The United States carried out an airstrike against a Venezuelan speedboat it alleged was carrying drugs without any warning or announcement. No evidence has been submitted to show that the drugs in question even existed, and there were no survivors who could dispute the official version of the story – in fact, there was a second strike on the remains of the boat specifically in order to kill the survivors of the initial attack (which is a war crime). The military plane that carried out the attack was disguised as a civilian craft (also a war crime). Trump claimed that he had absolute authority to order these extra-judicial killings, and that the people on the boat were trafficking drugs into the United States as justification for the strike. This despite the fact that the boat was hundreds of miles outside of US territorial waters, and was traveling from Venezuela to Trinidad & Tobago at the time.
These deaths would soon be joined by more, as additional alleged drug boats were destroyed without evidence or any attempt to take those on board into custody. By the end of 2025, a total of 36 boats would be destroyed and 114 people killed, with boats sunk in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the Trump administration’s evidence in support of these actions was effectively to say “trust us”. Increasingly few did.
