(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) The US military has dramatically ramped up its bombing campaign against small boats in the waters of Latin America in recent days amid the very fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran, and as it prepares for a potential attack on Cuba.
According to press releases from US Southern Command, the US has blown up five boats in the Eastern Pacific Ocean in five days from April 11 to April 15. In none of the cases has the command offered any evidence to back up its claims that the boats were running drugs, something the Pentagon has never done since the bombing campaign started in September 2025.
SOUTHCOM said that the latest strike, launched on April 15, killed three people. It labeled the dead as “narco-terrorists,” a term the Trump administration uses in its attempts to justify what are extra-judicial executions for an alleged crime that doesn’t receive the death penalty in the US.
According to numbers from The Intercept, the latest strikes bring the total number of boats that have been destroyed to 53 and the total number of people who’ve been killed in the campaign to 178. “They’re murdering at a relentless pace,” Intercept reporter Nick Turse said in a post on X on Wednesday night.
All of the people killed have been civilians since they were operating civilian vessels, were not engaged in combat, and didn’t pose any threat to the US at the time of the strikes.
Last month, the US military escalated its campaign in Latin America by supporting Ecuadorian against alleged drug targets in Ecuador, an effort dubbed “Operation Total Extermination.”
According to a report from The New York Times, one of the first operations involved bombing what the US and Ecuador claimed was a drug camp, but turned out to be a dairy farm, raising questions about the credibility of the US military’s intelligence in the region and claims about what it’s targeting.
US military operations in the region also included the January 3 attack on Venezuela to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The US assault on Venezuela killed 83 people, including four civilians.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
