US military burns alleged drug boat in eastern Pacific

The US military has carried out another lethal strike on a small vessel in the eastern Pacific that it says was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations”, killing three people, according to US Southern Command. A video shared by the command shows a boat floating before erupting into flames, a visual summary of a policy that has moved from interdiction to summary execution.

The Independent, citing the AP wire, says the latest attack adds to a tally of at least 148 deaths across at least 43 strikes since early September, spanning the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific. President Donald Trump has framed the campaign as an “armed conflict” with Latin American cartels—language that matters, because it attempts to route around ordinary criminal procedure and into the looser world of wartime authorities.

But the administration has offered little public evidence that those killed were “narcoterrorists” rather than smugglers, coerced crew, or simply the wrong people on the wrong boat. Critics quoted by AP question both legality and effectiveness: much of the fentanyl driving US overdose deaths is typically trafficked over land from Mexico, after production using precursor chemicals imported from China and India. The “war” is being fought at sea against targets that are, at best, adjacent to the central supply chain.

The controversy sharpened after revelations about the first strike in this series: survivors of the initial attack were reportedly killed by a follow-up strike. Republicans defended the action as necessary; Democratic lawmakers and legal experts called it murder, potentially a war crime, per AP.

Even if one sets aside the moral question—whether the state should be allowed to incinerate suspects without trial—the institutional incentives are obvious. Naval and air assets can rack up “successes” against soft targets in international waters with minimal risk to US personnel, while the political class can claim it is “doing something” about drugs without confronting the domestic drivers of demand, regulatory failures, or the realities of border enforcement.

What is left is a global policing regime without the boring constraints that normally slow governments down: jurisdiction, evidence standards, and the inconvenience of courts. If Washington wants to declare the ocean a kill zone for alleged traffickers, it should at least be honest about what it is building: not law enforcement, but a precedent for extrajudicial force—exportable, deniable, and very hard to roll back once normalized.