US Pacific boat strike leaves two dead as anti-trafficking raids draw fresh criticism

Washington’s armed forces have reported that two individuals died and a third lived through the most recent assault on a boat in the eastern Pacific. US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) publicised the incident on Friday, releasing footage that appears to show a craft under way taking a missile hit before being consumed by fire.

SOUTHCOM directs American military activity across the Caribbean and Latin America. It asserted the boat was run by “Designated Terrorist Organizations” but offered nothing to substantiate that allegation. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” it said in the statement. It added that no service personnel were injured.

The command said this was the third such engagement in May and noted it followed an earlier US account of three fatalities in a comparable incident. Since American forces launched the September campaign against figures Washington describes as narcotics traffickers, the dead are put at more than 170, though tallies differ.

The Trump administration has justified the raids by comparing illicit drug flows to a military assault on the United States and by classifying many crime groups tied to the trade as “terrorist” organisations. Jurists specialising in international law, human-rights defenders and several regional heads of government have rejected that framing, arguing the strikes amount to killings outside judicial process and that no situation of armed conflict exists to warrant them. Analysts contend that even genuine involvement in trafficking should be met with prosecution, not lethal force at sea.

Households in Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago have challenged earlier operations, maintaining those lost were not “narco-terrorists” as the Trump administration maintains, but fishers and casual labourers on ordinary crossings between the Caribbean and South America.