US military strikes another boat in Pacific, bringing death toll above 200

The US military said it had carried out another strike Friday on a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing three men in the third attack this week and pushing the overall death toll above 200 people.US Southern Command announced the latest strike in the months-long campaign against alleged drug boats traversing the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific with its usual language that the vessel was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations” and operated by a designated terrorist organization. It provided no evidence.Southern Command said in its post on X that the strike came at the direction of Gen Francis L Donovan, the top US commander in Latin America, who on Friday also met with Cuban military leaders near the US Navy base in Guantánamo Bay.While the military’s social media announcements always include video of the attacks, this appears to be the first with the footage in color instead of black and white. The video shows a small vessel floating in the ocean before it’s hit and engulfed in a fireball. It cuts to what could be the boat in flames, surrounded by a large plume of parcels or some other objects spread around it in the water.The attack puts the death toll at 202 people from the series of US strikes that began in early September, with two other attacks announced Tuesday and Wednesday. The Trump administration has declared that the US is at armed conflict with Latin American drug cartels, saying they are behind the flow of drugs into American communities. However, the administration has not provided definitive evidence that the vessels are involved in drug trafficking, prompting debate about the legality of the operations.Experts and human rights advocates, both in the US and globally, have raised questions about their legality, with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International saying the strikes amount to “unlawful extrajudicial killings”.The American Civil Liberties Union casts the assertions by the Trump administration against those it targets as “unsubstantiated, fear-mongering claims”.