A months-long collaborative investigation has identified 13 people killed in US military operations targeting boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, revealing a pattern of strikes against impoverished young men from Latin America and the Caribbean rather than major narcotics traffickers.
The Trump administration has repeatedly justified the campaign, which has claimed nearly 200 lives since last year, as strikes against narco-terrorists moving drugs toward the United States. But the joint effort by 20 journalists coordinated through the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism showed that identified victims came from extremely poor communities and included fishermen with no apparent connection to drug smuggling.
Only three of the 194 people killed had been publicly identified before this investigation, and only after families sued the White House. The new names represent a significant expansion in accountability and visibility for a largely invisible campaign.
The eight newly identified Venezuelan victims include Juan Carlos Fuentes, 43, and Luis Ramon Amundarain, 36, who worked as drivers in Guiria before being hired for what they were told would be legitimate boat work. On October 3, the vessel carrying them was bombed. Their widows told investigators the men had no involvement in drug trafficking, though some evidence suggested they were about to transport illegal cargo. The direction of their journey raised questions: boats typically move drugs northward from South America, not southbound toward Venezuela.
The investigation identified three Colombians, two Ecuadorians, two Trinidadians, and one person from Saint Lucia, including several fishermen whose families have filed lawsuits against the United States. Even those victims with apparent ties to drug smuggling fit a consistent profile: desperate people in communities ravaged by poverty and organized crime who took dangerous work to survive.
Maria Teresa Ronderos, director of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, framed the operation starkly. "The US is not taking down any Pablo Escobar or Joaquin El Chapo Guzman," she said. The investigation involved journalists from Colombia and Venezuela alongside the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, backed by international NGOs including the UK-based Airwars.
Ronderos described the investigation as extraordinarily difficult, hampered by fear among families, communities, and local authorities. "Official government sources, prosecutors' offices, nobody wants to speak because everyone fears damaging relations with the US and facing retaliation," she explained.
The campaign has failed to reduce drug flow into the United States, according to security analysts and the investigation itself. Instead, entire communities have been destabilized. Fishing communities stopped working for weeks out of fear of bombardment, leaving residents facing hunger. Children lost breadwinners in families already struggling with extreme poverty.
The US Southern Command defended the operations, stating they were "deliberate, lawful and precise, directed specifically at narco-terrorists and their enablers." In eight months of strikes, however, the military has produced no evidence that any of the 194 victims were involved in drug trafficking.
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and former US State Department lawyer, dismissed the operation as a genuine counter-drug effort. "I think this was in part a military spectacle to give the illusion of the administration doing something macro about drugs," he said.
Ronderos raised a fundamental legal argument: "There is no death penalty for cocaine trafficking. So the fact that they were killed without even having the chance to defend themselves is deeply troubling." The United Nations, numerous countries, and human rights organizations have condemned the strikes as extrajudicial executions. Yet they continue.
Finucane warned that the killings risk becoming normalized or mere background noise in an administration conducting multiple military operations simultaneously. The human cost, Ronderos emphasized, falls on the most vulnerable: "Whether those men were doing legal or illegal work, children were left without the person who brought food home, in families that were already extremely poor."
Author James Rodriguez: "This investigation pierces through the fog of national security rhetoric to show that US military operations in the Caribbean are not serious counter-drug work, just a parade of strikes against poor young men while actual kingpins remain untouched."
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