Death in the Caribbean
A U.S. drone strike sank a fishing boat off Venezuela, killing 11 men. Officials called it narcoterrorism. Critics call it unlawful. But it was just the beginning.
At the end of the road on the northern coast of Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula lies San Juan de Unare, once a quiet fishing village on the Caribbean. Then the traffickers came.
Over the past decade, the fishermen of Unare, as the locals call it, saw their livelihoods stripped away. Engines were stolen from their wooden peñeros, and the boats that once hauled sardines became couriers for cocaine, running east from Colombia toward Trinidad and Tobago.
Earlier this month, one of those boats left Unare bound for Trinidad. It never arrived..
A U.S. drone tracked the 40-foot vessel across international waters. In the early hours of September 2, the pilot opened fire, killing all 11 men on board. Reports say the crew spotted a military aircraft and appeared to turn back before the peñero was repeatedly struck and sunk.
The strike deliberately targeted civilians, in violation of U.S. and international law. The 11 men had no ties to terrorism and posed no threat to the United States. They may have been criminals driven by profit, but they were not ideologues. Eight came from Unare, the rest from nearby towns on the peninsula.
"This is about sending a message and psychological operations, not protecting U.S. citizens," said Cian Westmoreland, a former Air Force drone program technician who has spoken out against the U.S. drone wars.
Westmoreland told The After-Action Report that he sees the boat strikes as less a counter-narcotics mission than a show of force, the kind of operation meant to set the stage for a coup.
The September 2 attack was followed by at least three additional airstrikes that brought the death total to 17, rattling nerves in Venezuela as Washington quietly backs a push to weaken Nicolás Maduro's hold on power. The United States has put a $50 million bounty on the Venezuelan leader and said he leads a drug-trafficking cartel.
Critics say the strikes in Venezuela drive home the same lesson villagers in Afghanistan learned long ago: The drone, once billed as a precision tool in the war on terror, has instead become an instrument of terror.
"The character of interdiction has changed," said Lisa Ling, a former Air Force technical sergeant who worked on drone surveillance systems and also became a critic of remote killing.
"I think that before it was more akin to following laws and norms, and now it's terror,” Ling told The After-Action Report. “Using terror as a tool.”
Little Justification for Escalation
For years, U.S. Coast Guard and Navy ships stopped and searched drug boats in the Caribbean, guided by Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-South), a Key West–based unit that fuses human sources, signals intelligence, and radar. In some years, JIATF-South has accounted for half the world’s cocaine seizures.
But interdiction, Trump officials now argue, no longer works. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, he blew it up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared. “And it’ll happen again.”
On Sunday, Dominican authorities said they recovered hundreds of packages of cocaine from a destroyed speedboat headed for their shores. The Dominican government, alerted by JIATF-South and U.S. Southern Command, called it their first joint operation with the United States in the Caribbean.
Eight U.S. warships have been deployed to the region, raising the risk of open confrontation and forcing leaders to take sides. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, said the strikes amounted to “murder” and were “only for television.” Trinidad’s prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, welcomed the U.S. aggression: “I have no sympathy for traffickers. The U.S. military should kill them all violently.” Venezuela’s defense minister threatened retaliation if the island allowed itself to be used as a U.S. base.
The Trump administration has offered little justification for an escalation that risks blowback at home and abroad. Trump boasted on Truth Social that the crew were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted, “We knew exactly who was in that boat.” Yet the administration has provided no evidence to support either claim.
The administration has also said nothing about how the strike was carried out. Multiple sources told The Intercept that Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, conducted the lethal operation. SOCOM, based in Tampa, Florida, maintains a fleet of about 50 Reaper MQ-9 drones armed with Hellfire missiles "to perform strike, coordination, and reconnaissance against high-value, fleeting, and time-sensitive targets," according to a congressional budget justification.
The administration's silence on the strikes may reflect an effort to conceal how closely the targets were being watched. The New York Times reported on a "clandestine deployment" of elite special operations units to the region. Experts told the Times that the special operations deployment "suggests that strikes or commando raids inside Venezuela itself may be in the works.”
Growing Pentagon Concerns
With so much at stake, the legal rationale for the strikes rests on shaky ground. Trump’s required War Powers Resolution report on the Venezuelan airstrike did not rely upon the Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda. Nor does it cite the State Department’s designation of Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. Instead, the president relied solely on his constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief.
In the Pentagon, there seems to be growing concern that may not be enough. "We are hearing that there are individual folks in uniform involved in these operations who are now asking for legal cover because they believe that they potentially violate the law," Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said during a hearing last week, alluding to reporting by The Wall Street Journal.
Veterans of the drone program say that the line between lawful and unlawful has been crossed so many times in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere that pilots have developed a different calculus.
“It isn’t whether an order is lawful that matters to the person pressing the button,” said Daniel Hale, a former Air Force signals analyst imprisoned for leaking documents on civilian deaths in the drone war. “The question is whether it’s a moral action they can live with. For many, that line is children—and there are some who can’t live with it at all, and wind up killing themselves.”
“It is such a cowardly thing to fly a drone,” Hale told The After-Action Report. “It is one of the most cowardly and pathetic things that the military has ever devised.”
Legally, “just following orders” is not a defense. Military courts have held that a homicide committed under a lawful order may be justified, but one carried out under a patently illegal order is not. An order offers no protection if “a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know it to be illegal.”
Still, Westmoreland said drone operators are likely to comply because the system makes refusing orders nearly impossible. Pilots assume commanders and JAGs have cleared legality. “Lawyers in the program are there to provide legal justification and authorization for orders, not challenge executive authority,” he said.
Strikes are framed as imminent threats. Firing from a distance feels safer than stopping and searching vessels on the open seas. Responsibility shifts upward, prosecution is rare, and remote warfare itself creates the psychological distance that lowers the threshold for compliance.
The risks of reprisal also run very high for those who might step out of line. "In the drone program, every action is shielded by layers of secrecy, including legal oversight, which means that there is hardly any meaningful way to go against the chain of command past one's own resignation or leaking,” Westmoreland said.
Ling agreed. "The culture of the military is that even when it's an unlawful order, you follow it first and question later, and that is still wrong,” she said.
The Flow Continues
One thing that the strike won't change is the drug trade. The strikes may generate headlines and scare Maduro's henchmen, but they don't slow the flow of cocaine. Routes and shipment methods change, and the drugs keep flowing.
El Pitazo, a Venezuelan news outlet, reported that before the airstrike, two other boats loaded with drugs traveled the same route unchallenged.
But something has changed. The drones overhead have transformed the waters off Unare into something more familiar to villagers in Afghanistan or Yemen—a place where death can come from the sky without warning, and sometimes without explanation.
The question that hangs over Unare and the rest of the country is what comes next.