USA (Parliament Politics Magazine) – The US military says it carried out strikes on three boats accused of drug trafficking in the Pacific Ocean, killing eight people during the operation.
The US Southern Command said that the ships were
“transiting along known narco-trafficking routes… and were engaged in narco-trafficking”
and shared video of the attacks on social media.
As part of President Donald Trump’s intensifying battle against gangs he accuses of carrying drugs in the region, more than 20 vessels in the Pacific and the Caribbean have been targeted in recent months, killing at least 90 people.
The strikes may be outside the laws of armed combat, according to some experts.
Due to the fact that there were two strikes, with survivors of the first being killed in the second, the US’s initial attack on September 2nd has garnered special attention.
A former head prosecutor at the International Criminal Court previously told the BBC that the US military campaign as a whole qualified as a premeditated, systematic attack on civilians in times of peace.
The White House retorted that it had protected the United States from cartels
“trying to bring poison to our shores… destroying American lives”
by acting in accordance with the laws of armed conflict.
Together with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is scheduled to brief members of both chambers of Congress on Tuesday.
Later this week, all members of the House and Senate armed services committees were scheduled to watch a video of the contentious “double-tap” incident. Hegseth has been under pressure to release the video.
What evidence supports the boats were drug trafficking vessels?
US Southern Command cited intelligence indicating the three boats followed honored medicine trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific, but released no physical substantiation like medicines, manifests, or dispatches intercepts post-strikes.
Claims on undisclosed intelligence patterns from previous operations, including vessel biographies matching Venezuelan or Colombian combination” go- presto” boats used in Operation Southern Spear. Videotape footage shows strikes only, with no visible medicine bales recovered, unlike some earlier incidents where floating packages were noted.
Critics, including Human Rights Watch and legal experts, highlight minimum public evidence beyond route data and” narco- terrorist” markers, raising enterprises over verification amid 95 deaths since September. No independent evidence or survivor evidence has substantiated loads for these specific vessels.