Video posted on X shows a small speedboat with outboard engines and then the boat being blown apart. Three men were on it, according to the US military, and all three died.
US Southern Command said it hit the vessel in the Caribbean Sea on Monday. In its statement, the command said the boat was on a known drug-trafficking route. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” it wrote, adding that “three male narco-terrorists were killed during this action.”
It did not show evidence that the boat carried narcotics.
A growing toll
The strike adds to a campaign that began in early September, when the Trump administration started going after small vessels it suspects of smuggling drugs in the region. Official statements count more than 40 strikes so far. The reported death toll from them stands at no fewer than 151.
President Donald Trump has said repeatedly that the United States is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels in Latin America, and he has presented the strikes as a needed escalation to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the country. Little public evidence has come from the administration to back its claim that the dead were part of organised trafficking.
Legal questions
Some lawmakers and legal experts have challenged both the legality and the usefulness of the campaign. Their argument on effectiveness is geographic: most of the fentanyl tied to fatal overdoses in the US usually crosses by land from Mexico, where it is made with precursor chemicals imported mostly from China and India. It does not typically travel by sea through the Caribbean.
Scrutiny grew after reports that survivors of the first known boat strike were killed in a follow-up attack.
The administration and several Republican lawmakers defend the strikes as lawful and necessary, resting on its reading of self-defence and counter-narcotics authority. Democratic lawmakers and human rights advocates see it differently. They have called the killings unlawful, and some say they could amount to war crimes.
