President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. carried out a strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug-carrying vessel that departed from Venezuela. “We just … shot out a drug-carrying boat, lot of drugs in that boat,” he said. “These came out of Venezuela.”

A senior U.S. defense official offered a more coherent statement, confirming to The Intercept that “the U.S. military conducted a precision strike against a drug vessel operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization.”

The Tuesday attack is the first acknowledged attack in Trump’s recent ramp-up of U.S. military force in Central and South America. The belligerent foreign relations harken back to early 20th-century military interventions, when the “big stick” approach to the Monroe Doctrine led the U.S. to invade or militarily support favored regimes in the majority of nations in the Western Hemisphere. This gunboat diplomacy risks embroiling the U.S. in additional foreign wars and undermining Trump’s anti-immigration efforts.

The White House and State Department did not reply to request for additional information on the attack.

Last week, the United States dispatched three Aegis guided-missile destroyers to the waters off Venezuela as part of Trump’s supposed war on Latin American drug cartels. All told, seven U.S. warships and one nuclear-powered attack submarine are either in the Caribbean or are expected to arrive there soon. This followed the announcement, last month, that the U.S. was sending thousands of troops to U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the deployment of two units trained for amphibious warfare. Trump also secretly signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to begin targeting certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations.

Designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations “has opened a Pandora’s Box for military use of force against them both on foreign soil and in international waters,” Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the Pentagon, who was directly involved in counternarcotics activities against both the Taliban and ISIS in Afghanistan, told The Intercept. “If we head down the treacherous path of designating any group or individual person that commits a crime, or even an act of violence, as being part of a terrorist organization in order to justify the use of America’s warfighting capacity, we will find ourselves as a nation falling even further toward militarization and authoritarianism.”

At the same time, the Pentagon has been carrying out numerous training missions, exercises, and conferences — that have mostly been ignored by the press — with military personnel from across Latin America and the Caribbean including Argentina, Belize, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru.

“This approach is more likely to strengthen the region’s resolve to........

© The Intercept