Rubio: Military Strikes on Suspected Drug Boats "Will Happen Again"

 

The Trump administration plans to keep attacking drug boats with lethal military force, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Wednesday. 

"The United States has long — for many, many years — established intelligence that allowed us to interdict and stop drug boats. And we did that. And it doesn’t work. Interdiction doesn’t work," Rubio said at a press conference in Mexico City. "What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them."

The administration has deployed a large task force to waters of the southern Caribbean, and is testing a new, militarized approach to trafficking enforcement. On Tuesday, the White House announced that a boat allegedly transporting narcotics off Venezuela had been eliminated in a strike; 11 suspects were killed, the administration said, and no survivors were reported.

According to the White House, the boat was transporting drugs for the Tren de Aragua gang, designated by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization. Rubio said Tuesday that the vessel was likely headed to Trinidad or another country in the Caribbean. He expressed certainty that the drugs were headed for the United States; the same route is also commonly used on the circuitous drug pipeline to European markets, where cocaine fetches a higher value. 

The president personally authorized the attack on the suspect boat, Rubio told reporters. "On the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it will happen again," Rubio said. "Maybe it’s happening right now. I don’t know."

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sounded a similar note in an interview on Fox and Friends. "This is a deadly serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike," he said. 

Reactions to the new approach have been mixed. Many legal experts suggest that executing suspects on the high seas without a boarding or a trial may expose the administration to war crimes charges, particularly if done for an offense that is not normally punishable by death.

"Destroying a boat at sea without boarding or verifying opens the door to tragedy," said Juan S. Gonzalez, former senior director of the National Security Council under former President Joe Biden. "The USCG - not the Navy - is the right tool for counter-narcotics in the Caribbean."

However, some regional leaders are all too happy to see a new emphasis on lethality in countering the drug trade at sea. Military methods are already common for shoreside counternarcotics agencies in Latin America, matching the militarized nature of the cartels. Kamla Persad-Bissessar, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, said Tuesday that she supported the Trump administration's new approach. 

"The pain and suffering the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense. I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently," she said in a statement.