The ocean glimmers quietly until the missiles fall.
In the last few months, U.S. forces have turned suspected drug vessels into watery graves — 13 strikes, 57 dead, according to officials. The White House calls it self-defense. Human rights observers call it murder dressed as national security.
In a small fishing village in Trinidad, an old man named Cornell Clement clutches a photograph of his grandson, Chad Joseph, believed to be among the dead. “They say he was a trafficker,” Clement says, “but where is the proof?”
The New War at Sea
The Trump administration has redrawn the boundaries of America’s “war on drugs.” Instead of the Coast Guard intercepting smugglers, the military now uses armed drones and precision strikes — a strategy more often seen in counterterrorism campaigns.
Officials claim the targets are not ordinary smugglers but “narco-terrorists,” responsible for thousands of American deaths through fentanyl and cocaine trafficking. Washington’s reasoning: drug cartels are not mere criminals but hostile networks waging war against the United States.
Caracas, meanwhile, has denied Washington’s assertion that Venezuela’s president secretly commands one of the major trafficking gangs, Tren de Aragua.
Human rights groups have condemned the campaign as a leap over the legal line separating law enforcement from extrajudicial killing.
The Legal Tightrope
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war — but presidents, for decades, have found ways around that. The administration insists that Donald Trump, as commander-in-chief, can use limited force abroad to protect national interests, as long as it doesn’t rise to the level of a formal war.
In a required notice under the War Powers Act, the administration described the campaign as a “non-international armed conflict.” It argued the strikes were acts of self-defense against “unlawful combatants” — cartel operatives allegedly responsible for mass deaths inside the United States.
Yet international law is far less generous. Force may be used only in response to an armed attack or an imminent one. Critics say cartel activity, however lethal, does not meet that threshold. Unlike groups such as al-Qaeda, drug cartels are not organized around political or ideological goals — they are businesses.
And while the U.S. insists it distinguishes legitimate targets from civilians, no public evidence has been offered.
Can It Be Challenged?
Congress could, in theory, step in. A handful of lawmakers have already demanded the Justice Department’s legal justification for the killings. But with Republicans holding the majority — and Trump maintaining a near-total grip on the party — the likelihood of formal restraint is low.
The courts? Not much better. Judges in the U.S. have historically deferred to presidents on matters of war and foreign policy. The administration, anticipating challenges, reportedly released two surviving detainees from the attacks, eliminating the possibility of a courtroom confrontation over their treatment.
Families of the dead might sue in U.S. courts, but such a case would drag on for years and cost a fortune. International tribunals could issue symbolic rebukes — but lack the power to ground the drones or still the missiles.
The sea buries evidence quickly.
But questions — of law, of morality, of sovereignty — float to the surface again and again. And in coastal villages from Colombia to Trinidad, families still wait for answers the waves will not return.
