Over nearly a year, the U.S. military has attacked more than 60 vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. At least 200 people have perished in the strikes, which have been conducted under the aegis of “Operation Southern Spear.” Purportedly an effort to stop narcotics trafficking, the Trump administration has refused to provide evidence to the public that their targets were actually involved in the drug trade. This lack of evidence is paired with an equally egregious element of the campaign: the total militarization of drug interdiction, which the U.S. has traditionally treated as primarily a criminal matter. No more: those who traffic drugs into the country have been re-conceived by the Trump administration as a de facto invading army, with drugs themselves constituting the weaponry of these attackers. Whereas every previous administration sought to seize drug shipments and arrest perpetrators, the Trump administration has adopted a posture of maximal national defense, shooting first and refusing to ask questions later.
It was clear from the earliest days of the campaign that the administration was far more interested in the spectacle of violence and the thrill of inflicting death than actually trying to curb drug importation, let alone domestic drug use and addiction. The Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth has promoted snuff films of the attacks, which as far as we know have exclusively involved sinking vessels that do not attempt to defend themselves. The point was not so much that the United States was stopping drugs from entering the U.S. than that the military was executing supposed “narcoterrorists” in the most violent and horrible ways possible.
Very quickly, it turned out that the United States was not exclusively, and potentially not even most of the time, attacking boats actually transporting drugs. Survivors of attacks began to tell their stories, and so we learned of multiple fishermen blown out of their boats and left to fend desperately for survival. We also learned that an early attack involved a follow-up strike on shipwrecked sailors — an act in contravention of long-standing maritime laws, and quite arguably constituting a war crime.
Though the Trump regime has engaged in outrageous and illegal acts that can seem too numerous to count, these Latin American attacks are particularly chilling even as they share much in common with other administration offenses. As with other examples of regime law-breaking, one is almost dizzied by the intertwined layers of incompetence and bloodlust. At the most general level, the Trump administration has militarized an activity — efforts to curb drug importations — that previous administrations and the vast majority of experts have seen as generally benefitting from police action. But with its profound shift in approach, the administration has simply gone full throttle into total lawlessness, effectively declaring the drug trade so dire a threat to the homeland that no manner of excess is too great to bring it to heel. What other conclusion to draw from the apparent fact that the U.S. has repeatedly killed innocent men, with even survivors wantonly punished through the loss of the fishing boats that provided their livelihood, and in general has served capital punishment upon hundreds without judge or jury? These attacks defy any rational purpose, since even by their own terms they are not actually stopping drug importations into the U.S.
The far truer, more disturbing intentions lie in plain view; if they seem hidden to some, it is mainly because too many Americans are unwilling to accept the horrors that the administration itself so gleefully advertises. Trump and his allies like Pete Hegseth are less interested in promoting American interests than in projecting images of their own strength and indulging their own darkest, cruelest fantasies. And so the point is to blow shit up with weapons of war, the mismatch between victims and executioners a key part of the thrill. High-tech weapons funded and built to take on actual threats to the United States — opposing armies, terrorist cells — are turned against skiffs and speedboats thousands of miles from U.S. shores. Those targeted cannot in any sense be conceived of as opposing combatants, but rather as dehumanized vermin: bugs being squashed by the glorious lightning of god from above. And the release of snuff films that subsume the killings into the cartoon language of video games is meant to promote the spectacle not just of violence but of vast power: one moment the target is there, the next it’s a bright explosion. Something becomes nothing, like the creation myth run in reverse.
In the last week or so, reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times has brought a bit of clarity to what had been a mysterious subset of this deadly maritime campaign — reporting that helps further strip away the official pretenses for what is essentially a murder campaign. Back in March of this year, three Ecuadorian fishing vessels were attacked and sunk by unknown assailants in the eastern Pacific near the Galapagos Islands. One ship with eight men aboard disappeared without a trace, save for a plume of smoke seen by a couple of sailors who had been out on one of its smaller boats. But with the two other vessels, all aboard survived, and they were able to recount the dire events that had befallen them: of drones striking their vessels, and armed men speaking English and wearing uniforms with American flags subsequently detaining them before releasing them to authorities in El Salvador. In at least one attack, injured sailors were denied medical attention by their captors. The twist was that the U.S. government denied that American forces were involved in these attacks; as others have observed, this was an oddity given the outsized efforts to promote Southern Spear strikes in the waters off Latin America. Another key piece of information: the sailors themselves deny being involved in the drug trade, assertions which received corroboration from an investigation by Human Rights Watch.
The Washington Post is now reporting that all three attacks were connected to a covert CIA program, although “It was not clear whether other actors were involved, such as private contractors or authorities from other countries.” A key part of the reporting was the repeated appearance of a small, anonymous jet traced back to the United States that appeared to track all three vessels prior to the attacks (the Post was not able to directly confirm whether the jet was flown and manned by CIA employees).
