“Each one of these is individually a crime scene, and the United States is the responsible actor.” — John Walsh
With America preoccupied (as always) with war in the Middle East, another kind of killing is taking place at its back door. Since early September of last year, the United States military has bombed 67 small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and assassinated 221 supposed “narco-terrorists.” The first full account of this deadly war is the Washington Office on Latin America’s (WOLA) Killing Spree: Extrajudicial Executions in the U.S. Boat Strike Campaign, a 27,000-word report by Adam Isacson, WOLA’s director for defense oversight, and John Walsh, its director for drug policy.
Under U.S. and international law, this is murder, Isacson and Walsh conclude about a policy they see as premeditated killing of civilians who pose no immediate threat to the United States. Its official name is Operation Southern Spear, designed as a war on terror by an inner circle of Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio. So the Donroe Doctrine is really a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings. Trump might be able to point to Latin America on a map, but this official US policy is about far more than geography.
And it even fails as drug policy. The boat strikes target Andean cocaine while fentanyl (produced in Mexico from Chinese synthetics) drives the American epidemic. As Isacson puts it, bombing these boats is like murdering a street-corner dealer and declaring the entire drug problem solved.
The WOLA report’s darkest implication is domestic. The Justice Department memo underpinning the campaign amounts, Walsh argues, to an open license to kill. For an administration that talks obsessively about the enemy within, the boat strikes might be a dress rehearsal. Graham Greene’s quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans. Only this time they’re filming their own atrocities and boasting about them on social media. The assassination of that street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota. America’s southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door.
Five Takeaways
• 63 Crime Scenes. The numbers, from WOLA’s strike-by-strike tracker: 63 attacks on 67 boats since September 2, 2025; 221 people killed; three known survivors. The legal analysis is not complicated: Title 18, Section 1111 of the U.S. Code prohibits murder, applies on the high seas, and premeditated killing of civilians with no self-defense justification is precisely what it forbids — no due process, no evidence offered, and in many cases no idea who was aboard. Each announcement is a near-identical Southern Command tweet, which is exactly what makes the campaign insidious: with no news handle, coverage shrinks to 150 words in the AP, and a democracy grows numb to what Walsh insists on calling 63 individual crime scenes with the United States as the responsible actor.
• Narcoterrorism: Two Wars Welded Together. Operation Southern Spear fuses the post-9/11 war on terror with the sixty-year war on drugs: organized-crime groups redefined as the equivalent of al-Qaeda and ISIS, a secret list of two dozen designated organizations, and Stephen Miller declaring that only the military can fight drug trafficking. The policy’s continuity is real — supply control has been an American staple since Reagan — but its rupture is stark: Marco Rubio’s own justification admitted that decades of interdiction never worked, so the administration would skip the intermediary steps and simply kill. The December 2025 National Security Strategy makes Latin America a first-tier priority for the first time in decades — the Donroe Doctrine, which Andrew reads as a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings — with Venezuela as proof of concept and “joint operations” as the export: Mexico refused, Ecuador agreed, and newly elected far-right governments in Colombia and Peru may soon invite American special forces to kick in doors.
• The Wrong War on the Wrong Economy. Both authors concede the underlying problem is real: organized crime kills, displaces, extorts everyone from street peddlers to five-star restaurants, and buys governments wholesale. But the strikes fail on their own terms. They target Andean cocaine while fentanyl — compact, potent, made in Mexico from Chinese precursors — drives American overdose deaths. Drugs are one income stream among many: at $4,000-an-ounce gold, illegal mining that poisons the Amazon may pay better, alongside extortion, kidnapping, and migrant smuggling. And the military is the wrong tool: America’s supermax already holds the drug lords, the Medellín and Cali cartels were obliterated decades ago, and there is more coca than ever — because organized crime, unlike an insurgency, doesn’t want to fight the state. It wants to corrupt it. Killing suspects also destroys the evidence a real case would need — ludicrous, as Walsh puts it, as drug policy.
• Who Were the 221? Nobody knows how many were innocent — which is itself the scandal. From the few dozen cases WOLA could document, the dead include fishermen, migrants, human-trafficking victims, and kids paid a couple hundred dollars to run drugs or fuel one time — the lowest links in the chain, in coastal regions where boats are the only roads and the same vessel carries passengers one day and a small cargo the next. (Isacson has ridden boats exactly like the ones in the videos.) One victim was a genuinely dirty local drug boss; most were nothing of the kind. The reckoning has begun at the edges: two Trinidadian families are suing the United States in Boston federal court, a Colombian fisherman’s family has gone to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and an Ecuadorian prosecutor who investigated the strikes has been assassinated.
• Colombia or Chicago. The report’s most chilling section reads the Justice Department’s legal memo as an open license to kill: a secret list, membership decided by the president, no limiting factor — so that, as Walsh warns, “it doesn’t matter if you’re in Colombia or Chicago.” For an administration that speaks constantly of the enemy from within — and drummed the theme into the assembled brass at Quantico — the high seas look like a rehearsal space. Accountability remains possible: Tim Kaine is reading every after-action report, boat-flag states could take Trump officials to the International Criminal Court, and travel could get complicated for the inner circle. WOLA’s fear isn’t retribution but lawfare — never, as Isacson says, a reason to be silent. Graham Greene’s quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans, filming their own atrocities and boasting on social media. The assassination of a street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota: America’s southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door. The report is free online. Read it.
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