US Southern Command kills 3 in eastern Pacific strike on alleged drug-smuggling boat, Southern Spear campaign claims designated terrorist operators and 140+ deaths since September, Drug war rebranded as maritime kill list with X as press office

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US Southern Command on social media posted video of the strikes. Photograph: U.S. Southern Command via X theguardian.com

bnonews.com

The Trump administration’s latest innovation in the drug war is to skip the arrest, skip the indictment, and go straight to a missile strike—then post the highlight reel on X.

On Friday, US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said it carried out a “lethal kinetic strike” on a vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing three people it described as “narco-terrorists,” according to The Guardian. BNO News, citing a SOUTHCOM statement, adds that the boat was allegedly operated by a “Designated Terrorist Organization” and that the strike was ordered by SOUTHCOM commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan. The command released a short video clip showing the strike and the vessel burning.

This was the second such strike of the week. The Guardian reports that a separate strike earlier killed 11 people. Since September, SOUTHCOM’s “Southern Spear” campaign has struck at least 44 vessels across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with at least 143–148 deaths depending on the count (BNO News cites 143; The Guardian cites at least 148).

The legal and evidentiary questions are where the story stops being “counter-narcotics” and starts looking like a doctrine. SOUTHCOM says “intelligence confirmed” the vessel was transiting known narco-trafficking routes and engaged in trafficking. But neither The Guardian nor BNO reports any publicly presented evidence: no cargo recovered, no arrests, no chain of custody, no court filings—just an assertion and a fireball.

That is a remarkable escalation for what is, at bottom, a criminal allegation. Smuggling drugs is not, under US or international law, a license to kill civilians. The Guardian notes rising concern among lawmakers and legal experts, citing an ACLU statement from Jeffrey Stein and Christopher Anders arguing it is “flagrantly illegal” to use the military to kill civilians suspected only of crimes and that such people are not lawful targets.

Yet SOUTHCOM’s framing—“narco-terrorists,” “designated terrorist organizations,” “known routes”—is doing the work that due process usually does. Label first, strike second, and let the public infer guilt from the fact that the Pentagon says so.

There is also an institutional drift. The Guardian reports Donovan replaced Adm. Alvin Holsey after an abrupt retirement reportedly tied to disagreements over the strike policy. When commanders rotate in and out over how often to kill suspects at sea, the policy is no longer merely law enforcement support; it is operationalized lethal force with its own bureaucratic momentum.

The drug war has always been a pretext for expanding state power. The novelty here is the outsourcing of “probable cause” to classified intelligence and the publication of “transparency” as a 16-second clip on a social platform. The administration may call it interdiction. For anyone who still remembers what a trial is, it looks like summary execution—just with better videography.