The US military blew up another boat in the waters of Latin America on Wednesday, an attack that comes amid growing congressional scrutiny of the bombing campaign.
US Southern Command said in a statement on X that its forces conducted a “lethal kinetic strike” on a vessel in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The command claimed, without providing any evidence, that the boat was carrying “illicit narcotics.”
SOUTHCOM said the strike killed four male “narcoterrorists,” a term used to justify the extrajudicial executions at sea. The Pentagon has previously admitted to Congress that it doesn’t know the identities of all the people it has killed in the boat strikes.
According to numbers released by the Trump administration, the attack brings the total number of people killed in the bombing campaign to 87 and marks the 22nd strike and 23rd boat that has been destroyed. Eleven of the boats have been struck in the Caribbean near Venezuela, where the bombing campaign started, and 12 have been hit in the Eastern Pacific.
The strike came after a small group of US lawmakers saw the video of the September 2 boat bombing, the opening salvo of the campaign, which involved multiple strikes to kill survivors.
“What I saw in that room is one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) told The Intercept. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States.”
Members of Congress intend to investigate the strike to see if a war crime was committed, though the entire bombing campaign is clearly illegal under US and international law. The Trump administration has also continued its military buildup in the Caribbean and its push toward war with Venezuela to oust President Nicolas Maduro.