The attack comes a week after the Trump administration was sued by the families of two men killed in an earlier strike.
Just over a week after the families of two Trinidadian men sued the Trump administration over the boat bombings that killed their relatives, the US Department of Defense killed two more people in the eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing the total death toll to at least 128 in the White House’s operation that it claims is targeting drug traffickers.
The US Southern Command said in a social media post that at the direction of Cmdr. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by designated terrorist organizations.”
As with the other dozens of strikes the Pentagon has carried out in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea since September, Southern Command did not provide evidence for its claim that “narco-terrorists” were killed in the attack or that the vessel was traveling “along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
The White House has persistently claimed that the boat strikes are aimed at stopping drug cartels based in Venezuela from sending drugs to the US, but international and domestic intelligence agencies have not identified Venezuela as a major player in the trafficking of illicit substances — particularly not of fentanyl, the leading cause of overdoses in the US.
