U.S. officials have yet to cite the legal authority that justified Tuesday’s airstrike on an alleged Venezuelan drug smuggling boat in international waters, as criticism mounts from legal experts.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighter jets to a Puerto Rico airfield to conduct operations against drug cartels, two sources briefed on the matter told Reuters in a report published Friday. The advanced fighter jets add to a more muscular presence in the southern Caribbean by the U.S. military in recent weeks.
The strike, announced Tuesday by U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his administration, killed 11 people. The White House said the boat carried members of Tren de Aragua, a gang the administration alleges is closely linked to the government of Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicholas Maduro.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told Fox News on Wednesday that the U.S. “knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented.”
As yet, those details haven’t been provided, even as a presidential administration is required by law to advise about military action not authorized by Congress within 48 hours, a deadline that passed Thursday.
‘Disproportionate lethal force’
The Washington Office of Latin America (WOLA), a non-governmental organization, said in a statement on Thursday that the U.S. action “violates the letter and spirit of more than a century of international standards and the United States’s own regulations for maritime operations against civilian vessels in international waters.”
“What we have seen so far suggests that the U.S. armed forces did something that it has never done, to our knowledge, in more than 35 years of military involvement in drug interdiction in the Caribbean Sea: an instant escalation to disproportionate lethal force against a civilian vessel without any apparent self-defence justification,” the organization said.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not provide specifics on what legal review process preceded the strikes when asked in Ecuador on Thursday by a Washington Post reporter if drug smugglers from countries that aren’t adversaries like Venezuela could “face unilateral execution from U.S. forces.”
In his answer, Rubio asserted that U.S. allies in the region would “help us find these people and blow them up if that’s what it takes.”
Debates over the legality of pre-emptive strikes have occurred frequently in recent years. Barack Obama’s administration took out U.S.-born, Islamist militant Anwar al-Awlaki, while Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani was killed by a U.S. strike during Trump’s first administration. Joe Biden’s administration and the current Trump White House have both overseen strikes on Houthi militants the U.S. has accused of threatening international ships in the Red Sea.
But what took place in recent days may differ from those examples.
“Intentional killing outside armed conflict hostilities is unlawful unless it is to save a life immediately,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, an expert on international law and the use of force at the University of Notre Dame Law School. “No hostilities were occurring in the Caribbean.”
Democrats seek more information
The current administration, as part of its expansive deportation efforts of undocumented U.S. residents, has sought to depict Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization, a designation that has been debated by some experts, though Canada also named the group this year a terrorist entity.
As well, analysts who track global drug trafficking have questioned both the scope of the gang’s presence on the international stage, as well as how closely linked it is with the Maduro government.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday the U.S. carried out a military strike in the southern Caribbean, killing 11 people aboard what he said was a drug-carrying vessel operated by the Tren de Aragua gang that departed from Venezuela.
Criticism on Capitol Hill this week has been relatively circumspect, likely reflecting the fact that one rare area of bipartisan agreement in Congress among Republican and Democratic lawmakers is the illegitimacy of Maduro’s leadership, given suspect Venezuelan elections. Democratic congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut is among those who’ve vocalized concerns over what legal authority the president had to order the strike, per a Politico report.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in an op-ed piece this week that it would be a mistake to see international laws applied unequally, based on who is targeted.
“If we close our eyes to this instance of misapplied war rules because of dislike for Venezuelan drug cartels or fear of illicit drugs, we risk setting a precedent in which our most basic right to life is suddenly dependent on whether Trump or other leaders decide in effect to declare a war against us,” Roth wrote in the Guardian.
“Even despicable individuals are entitled to arrest and prosecution rather than summary killing,” Roth added, while pointing to the example of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who faces trial at the International Criminal Court related to indiscriminate killings as part of his administration’s war on drugs.
American allies and adversaries alike have also been reluctant to offer reaction in the absence of more information, though Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva reportedly accused the U.S. on Thursday in general terms of violating international law with its Venezuelan policies.
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