Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: New reports unpack the toll of U.S. boat strikes, El Niño triggers deadly flooding in Chile, and Cape Verde’s star goalkeeper is signed by a South American club.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: New reports unpack the toll of U.S. boat strikes, El Niño triggers deadly flooding in Chile, and Cape Verde’s star goalkeeper is signed by a South American club.

Unanswered Questions About U.S. Boat Strikes

A series of NGO and media reports sheds new light on the United States’ boat bombing campaign near Latin America, finding evidence that officials are withholding information about those killed and that the campaign has failed to achieve its stated goal of curbing drug flows.

Since last September, the U.S. military has killed at least 221 people in waters near Latin America. The campaign marks a sharp break from previous U.S. maritime counternarcotics doctrine, under which forces stopped and searched suspected smuggling vessels with the aim of arresting—rather than killing—those on board.

Members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration have repeatedly described those killed as “narco-terrorists.” But a review released last Friday by the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, found that the administration had provided no public evidence that the targeted vessels were carrying drugs or that those killed were affiliated with specific trafficking groups.

Those targeted also had no opportunity to contest the allegations against them. For that reason, multiple United Nations and other legal experts have concluded that these strikes constitute extrajudicial executions.

Former U.S. State Department legal advisor Charlie Trumbull argues that because the killings are state-backed and systematic, they also amount to the more serious offense of crimes against humanity. That charge is what led to former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s detention in The Hague, where he awaits trial, following his own militarized anti-drug campaign.

The Trump administration has not disclosed the identities of those killed by the strikes, but journalists have begun to piece together an account.

On July 20, the Los Angeles Times reported that at least 13 Mexicans had been killed, raising an earlier estimate published by Mexico’s La Jornada. Last week, the Guardian reported that at least 16 Colombians who disappeared from the islands of San Andrés and Providence were suspected to be among the........

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