In the days following its deadly attack on a vessel allegedly transporting Venezuelan drug smugglers through international waters, the administration of US President Donald Trump sent a unified message: The United States will not hesitate to strike so-called “narco terrorists”.
“Instead of interdicting [the vessel], on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday.
“And it’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now,” he said.
Analysts say this new strategy represents a major escalation in how the US approaches Latin American criminal organisations, one that relies on the public signalling and dubious legal practices that undergirded US attacks across the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia as part of the so-called “Global War on Terror“.
With little indication that the Republican-dominated US Congress will be willing to check Trump’s approach, observers warn that Tuesday’s “kinetic strike” that killed 11 alleged members of Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua gang could open a new phase and theatre for extrajudicial military killings.
“They are repurposing the ‘war on terror’ for entirely new sets of supposed enemies in a way that is radically inappropriate,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the US programme at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera.
“Now the supposed terrorists are in our own backyard in the Caribbean, and now they say they’re drug smugglers.”
‘Performative and gratuitous’
The public messaging campaign stretches back to Trump’s first term, when he pondered bombing drug labs in Mexico, a pugilistic approach to Latin American cartels embraced by some segments of the Republican Party.
Shortly after Trump took office in January, his administration moved to formalise its rhetoric, designating several Latin America-based cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”. The label increases penalties for collaborators and legal mechanisms to sanction and boost surveillance for designated groups, but does not on its own afford greater presidential power to take unilateral military action.
Finucane saw Tuesday’s strike as the latest drive in a campaign to shift public perception of Latin American criminal gangs from profit-driven criminal entities to coordinated foreign actors seeking to destabilise the US.
It is a message that dovetails with Trump’s portrayal of migrants travelling to the US as violent criminals, which has further underpinned his domestic deployment of federal agents across the country.
Finucane described the US strike as “performative and gratuitous use of military power”.
“For decades, the US Navy and Coast Guard worked together on interdicting vessels, stopping them at sea, taking the purported smugglers into custody and prosecuting them through law enforcement channels,” he said.
“There is no indication of why that wasn’t possible here. So the blowing up of this vessel was entirely unnecessary. It was also literally performed in the sense that Trump posted on Truth Social a video of the attack, essentially a snuff film.”
‘Blow them up’
For its part, the US administration has offered few details on why the military used deadly force, beyond blatantly pointing to the message it sends to drug smugglers.
Speaking on Fox News on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Tren de Aragua was seeking to “poison” the US with drugs.
“It won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate,” Hegseth said.
He maintained that the Trump administration was certain of the identities of those on board the attacked vessel, without providing further details of the strike.
Rubio, speaking during his visit to Mexico, said simply that stopping and arresting drug smugglers – known as interdiction – had proven ineffective. He said the targeted smuggling boat was heading to Trinidad and Tobago, with the drugs likely bound for the US.
“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” Rubio said.
Trump, speaking from the White House on Wednesday, said there were “massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people, and everybody fully understands that”.
Alleged gang members may not be the only intended audience, according to Nathan Jones, a nonresident scholar in drug policy and Mexico studies at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas.
“I think the signalling may be more important to governments in the region, particularly the Mexican government,” said Jones, noting that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has sought to strike a careful balance between cooperating with the Trump administration and protecting her country’s sovereignty.
Following reports that Trump had authorised the military to target certain Latin American cartels in August, Sheinbaum said that any US “invasion” was “off the table”.
A day after the strike, Rubio visited Sheinbaum in Mexico, with the pair agreeing to boost cooperation to target cartels.
“They don’t want those types of US military kinetic operations happening on their sovereign territory,” Jones said.
“So they’re going to be taking affirmative steps, certainly symbolically, to show the Trump administration they’re doing everything we can on this.”
Domestic legal justification
Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has not yet elucidated its justification for the strike under domestic US law. Any legal authority remains, at best, extremely murky, analysts said.
Throughout the “Global War on Terror”, US presidents have relied on a mix of executive power and Congressional actions to justify – often tenuously – strikes on targets outside of active conflict zones.
Under the US Constitution, only Congress can declare war, but presidents can unilaterally take some military actions prior to receiving congressional approval. The limits of those actions have been heavily debated.
Many of the aerial attacks and drone campaigns that defined the past two decades relied on the so-called Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in 2001, which gives the president authority to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against entities and individuals behind the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Even under the widest interpretation of the legislation, it would not apply to Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has dubiously claimed is directly aligned with the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, or other criminal gangs.
The US president’s constitutional war powers, meanwhile, typically apply only to alleged “combatants”, not alleged criminals, the International Crisis Group’s Finucane explained.
“Being a drug smuggler, by itself, does not render you a combatant or an enemy fighter,” Finucane said.
“And if they don’t fall into that category for law of war purposes, then they’re civilians. And the intentional targeting of civilians is a war crime.”
Praise from Republicans
Presidential war powers also require reporting to Congress and intelligence briefings related to underlying justifications. Congress can then pass legislation to rein in the president’s actions.
But to date, many top Republicans have so far indicated little appetite to do so.
Instead, they have leaned into Trump’s rhetoric, with Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Chairman Jim Risch on Tuesday praising what he called Trump’s “decisive action towards these criminals”.
Senator Tom Cotton echoed Trump’s language in his praise, hailing the strike against “terrorists”.
Democrats have, in turn, been relatively muted in their response, although the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee has called for the administration to “brief Congress immediately and spell out its legal justification, if they have one, for this strike”.
All told, the Trump administration appears to be “trying to normalise something that is illegal”, according to Adam Isacson, the director of defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
That carries several risks, including dangers for civilians such as fishermen and migrants who travel in international waters. It also raises the spectre of strikes on sovereign territory or regional escalation.
“This is turning up the heat on the frog in hot water and making it a few degrees hotter, and seeing how many members of the Republican leadership go along with it,” Isacson said.
“It appears they’re getting them to be OK with this, and getting them on record being OK with this, so that they can then escalate.”
