US Military Strikes Have Killed 181 in Caribbean Since September With No Public Evidence of Drugs
Operation Southern Spear has conducted 53+ airstrikes on vessels since September 2025, with human rights groups, Colombia, and Venezuela alleging many victims were civilians — not drug traffickers.
A U.S. military strike in the Caribbean Sea killed at least three people on Sunday, adding to a running toll that has now reached at least 181 dead since the Trump administration launched Operation Southern Spear in September 2025 — a campaign of military airstrikes targeting vessels the U.S. military has characterized as narco-trafficking platforms. Human rights organizations, the governments of Colombia and Venezuela, and investigative journalists have raised persistent and increasingly detailed allegations that many of those killed were civilians with no connection to drug trafficking, and that the military has provided no publicly verifiable evidence of drugs aboard any of the targeted vessels.
Operation Southern Spear began on September 1-2, 2025, when the first airstrike killed 11 people on a Venezuelan-flagged vessel in the Caribbean. Since then, the military has conducted more than 53 documented strikes across 48 or more vessels — 15 in the Caribbean and more than 31 in the eastern Pacific Ocean — killing at least 181 people, with four more missing and presumed dead, three captured, and two extradited to the United States. The operation has also claimed one American service member: Lance Corporal Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, who fell overboard from the USS Iwo Jima on February 10, 2026.
The administration has characterized the operation as a legitimate military campaign against transnational criminal organizations. President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have jointly argued that the United States is in a state of "armed conflict" with cartels including Tren de Aragua, the Colombian National Liberation Army, and other organized crime groups that the administration designated as foreign terrorist organizations. The administration formally declared a "non-international armed conflict" status effective October 1, 2025, a legal designation intended to bring the strikes within the framework of the laws of war.
But the evidence underlying the strikes has drawn intense scrutiny. The military has not provided journalists, members of Congress, or the public with documentation demonstrating that any of the 48-plus targeted vessels was carrying narcotics at the time of attack. The Associated Press, The Guardian, and NBC News have each published investigations based on interviews with family members of victims, surviving witnesses, and regional fishermen who described loved ones killed while fishing legally or traveling between coastal communities.
The governments of Colombia and Venezuela have formally protested multiple strikes and demanded compensation for families of citizens killed. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called for an independent investigation, characterizing the absence of due process and public evidentiary standards as deeply troubling. Former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo went further, characterizing the campaign as potentially meeting the legal threshold for crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute.
In January 2026, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of families from Trinidad and Tobago whose relatives were killed in an October 14, 2025 strike. The lawsuit argues that the strikes violate the U.S. Constitution's Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections and international human rights law, and that the administration's invocation of armed conflict status does not justify lethal force against individuals who posed no imminent threat to U.S. forces.
Sunday's strike, which killed three people on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea, came the same day that North Korea fired five tactical ballistic missiles, the USS Gerald R. Ford entered the Red Sea, and more than 60 nations gathered in Brussels for a Palestinian peace summit — underscoring the breadth of security crises the Trump administration is navigating simultaneously. Congressional Democrats have called for classified briefings on the operation's targeting criteria and for an independent review of the evidentiary standards used before each strike is authorized.
Originally reported by Euronews.