On Monday, the Trump administration announced a new series of criminal missile strikes against four civilian vessels in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. It was the deadliest day yet in the barbaric campaign of extrajudicial assassinations carried out by the US military in Latin American waters since the beginning of September.
Monday’s operation marked a major escalation in the violence and scope of the attacks. Three different missile strikes blasted four vessels out of the water, killing 14 people, and bringing the total death toll in US imperialism’s murder spree to 57.
The reporting of the attacks repeated the atrocious ritual established by the fascists in the White House and the Pentagon. The assassinations—carried out in flagrant violation of US and international law—were trumpeted on social media along with videos of what amount to extrajudicial executions.
“Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth boasted on X about the murder of the unidentified civilians of undisclosed nationalities. He repeated the fraudulent claim that the small boats were “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and carrying narcotics” and that their crew members were “narco-terrorists.”
Not a single shred of evidence has been presented by the White House to prove that any of the targeted vessels or their crew members were connected to drug-trafficking—which, in any case, would not legalize the blatantly criminal murder of unarmed civilians in international waters. But the US administration is no more concerned about justifying its claims than Al Capone was interested in making a moral case for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. It is employing the immense power of the US military and intelligence apparatus as a giant Murder Inc. in pursuit of blatantly criminal and predatory aims.
Trump made the completely absurd boast that each small fishing boat he destroyed has saved 50,000 lives by preventing illegal drugs from entering the United States. This would amount to more than half a million lives, though the number of overdose deaths in the US annually is less than 100,000, and the vast majority are caused by fentanyl, which is smuggled into the US from Mexico, not South America. The small boats struck by US missiles were nearly 3,000 miles from the US, with no capability of delivering drugs to American shores.
Hegseth has now doubled down on Trump’s Hitlerian Big Lie. In his Tuesday morning post on X, the Secretary of War wrote:
The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own. These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.
Hegseth’s invocation of Washington’s justifications for launching its “War on Terror” is highly significant. Just as the 9/11 attacks and subsequent lies about “weapons of mass destruction” were used as phony pretexts to launch two wars of imperialist aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan, so today Trump’s campaign of strikes against small boats accused of “narco-terrorism” is aimed at manufacturing a war to loot oil-rich Venezuela.
Washington’s preparations for a full-scale war against the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro are rapidly escalating.
On Friday, Hegseth announced the deployment of the Navy’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to waters near Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, where a naval armada and 10,000 US sailors and Marines are already deployed. This escalation, which is hardly suitable for drug interdictions, followed statements by Trump that he had authorized CIA operations to overthrow Maduro as well as threatening a ground invasion of the country. This has been joined by flights of B-1 bombers adjacent to Venezuelan airspace.
The military buildup against Venezuela is part of US imperialism’s neocolonial drive against Latin America as a whole. It not only revives Monroe Doctrine claims of a US right to control Latin America and its strategic resources, but seeks to reverse by means of military violence Washington’s loss of hegemonic political and economic influence in the region, in particular to China.
The intensification of Trump’s criminal attacks on civilian vessels is an ominous indication that the threat of a regional war is rapidly growing. In turn, the military campaign in Latin America is only one front in an emerging Third World War.
While the initial attacks struck boats in the southern Caribbean, near Venezuela, Monday’s and other recent attacks have occurred in the Eastern Pacific, off Colombia’s coast. This shift coincides with Trump’s launching of a vicious political offensive against the Colombian government.
On October 18, Trump attacked President Gustavo Petro on social media, accusing him of being an “illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs” and that this has “become the biggest business in Colombia.” This monstrous lie, followed by sanctions against the Colombian president, his family and other officials, is a mere repetition of the claims fabricated to justify the political and military intervention against Venezuela and with the exact same purpose.
Coming steps in this imperialist offensive have been indicated by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who told CBS News on Sunday: “Trump told me yesterday that he plans to brief members of Congress when he gets back from Asia about future potential military operations against Venezuela and Colombia.”
This path being pursued by US imperialism under Trump will set the whole region on fire. It can only achieve its aims by means of extreme violence, economic disruption and the establishment of fascistic and military regimes, all of which will be met with mass popular resistance and intensifying class struggle.
Imperialism’s plans must be stopped, but this can only be done by attacking their real essence, rooted in the contradictions of the global capitalist system.
The most critical point to be grasped by workers on both sides of the Rio Grande is that the entire working class, both in Latin America and within the United States, constitutes the real target of imperialism.
The gangster campaign of extrajudicial killings in Latin American waters is organically connected to the Trump administration’s domestic assault on democratic rights and its persecution of immigrant workers.
The same military and intelligence apparatus deployed to murder fishermen and migrants in the Caribbean and Pacific is being mobilized to round up and deport millions of immigrants within the United States.
Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and declaration of “non-international armed conflict” serve to justify both overseas killings and domestic repression, revealing the inseparable connection between imperialist war abroad and the drive toward dictatorship at home. Just as the gangster Trump is murdering fishermen and migrants in South American waters, so too will his administration assert its power to carry out extrajudicial executions in the US itself.
The redeployment of the Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean signals the global character of American imperialism’s military operations and its determination to exert dominance across multiple theaters simultaneously.
Broader military confrontations are inevitable as the ruling class responds to the deepening crisis of the profit system through military violence abroad and authoritarian rule at home.
The only force capable of preventing imperialist war and defending democratic rights is the international working class, organized independently of all capitalist parties and nationalist movements, fighting for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism.
Workers in the United States must reject both the Trump administration’s campaign of state terror and the complicity of the Democratic Party, which, with the drone assassination campaign under the Obama administration, pioneered the practice of extrajudicial executions ordered from the White House. It has supported and enabled decades of imperialist aggression throughout Latin America and across the planet.
The defense of Venezuelan, Colombian and all Latin American workers targeted by US imperialism requires the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to provide revolutionary socialist leadership to the working class.
Only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, uniting its struggles against war and in defense of social and democratic rights across national borders, can the drive toward catastrophic conflict be stopped and the foundations laid for genuine democracy and social equality.