial institutions in drug-producing subregions throughout Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, illicit economies and the irregular armed actors feeding off them will persist, regardless of military pressure.
Raiding artisanal drug labs, fumigating small-scale farmers or extraditing kingpins have not proved particularly significant in advancing durable policy outcomes. And there’s little evidence to show that bombing alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean or Eastern Pacific will work either, despite some Trump administration officials’ claims.
Assisting our Colombian partners in formulating a credible security posture against armed non-state actors is crucial to US counternarcotics goals. But in tandem with this approach, we must seek to safeguard development assistance for coca-growing communities; sequence manual eradication campaigns with prior investment in infrastructure; boost interdictions of more valuable drug supply; and counter impunity and corruption by political and business elites.
Colombia’s high-stakes presidential elections could well accelerate a remilitarization of the regional drug war. It is therefore urgent that analysts and officials evaluate the effectiveness of diverse counternarcotics strategies in Colombia over the past quarter century. If reducing the flow of drugs to the US is truly the Trump administration’s objective, then US officials must learn from decades of failure and chart a new course.
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UN Experts Demands Nations ‘Break Their Silence’ as Trump, Hegseth Murder 3 More People at Sea
The Trump administration has killed at least 211 people by bombing boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since last September.
Jun 19, 2026
As US senators pushed the Department of Defense to release unedited footage of the boat bombings the Trump administration has carried out in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since last September, US Southern Command on Thursday announced that it had killed three more people in the operation that some international law experts have said amounts to mass murder and an extrajudicial killing spree.
As with the other announcements of boat bombings, at least 65 of which the US has now carried out, Southern Command released no evidence Thursday night of its claim that the vessel it bombed was “operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” “engaged in narco-trafficking operations," or that the three people killed were “narco-terrorists.”
Victims of the previous boat bombings have included fishermen and other people who had no involvement with drug trafficking, according to legal complaints filed by families.
Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, called on international governments to "break their silence and jointly condemn these murders," noting that the death toll of the administration's operation is now at least 211 people.
Some international officials, including French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, have strongly denounced the boat bombings and accused Trump of breaking international law. Some countries have ended or dialed back intelligence sharing with the US. But human rights groups have called on the international community to take a unified stance against the boat strikes.
"Sick of hearing, 'I didn't know those boat strikes are still happening. Silence leaves the impression that this is somehow OK," said Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America on Thursday, adding that the US Coast Guard had called off its search for two survivors of an earlier boat bombing this week, potentially bringing the total death toll to 213.
President Donald Trump has claimed the US is engaged in an "armed conflict" with cartels in Latin America and has said the boat bombing campaign is aimed at stopping illegal drugs like fentanyl from flowing into the US. According to the US State Department's 2025 report on international narcotics control, Mexico is the "only significant source of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues significantly affecting the United States," with the drug mainly entering the US via the southern border.
In an analysis of Customs and Border Protection data in April, Isacson emphasized that the lethal boat strikes have not stopped drugs from entering the US.
Even if the administration were targeting drug traffickers as it claims, bombing vessels involved in the drug trade is a violation of international laws protecting civilians from military force. Since the US is not officially engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels, the accused "narco-terrorists" the Trump administration has killed have all been civilians.
Legal experts also say that US Southern Command's killing of survivors of initial strikes by bombing them again, would also be war crimes in an armed conflict.
Earlier this week, after another boat bombing that killed at least one person, Saul called for "those who ordered and carried out these crimes to be investigated, prosecuted, and punished, in line with international law."
On June 24, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights are set to argue before the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for the immediate release of a secret legal memo authored by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed gives the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth the authority to kill people at sea.
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