The U.S. Military Has Blown Up More Than 220 People on Alleged Drug Boats — Without Trial, Warning, or Public Evidence — Under a Secret Legal Memo Experts Call "a License to Kill." Now a Pentagon Report Claims It Killed Zero Civilians, a New Yorker Investigation Points to an Innocent Ecuadorian Fishing Boat, and the Prosecutor Investigating the Strikes Was Assassinated
Since September 2025, the Trump administration has carried out a campaign of lethal military strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, and now on land in Latin America — killing more than 220 people it labels "narcoterrorists," without trial, without warning, and without publicly showing the evidence. Legal experts across the spectrum call the strikes extrajudicial killings inconsistent with international law: the administration asserts, in a secret legal memo, that the victims are "unlawful combatants" in a "non-international armed conflict" between the United States and a classified list of drug cartels. Former Defense Department attorney Sarah Harrison said the policy asserts "a license to kill"; former State Department lawyer Charlie Trumbull called it "more problematic than Iran" because it rests on "the president just waving a magic wand"; Rep. Jason Crow, who reviewed the memo, called it "a pretty farcical analysis." Now the accountability is collapsing on every front at once. In August 2026, the Pentagon released a review claiming its 2025 strikes killed no civilians — a report The Intercept called a "total whitewash," given the more than 120 civilians documented killed. A New Yorker investigation into the disappearance of the Ecuadorian fishing vessel Fiorella suggests the U.S. is striking boats it will not even acknowledge, opening a "hidden front" under Operation Southern Spear. And an Ecuadorian prosecutor investigating the boat strikes was assassinated. Rights groups, the families of dead men, and the Pentagon's own inspector general are all now demanding answers the administration is fighting to withhold.