Nearly two weeks after the US military attack on a Venezuelan vessel suspected of carrying drugs, information about the attack, which left all 11 occupants dead, continues to trickle in. The limited information raised questions about its legal legitimacy. A group of senators demanded official explanations in a letter to President Donald Trump, while human rights advocates denounced the fact that"this administration is normalizing extrajudicial killings."
Beyond the video Trump posted on social media showing the boat exploding, and a notification letter that the White House is required by law to send to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, little information has been released to the public about an incident that has brought tensions between the United States and Venezuela to a boil. A briefing at the Capitol was postponed at the last minute, and when it finally took place, it was very brief: only a handful of advisers were invited and no lawmakers were included. The public has also not been informed of the exact location of the attack, the identities of the dead, or what drugs were allegedly on board.
The scant information provided by the government raises more and more doubts. On the 2nd, Trump claimed that the boat's occupants had been positively identified as drug traffickers from the Tren de Aragua organization. They were headed, he said, to the United States. The following day, he added that communications had been intercepted confirming this, although these have not been made public.
At the briefing, administration officials confirmed that U.S. forces opened fire on the vessel multiple times once it realized it was being pursued and turned back, according to two sources consulted by the AP.
The Pentagon is defending the attack as an act of self-defense against drug traffickers from a group included on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations since last February. In this version, the attack was justified because the boat posed"an imminent threat" to the U.S., and the president—according to this administration—has the authority to order military strikes against such threats without needing congressional approval.
The White House insists that the boat's occupants were members of the Tren de Aragua group and that, by giving the order to open fire,"the president behaved in accordance with the laws of armed conflict." His Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, however, considers this an excuse to invade his country and overthrow him, while the Trump administration repeatedly accuses him of being a drug trafficking leader. The Venezuelan government also maintains that the 11 people on board the boat were civilians, not drug traffickers.
There are facts that don't fit the American narrative."Normally, a drug boat carries two or three people at most, the minimum necessary to move the product, because you want to dedicate the space to as much cargo as possible," notes Sanho Tree, director of the Institute for Policy Studies' counternarcotics project. In Caribbean coastal areas where road communications are poor, he recalls, boating is the preferred means of transport,"whether to transport cocaine or coconuts." And drugs that enter the US by sea usually do so through the Pacific, not the Atlantic or the Caribbean.
In Tree's opinion, the theory that the boat was headed to the US doesn't make much sense either: it's too far a destination for such a fragile vessel."You risk storms, the boat flooding," or losing your cargo or your life, among other things. It's also unclear whether it had fentanyl on board: human trafficking from Venezuela is much more common than trafficking of that narcotic, experts point out.
Following the attack, Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially claimed the boat may have been headed to Trinidad and Tobago, a account he later amended to align with the president’s and suggest it was likely headed to the U.S. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has even suggested the attack may have occurred in Trinidad and Tobago’s territorial waters, where Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissesar publicly congratulated the Trump administration for destroying the boat.
Until now, the Coast Guard had been responsible for intercepting boats suspected of transporting drugs. Standard procedure would have required the boat to stop. The vessel and its cargo would have been seized. And its occupants would have been interrogated, detained, and tried. In this case,"instead of intercepting it, on the president's orders, we blew it up. And it will happen again," Rubio declared after the incident.
Letter from the Senators
"We await the Administration's responses, but I fear this act was unlawful," Virginia Senator Tim Kaine said Wednesday from his office on Capitol Hill, responding to questions from this newspaper. The top Democrat on the Senate subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere is the sponsor of a letter to the US president, signed by 24 lawmakers and sent this week, demanding answers before Wednesday regarding the legality of the attack, the intelligence that led to the decision to strike, and the reasons for blowing up the vessel instead of intercepting it.
“With interception, we can often discover which group they belong to and who their leaders are. We can obtain information that we can use to take further action against drug traffickers. Now this Administration has decided to attack. And when an attack occurs, and people die, we can't obtain that information for use in further legal action against drug traffickers,” Kaine explains in perfect Spanish.
In the letter, the signing senators, all Democrats, also demand information about the administration's threats to launch similar attacks in the Caribbean and Latin America. They recall that in August, several media outlets reported that Trump had signed a"secret directive authorizing the use of military force in the region, despite the lack of any legal basis for such a use of military force."
“Premeditated murder of suspects”
Human rights defenders have echoed the accusations that the destruction of the boat was "an extrajudicial execution," as described by Sarah Harrison of the International Crisis Group, an organization dedicated to conflict prevention and resolution."This was a premeditated killing of criminal suspects," she notes. In short, a military solution was used to address a problem of maintaining law and order. Harrison also points out that drug trafficking is generally not punishable by capital punishment in the United States.
Daphne Eviatar, Amnesty International's US director of Security and Human Rights, adds:"You can designate an organization as a terrorist organization, but that doesn't mean we're in an armed conflict with that group, and the designation doesn't provide any legal authorization to kill them."
Human rights advocates also point out that in the first weeks of Trump's term, the Pentagon dismissed the heads of the judicial services of each branch of the armed forces, precisely the people who could have alerted the government to the problematic nature of the attack.
The Trump administration “has taken this step without providing any legal argument whatsoever, beyond saying it respects international law,” agrees Sarah Yager of Human Rights Watch. “This president believes he can kill anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances, and that he won’t have to explain himself, and that he will enjoy impunity from any semblance of accountability.”
For now, the US government insists that other similar attacks could occur as part of a military campaign against drug trafficking organizations it has designated as terrorists. It has added F-35 aircraft in Puerto Rico to the Pentagon's fleet in international waters off the Venezuelan coast. Three amphibious ships were conducting military maneuvers near that island, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth paid a surprise visit to this week. There, Hegseth reminded the military that they are not on a training mission: they are, he said, deployed on the"front lines" of a critical counterdrug mission.
