U.S. Military Conducts Boat Strike in Venezuela, Killing Two

U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said Joint Task Force Southern Spear carried out a “lethal kinetic strike” on Friday against a vessel it said was operated by “Designated Terrorist Organizations,” killing 2 people and leaving 1 survivor. The U.S. Coast Guard said it was coordinating search-and-rescue operations for the survivor.

The incident brings the publicly acknowledged death toll under Operation Southern Spear to at least 117 people since the campaign began, according to U.S. officials. The Trump administration has framed the operation as a response to maritime narcotics trafficking routes feeding the U.S. drug market.

“We Are Left With The Dead”

While Washington frames the strikes as counter-narcotics enforcement, regional leaders have questioned who ultimately benefits from the drug economy. On Jan. 7, Colombian President Gustavo Petro argued that the financial gains of trafficking are largely captured outside producer and transit states, pointing instead to the global financial system.

“Drug trafficking profits, for the most part, stay in international banks, in buildings in the United States,” Petro said, adding that proceeds are laundered through U.S. real estate. The result, he argued, is an asymmetric burden in which violence and casualties are concentrated in the Global South, while the core financial benefits accrue in advanced economies, leaving countries like Colombia, in his words, with “the dead.”

The Jan. 23 strike followed a pause as the U.S. military last acknowledged boat strikes on Dec. 31, when 2 vessels were hit and 5 people were killed. Earlier incidents left survivors, including a Dec. 30 strike in which an unspecified number of people abandoned their vessel before the Coast Guard later suspended its search 3 days afterward. In October, 2 survivors were recovered from an attack on a semi-submersible in the Caribbean and later released to Ecuador and Colombia; 2 other crew members were killed.

Double-Tap Scrutiny and Legal Risk

The campaign has drawn scrutiny since its outset. The first acknowledged strike on Sept. 2 involved 2 successive attacks on the same boat after it failed to sink, killing 2 people who were clinging to the capsized vessel. Democratic lawmakers later pressed the administration for the release of strike footage, raising questions about compliance with the law of armed conflict and whether a “double-tap” constituted a war crime.

Friday’s strike was also the first since a separate U.S. military operation captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and transferred him to New York to face criminal charges. Maduro pleaded not guilty earlier this month. On Jan. 6, the U.S. Justice Department quietly narrowed its allegations, dropping the claim that Maduro led a formal drug cartel known as the “Cartel de los Soles.” A revised indictment now describes the term as a “culture of corruption and patronage” linked to drug money, rather than an actual organization, according to The New York Times.