At the most general level, these revelation are pretty astonishing: not only is the administration ostentatiously killing hundreds of sailors via Operation Southern Spear in order to make Trump and his allies feel like modern-day gods, but has established a separate, secret program that is killing still more innocent sailors. As with the larger-scale campaign conducted by the U.S. military, the CIA effort (at least what we know of it) seems to specialize in murdering innocents and blowing up their boats. But unlike Southern Spear, the American people don’t even know who’s doing the killing in their name. Survivors of the attacks say their attackers spoke English, with at least some wearing uniforms with US flags and “USA” stitched on. Whether they are military personnel, CIA employees, or mercenaries is at this point not publicly known.
The prospect of non-military involvement suggests a homicidal metastasizing of the Latin American maritime killings. Where Operation Southern Spear advertises the administration’s bloodlust and lawlessness, this CIA program should chill us with its secret extent, common murderousness, and clear incompetence. What are they trying to hide? Equally, it should raise all manner of alarm bells given prior U.S. involvement in Latin American affairs, a litany of offenses that include complicity in genocide in Guatemala and the operations of death squads in El Salvador. (The Post reminds us that last year, Trump “granted the CIA new authorities to counter narcotics trafficking, signing an authorization for covert action aimed at countering transnational criminal organizations, including through lethal force”; moreover, CIA personnel were involved with the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and two employees were killed in a traffic accident following an anti-narcotics operation in Mexico.) It is as if the Trump administration had looked at all the interventions and atrocities committed by the United States over the last century, and determined that the lesson offered by history is that we need more killing, more murder, more counterproductive interventions in sovereign nations.
Moreover, the lower-tech nature of the attacks on the Ecuadorian fishing boats, and the possibility that armed mercenaries were involved, helps undermine the spectacle of vast American power blowing unsuspecting ships out of the water. The use of quadcopter drones to attack the ships sounds more like the jerry-rigged combat of the Ukraine war, while the prospect of mercenary companies making a buck off killing innocent fishermen should appall anyone with a conscience. This doesn’t look like a video game; it reads as plain murder. The possibility that mercenary companies might now be cashing in on these killings adds a fresh level of immorality.
What we’re learning about the Trump regime’s activities in the waters of the Caribbean and eastern Pacific should be viewed in the larger context not only of its other acts of Latin American neo-imperialism, but the demented warmongering that has led the U.S. into an illegal and debilitating war against Iran. And all of this should in turn be viewed within the frame of the white supremacism that courses through MAGA like a spiritual poison, in which non-whites are seen not only as unworthy of citizenship but as less than human. In both Iran and Latin America, the Trump administration seeks to enhance its standing via bloody gambits that betray both short-term thinking and a comfort with violence inflicted on non-white populations.
There remains a too-common presumption that this administration is somehow advancing U.S. interests, in however misguided a fashion: but we are well past the point where this presumption of good intentions should be granted. Just as Donald Trump started the Iran war in significant part to distract from the Epstein files and to counter his falling popularity with what he thought would be an easy “win” (as he seems to think he accomplished in Venezuela), it’s crazy to say that “U.S. interests” are being served by blowing up boats in the waters off Latin America. It is far likelier that we are seeing what happens when broken men are given control over the most powerful military in the world, and choose to deploy it for their own psychological and political aggrandizement. Our politics and our society need to catch up with this reality, not the comforting one that would have us believe there is a deeper method in the madness.
All this said, I keep coming back to the fundamentally disproportionate nature of these killings. These are state executions driven in part because of the White House’s accurate perceptions of the victims’ powerlessness. They are not warfighters; it seems most are taken by surprise by the attacks; and it appears that even their own governments are either complicit with the killings or unwilling to pick a fight with the United States over them. In a very basic sense, the Trump administration is slaughtering these people, most of whom appear to be innocent of any crimes, and none of whom deserve summary execution, simply because it can.
And one of the reasons the administration believes it can is that it has faith that Americans will not object too much to non-white, non-Americans being killed to keep the United States “safe”; that the killings are too remote to merit much pushback. This sense of impunity and trust in the complicity of ordinary citizens is exactly why we all should shine a spotlight on these murders, and call for both their cessation and accountability for the government’s crimes. In raining down death on foreigners who do not deserve it, this regime is violating the most foundational ideas of democracy and even civilization itself. If there’s one thing not only any citizen but any human should be able to count on, it’s that you will not be killed for unspecified crimes by weapons of war as you go about your business. This basic principle might seem naive or impossible to meet, but my point here is that we Americans should at least do what we can to force our own government to adhere to it. We cannot meaningfully claim to be citizens of a democracy if we do not work to stop horrific actions done in our name, particularly actions that tear at the very foundations of civilization and morality.