{"id":17016,"date":"2026-04-15T13:01:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/17016\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:01:42","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:01:42","slug":"the-u-s-is-still-routinely-killing-civilians-in-boats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/17016\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Is Still Routinely Killing Civilians in Boats"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration is ramping up its boat strike campaign, conducting three strikes in the space of three days. The U.S. has now conducted 50 strikes in its campaign of targeting civilian vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The death toll now exceeds 170<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On April 11, the U.S. conducted attacks on two boats in the Pacific Ocean, killing two people in the first strike and leaving one shipwrecked. The search for that survivor has been abandoned and that person is presumed dead. Three people were killed in the second strike that day. These attacks were followed by another strike in the Eastern Pacific on April 13 that killed two more people.<\/p>\n

As part of\u00a0Operation Southern Spear<\/a>, the U.S. military has now\u00a0destroyed 51 vessels\u00a0and\u00a0killed 171 civilians. The Trump administration claims its victims<\/a> are members of at least one of\u00a024 or more cartels and criminal gangs\u00a0with whom it claims to be at war but\u00a0refuses to name<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The boat strikes recently moved to land as so-called \u201cbilateral kinetic actions<\/a>\u201d along the Colombia\u2013Ecuador border. \u201cThe joint effort, named \u2018Operation Total Extermination<\/a>,\u2019 is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,\u201d\u00a0Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, announced last month.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a danger that these lawless killings just become background noise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a danger that these lawless killings just become background noise,\u201d Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept in the wake of the 50th boat strike. \u201cThe U.S. Congress remains the institution best situated to bring these to halt \u2014 if not now, then at least after the midterms. And members of Congress and 2028 hopefuls should be vowing accountability for those who participated in unlawful killings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finucane and other experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress,\u00a0from both parties<\/a>, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings<\/a> because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians \u2014 even suspected criminals \u2014 who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the\u00a0long-running U.S. war on drugs<\/a>, in which law enforcement agencies detained\u00a0suspected drug smugglers<\/a> and brought them to trial on criminal charges.<\/p>\n

After blowing up one of the boats on Saturday, U.S. Southern Command sent a message to the Coast Guard alerting them to \u201ca person in distress in the Pacific Ocean,\u201d Coast Guard spokesperson Kenneth Wiese told The Intercept.<\/p>\n

The Coast Guard \u201cimmediately commenced search efforts,\u201d calling on ships in the area to divert to search for the survivor of the U.S. attack. The next day, a French-flagged cargo ship, MV Marius, diverted to the scene but \u201ccompleted its search with negative results and departed the area due to operational and fuel constraints,\u201d according to the Coast Guard. On Monday, a U.S.-flagged research vessel, RV Sikuliaq, \u201ccompleted two search patterns provided by the Coast Guard with negative results.\u201d The same day, at 10:43 Pacific time, the Coast Guard suspended its efforts after having found \u201cno signs of survivors or debris.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most boat strike survivors have been purposefully killed or left to drown<\/a> by the United States. Two survivors, for example, clung\u00a0to the wreckage of a vessel<\/a> attacked on September 2, 2025, for roughly 45 minutes. Adm. Frank Bradley \u2014 then the head of Joint Special Operations Command \u2014 sought guidance from his top legal adviser<\/a>, Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC. He then ordered a follow-up attack,\u00a0first reported<\/a>\u00a0by The Intercept in September, that killed the shipwrecked men<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Search efforts for survivors have seldom resulted in rescues. After a U.S boat strike on December 30, a Coast Guard plane did not head toward the site of the attack for almost two days, reporting from Airwars and The Intercept revealed<\/a>. A total of 11 civilians died following that attack\u2014 including eight who jumped overboard.<\/p>\n


\"\" <\/p>\n

\n Read Our Complete Coverage <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The Coast Guard atypically rescued the survivor of a March 19 attack that killed two civilians. The Costa Rican press<\/a> recently identified the deceased as Ecuadoran citizens Pedro Ram\u00f3n Holgu\u00edn, 40, and Carlos Manuel Rodr\u00edguez Sol\u00f3rzano, 34. The injured man was identified as Jos\u00e9 David Torres Hurtado, 21, a Colombian national. He reportedly remains hospitalized in the burn unit at San Juan de Dios Hospital, \u201cwhere, according to medical reports, his condition is critical but stable,\u201d said Costa Rican authorities.<\/p>\n

The Intercept reported<\/a> on Monday that the U.S. is waging a pressure campaign against the leading pan-American human rights watchdog to squash a potential investigation into\u00a0the illegal boat strike campaign. After a recent meeting of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the State Department pushed the organization to shift its focus to other issues instead of the U.S. campaign of extrajudicial killings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration is ramping up its boat strike campaign, conducting three strikes in the space of three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1493,10562,8,1501,1494,9,1492,1498,1499,1500,1496,1497,3282,7,1495],"class_list":{"0":"post-17016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-article-type-article-post","9":"tag-day-tuesday","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-language-english","12":"tag-medium","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-page-type-article","15":"tag-partner-factiva","16":"tag-partner-smart-news","17":"tag-partner-social-flow","18":"tag-subject-national-security","19":"tag-subject-world","20":"tag-time-17-00","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-wc-0-999"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116408856426837376","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}