The Morning the Caribbean Stilled
There are mornings when the sea off Venezuela wakes like a living thing—lamps blinking, nets bobbing, the smell of fried plantains and diesel from harbor stalls drifting over the water. On one such morning this September, something different carved the horizon: shock, and then silence.
Eleven people boarded a small motorboat at a southern Venezuelan port and set out into the blue. By afternoon they were dead. The United States military says it fired on the vessel in international waters as a deliberate strike against a designated criminal organisation. Venezuelan officials say those killed were civilians. Families on both sides of the story now keep their phones pressed to their faces, listening for answers that have not come.
What Happened — And Why It Matters
According to U.S. authorities, the operation targeted a group they say are members of a violent cartel that Washington has labelled a “foreign terrorist organisation.” The move—an armed strike on a vessel in international waters authorised at the highest level—was framed by some in Washington as a decisive blow against traffickers who funnel illicit drugs into the United States.
Others saw it as something darker: an extrajudicial killing that stretches international law and the accepted boundaries of presidential power. “Kinetic action without custody is a blunt instrument,” said Lina Morales, an international human-rights lawyer based in Bogotá. “When you lean on strikes instead of seizures and arrests, the chance for misidentification and tragedy—especially at sea—goes up dramatically.”
Voices From the Water
“They were fishermen,” said Carlos Ortega, a fisherman from the port city where the boat departed. “I know those faces. Two of them used to patch my nets. Who is going to tell the mothers here that bombs are a new kind of law?”
Across the border in a cramped living room, Mariana Rivas clutched a faded photograph of her brother—one of the missing—and said, “We were told he was gone. We were not told he was a terrorist. Someone has to explain how a man who sold mangoes to feed his kids becomes a target at sea.”
Washington’s Rationale and the Pushback
For Washington, the calculus is businesslike: a decades-long “war on drugs” now metastasising into a campaign that borrows playbooks from counterterrorism. Senior officials argue that interdiction and arrests are costly, dangerous, and easily evaded; a precise strike, they say, sends a deterrent message. “We will not allow our streets to be flooded,” a senior U.S. official told me on the condition of anonymity. “We will use every tool we have to protect American lives.”
But the policy has its critics inside and outside the United States. Members of Congress, human-rights organisations, and legal scholars warn of constitutional and international pitfalls. “There was no congressional authorisation for this use of force,” said Professor Ana Reyes, an expert in American constitutional law. “Rebranding suspects as foreign terrorists does not automatically create the legal authority to kill them without trial.”
International law sets a high bar for lethal force at sea: it must be necessary, proportionate, and used only when there are no less-harmful means of preventing imminent harm. “The presumption should be capture, not annihilation,” said Dr. Martín Calderón, a human-rights scholar in Santiago. “When you lower that bar, you reshape norms and make such strikes easier for others to justify.”
Military Muscle and a Region on Edge
The strike didn’t happen in a vacuum. Over recent months the U.S. has increased its naval and air presence in the Caribbean: reports speak of a flotilla of warships, a submarine on patrol, roughly 4,000 marines and sailors deployed, and a forward base buzzed with F‑35 jets—moves that create the unmistakable sense of an armada poised for action.
“They are not there for sightseeing,” a former special-operations soldier who served in the region told me. He asked to remain anonymous. “A Marine Expeditionary Unit is built for raids and rapid strikes.” He added, almost casually, “You could hit… targets across the hemisphere and be back home before dinner.”
That outlook terrifies many regional capitals. Mexico’s president warned that unilateral strikes on Mexican soil would cross a “red line” of sovereignty. Venezuela’s leaders insist these operations are a pretext for regime-change and have mobilised defences across the country, even as Washington offers steep financial bounties for the arrest of Venezuela’s political leaders.
On the Dock, a Broader History
To many Venezuelans, this episode is a fresh chapter in a long story. The shadow of the Monroe Doctrine still stretches over Latin America—a doctrine born two centuries ago that defined the hemisphere as the United States’ sphere of influence. From CIA-backed coups during the Cold War to more recent interventions cloaked in the language of counter-narcotics, the pattern has been familiar: Washington’s security concerns intersect with regional politics, rarely without consequences for civilians.
The Human Cost and the Numbers Behind the Rhetoric
The human cost of the drug crisis in the United States is real and harrowing. Over the past several years, more than 100,000 Americans annually have died from drug overdoses—an epidemic driven in large part by synthetic opioids like fentanyl. A widely cited analysis even suggested that fentanyl-related deaths in a recent two-year span outpaced U.S. combat fatalities in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined.
“The numbers are a national trauma,” said Dr. Emily Chen, a public-health specialist. “Families are losing sons and daughters, sometimes multiple members, in a way we didn’t foresee. That anguish fuels the pressure to act.”
Yet experts caution that tactics drawn from the ‘war on terror’ era carry their own price. “Post‑9/11 policies gave governments across the globe a template to bypass due process,” Morales said. “When democracies start using targeted killings as routine tools, it erodes the norms that protect ordinary people everywhere.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
For now, the Caribbean remains a cauldron of competing narratives—official accounts, grieving families, alarmed neighbours, and quiet communities trying to keep their livelihoods afloat while big powers play a deadly game of chess. The incident raises questions that are both legal and moral: When does self‑defence become an extrajudicial execution? When does deterrence become provocation? And who pays the price when the answer isn’t clear?
If you’re reading this from a city far from the Gulf Stream, what should you feel? Outrage, empathy, concern—or all three? Wars on drugs, terror, or anything else always ripple outward, altering norms, alliances, and daily lives in ways we rarely predict.
Questions to Carry With You
- How do democracies balance urgent domestic crises with the rule of law abroad?
- Can the deterrent effect of a strike ever justify the certainty of civilian deaths?
- What precedent do we set when state actors choose lethal force over capture and trial?
Back in the dockside cafes, old men sip coffee and remember the names of the lost. Children run among crates of fish. The sea takes its normal rhythm back, and the questions remain—waiting, like tides, for answers that may never come.
