The U.S. Has Now Killed at Least 168 People in ‘Narcoterrorist’ Boat Strikes
We have yet to rescue a single "survivor" in the entire boat strike campaign.
Photo via U.S. Southern Command. Splinter boat strikes
The United States killed six more people on the Pacific Ocean yesterday, in a news headline that barely registered as a blip among more pressing concerns such as the abject failure of Iran-U.S. war negotiations, or Donald Trump deciding he didn’t have quite enough enemies and picking a fight with the Pope, leader of a global religion with 1.4 billion faithful adherents. Or perhaps more accurately, the U.S. killed five people outright on the Pacific, and left one “survivor” behind with a 100% chance of death, as has become our cruel, war-crimey standard operating procedure to barely pretend to conduct search and rescue operations.
I can’t exactly blame folks for letting U.S. Southern Command’s boat strike campaign against supposed “narcoterrorists” slip from the center of attention when we’ve invaded multiple countries since the last time it was dominating headlines, but it bears noting that the killings have continued all the same. To date, the U.S. has killed at least 168 people supposedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific, without bothering to offer a shred of physical evidence that the drugs were even present, and while leaving any survivors to die in glaring violation of maritime law.
On Sunday, the latest casualties in “Operation Southern Spear” came from two separate boat strikes, targeting two vessels “operated by designated terrorist organizations.” Which terrorist organizations? Well, our government and military refuses to tell us that information. Why would we want to know who we’re killing? We’re told only that they were “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific,” with no evidence to actually prove they were transporting drugs at the time. U.S. Southern Command goes on to say that “two male narco-terrorists were killed, and one narco-terrorist survived the first strike. Three male narco-terrorists were killed during the second strike. Following the engagements, USSOUTHCOM immediately notified U.S. Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivor.” The announcement also contains the fantastic corpo-speak line of “applying total systemic friction on the cartels,” which would have sounded perfectly apropos for say, Office Space.
169 people extrajudicially executed in 46 strikes.
Stay disgusted.
— Adam Isacson (@adamisacson.com) Apr 12, 2026 at 8:51 PM
As for the “search and rescue system,” we’ve already written at length about the fake, performative so-called rescue missions that U.S. Southern Command has outsourced to others such as the Coast Guard, in which the navy blows up a boat or series of boats hundreds and hundreds of miles into the middle of the Pacific, and then relays that information to Coast Guard vessels that must depart from thousands of miles away to reach a destination where they already know they won’t be finding any survivors. In one more recent case, the dispatched “rescue” team didn’t arrive on the site of the boat strikes until a stunning 45 hours after the strikes had happened. As Brian Finucane, a former state department lawyer and expert on the laws of war put it while speaking with The Intercept: “It does not appear as if they were eager to rescue additional survivors and then be faced with the question of ‘what do we do with them?’ We’re going to hand off responsibility to the Coast Guard, which is going to arrive in a few days from California and look around and not find anything. So you can draw your own conclusions from that sequence.”
It is indeed not difficult to “draw your own conclusions” from this U.S. behavior: We have decided that actually ending up with survivors of these boat strikes would be more trouble than it is worth, and have thus designed our operations to avoid the possibility of anyone surviving. That includes incidents like the above, in which the U.S. struck one boat in a three-boat caravan, killing those on board and causing eight other people to leap into the Pacific Ocean from the other two boats in the caravan. Rather than acknowledge that these men clearly posed no threat at this point and had effectively surrendered by jumping into the ocean 400 miles from shore, the U.S. proceeded to blow up the other two boats anyway, sentencing the men in the water to certain death. None of them remained when “rescue” teams showed up nearly two days later. It was an execution, plain and simple.
The U.S. just killed five more people in its latest boat strikes. The death toll of these extrajudicial killings is almost 170 civilians.
And more deaths are on the horizon.
Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin America Are Just the Beginning
theintercept.com/2026/03/23/t…— Nick Turse (@nickturse.bsky.social) Apr 12, 2026 at 8:02 PM
This method of ensuring there are no survivors to give accounts to the media is presumably seen as preferable by the Trump administration to what it did in September of 2025 at the beginning of the boat strike campaign, when we infamously fired a second missile at the sailors clinging to boat wreckage, in order to assure their deaths. At the time, GOP members of Congress like Sen. Tom Cotton (AR) made the unforgivable decision to justify cold-blooded murder in the so-called “double tap” strike, with the senator claiming that in the video footage provided to Congress, the survivors of the exploded boat were “not distressed” and were therefore still valid military targets rather than human beings we were legally obligated to rescue, a cornerstone expectation of maritime law. Subsequently, the Trump administration has been emboldened to continue carrying out however many extrajudicial killings in the region as it cares to engage in, while the American people increasingly tune out the atrocities.
Suffice to say, even with other news dominating daily headlines, we should still be calling on our elected officials to cease the wanton killing of random people in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, strikes that are being carried out without any kind of verification or information provided to the American public. We have a right to know who we’re murdering on the high seas, and the government has a responsibility to provide evidence backing up why we’re killing these people. We can’t afford to normalize these extrajudicial killings of an unknown enemy we’re supposedly “at war” with, when our government won’t even explain who they are. After all, who can say what ill-defined entity the Trump administration will claim we’re at war with next?
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