208 Murders and Counting

The US military is executing people on the open ocean without trial, without evidence, and without consequence.

The US military struck another boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean today. One person killed, two survivors. The death toll from Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration’s campaign of maritime strikes against vessels it labels narcoterrorist vessels, now stands at a minimum of 208 people since September 2, 2025.

In virtually every announcement of every strike, US Southern Command says the same thing: intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. In virtually every announcement of every strike, the military does not provide evidence that the vessel was actually carrying drugs. A video is posted to X showing a small boat on open water being hit and bursting into flames. The Coast Guard is notified to look for survivors. The number goes up.

Two hundred and eight people. In nine months. On the open ocean. Without trial. Without charges. Without public evidence. Without a declaration of war by Congress, which is the only body the Constitution authorizes to do such a thing.

Let us use the words that apply. Legal experts from Human Rights Watch, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, and a retired US Navy captain writing in the US Naval Institute’s own proceedings have all reached the same conclusion: these are extrajudicial executions. The administration is not permitted under international law to deliberately target civilians, even suspected criminals, who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The “war on drugs” is a rhetorical construct, not a legal armed conflict. Calling it one does not make it one, and calling it one is specifically what the administration has done to circumvent its obligations under international law, as Colombia’s president and Venezuela have both stated explicitly.

Even the military’s own lawyers said so. The top JAG officer raised legal concerns about the strikes before they began. JAG opinions are supposed to be the primary guiding principle as political leaders decide whether to take such action. The strikes happened anyway.

The pretext does not hold on its own terms. Fentanyl, the drug responsible for the largest share of US overdose deaths, roughly 70,000 Americans per year, is primarily smuggled overland from Mexico, not by boat through the Pacific. The DEA has said this. Factcheck.org has confirmed it. The Intercept’s reporting found the administration’s claims that boat strikes have halted 97 percent of cocaine shipments to be baseless. Trump has said Operation Southern Spear has saved more than one million American lives. Experts call that assertion laughable. Cocaine travels primarily by sea, but cocaine is not fentanyl, and fentanyl is why people are dying, and the people being killed in boats in the Pacific are not the supply chain for the drug killing Americans in their homes.

So why is it happening. The answer sitting in plain sight is that the administration declared an armed conflict with Latin American cartels, designated them terrorist organizations, pointed the military at small boats in international waters, and began killing the people on them, because killing people on boats in the Pacific plays to the base, because the imagery of a vessel bursting into flames on X looks like decisive action, because no one on the boats can contest the charge of narcoterrorism from inside a fireball, and because the press has largely processed 208 deaths as a beat story rather than a atrocity.

Prior to Southern Spear, suspected drug trafficking at sea was handled by law enforcement and the Coast Guard. Cartel members and drug smugglers were treated as criminals with due process rights: evidence, charges, courts, the whole apparatus that distinguishes a government from a death squad. That apparatus was set aside in September 2025 and replaced with a military targeting process that the Pentagon’s own inspector general has now been asked to evaluate, meaning the Defense Department’s internal watchdog is currently investigating whether the military followed its own protocols when it killed 208 people over nine months on the open ocean.

The inspector general will report. The legal challenges will continue. Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro labeled the killings murders and suspended intelligence sharing with the United States in response, and received US sanctions for doing so, which is what happens when a country calls a thing by its name in this particular neighborhood. Rand Paul, not a man who agrees with much, called the strikes extrajudicial killings. Lawmakers from both parties have questioned both the legality and the effectiveness of the campaign. The administration has provided little public evidence, vehemently defended the use of lethal force, and kept shooting.

Two hundred and eight people. The number will be higher by the time you read this, because the strikes are ongoing, because no legal mechanism has stopped them, because the courts move slower than boats burn, and because we have developed as a country a specific and practiced capacity for not looking directly at the things our military does in international waters when the people dying do not look like us and the word “narcoterrorist” is attached to them before the fire goes out.

The word for killing people without trial on the basis of unverified intelligence because they were traveling a known route is not counternarcotics. It is not national security. It is not even the war on drugs, which was itself a catastrophic and racially weaponized policy failure, but at least arrested people before it destroyed them.

The word is murder. We have a number now. It is 208, and it is going up, and we are not calling it what it is, and that silence is also a choice, and the choice also has a number attached to it, and that number is every one of them.