One year into the U.S. military campaign to blow up alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon’s increasingly vague descriptions of the individuals killed have prompted criticism from the international community.
In September and October 2025, when the strikes began, U.S. Southern Command, known as SOUTHCOM, linked three of the strikes to the Tren de Aragua and Ejército de Liberación Nacional criminal organizations. Most later strikes were described as targeting “a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations.”
But the military’s most recent two announcements of strikes simply stated that “confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking.”
On Sept. 2, 2025, the United States military conducted its first known deadly kinetic strike on a small vessel it said was trafficking drugs bound for the U.S., kicking off a controversial yearlong crusade against alleged drug boats that shows no sign of stopping.
At the time, President Donald Trump claimed — without evidence — that targeted boats were carrying the opioid fentanyl and that every boat “blown up” saved “25,000 lives.” But experts on drug trafficking said that places where the boats were destroyed are not a corridor for smuggling fentanyl.
The U.S. military campaign against drug smugglers — later named Operation Southern Spear — has killed at least 227 people in 68 strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, with three survivors rescued at sea and repatriated to their home countries.
“Now, for the first time ever, we are treating these organizations and all of their downstream and upstream allies and cohorts as part of this continuum of terrorist activity, for which kinetic force is the only possible solution,” a U.S. official told reporters in a briefing marking one year since the strikes started.
The strikes have been criticized for violating international law and killing people without due process. The U.S. military hasn’t made public the information it had about the boats before launching the attacks. U.N. experts on Tuesday described the strikes as “unlawful killings.”
“They are engaging in conduct that is widely regarded to be flagrantly illegal, criminal even, and have not offered anything approaching plausible legal rationale,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser who focused on the use of military force, told MS NOW.
The Trump administration has been relying on a secret Office of Legal Counsel memo to provide legal justification for its boat strikes campaign. The American Civil Liberties Union is leading a lawsuit from civil rights groups seeking the immediate release of the OLC opinion under the Freedom of Information Act.
Finucane says that while the OLC memo is serving as a “permission slip” for the strikes, the government has yet to substantiate its claims that the U.S. is engaged in an armed conflict.
“This war framing on the part of the administration is really bogus,” he said. “This is a make-believe armed conflict, but these are very real killings.”
The Trump administration says SOUTHCOM’s counternarcotics operations have led to “record reductions in illicit maritime activity” — including a 65% reduction in the movement of suspected drug vessels in the Western Caribbean, 60% in the Eastern Caribbean and almost 50% in key areas of the Eastern Pacific.
MS NOW was unable to independently verify these figures or how they were measured.
“Those numbers matter because every disputed route, every denied corridor and every degraded network makes it harder, makes it more expensive and more dangerous for narco-terrorists to move their poison towards the United States of America,” a second U.S. official said. Another official noted that the military campaign has “created the political space” to work with governments in the region in combating cartels.
John Walsh, director for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy organization, is skeptical of the administration’s claims, noting that there have not been signs of a change in supply or price in the illicit cocaine market and that the boats have nothing to do with the fentanyl trade, which Trump has cited to justify the strikes.
“Murdering a number of low-level drug carriers on the high seas is not having an effect on drug supplies and never, never did, never would, never could,” Walsh told MS NOW. “It’s clear that they in no way can have an impact on the flow of drugs, nor the strength and power of organized crime.”
Walsh called the boat strike effort “massive overkill, literally and figuratively.”
“You’re using these huge and expensive military operations to target and destroy small drug-riding boats,” he said. “That has zero impact on drug flows, because there are many, many other conveyances and routes for drug traffickers to use. That’s long been the case, is still the case, and this only sort of increases the likelihood of that adaptation.”
A U.S. official said such adaptation is evidence the effort is working.
“We’re forcing them to change routes. We’re forcing them to spend more money. We’re forcing them to take greater risks,” the official said.
A U.S. official argued that the use of military assets “yields asymmetric benefit” for the United States.
But any possible benefit of curbing the flow of narcotics comes at a human cost.
Annie Shiel of the Center for Civilians in Conflict has been advocating for the affected families in the Caribbean region.
“What we’re talking about is people, civilian families, who may never know what happened to their loved ones, people who never came back from work one day, fishermen who are struggling to provide for their families now because they are afraid to go fish — their livelihood — because of the risk of bombing,” she told MS NOW.
In January, the mother of one Trinidadian man and the sister of another filed a wrongful death lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of the “premeditated and intentional killings” of their son and brother, who they say worked as fishermen and farmers.
The U.S. government has not made public evidence that all of the individuals killed on the boats targeted were smuggling drugs.
Senators are demanding more information about the strikes. The Senate’s version of next year’s defense budget includes a bipartisan provision that cuts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s travel fund by 75% until the Pentagon provides unedited video footage of all boat strikes.
On Tuesday, U.N. experts demanded “an end to unlawful killings” by the U.S., rejecting the U.S. government’s legal claims that drug cartels are carrying out armed attacks. “Calling it a war does not make it one,” the U.N. experts said, adding that they are in contact with the U.S. government.
“These systematic killings gravely violate the fundamental obligation to respect the right to life,” the U.N. experts said. “International law does not permit governments to simply murder alleged criminals at sea, just as the police cannot summarily execute people on the street in United States territory.”
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