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Trump’s Caribbean Killing Spree Is a Feckless, Criminal Failure

Blowing up innocent fishermen hasn’t curbed the drug trade.

Donald Trump boards Air Force One on July 27, 2026.

On January 19, Carlos Mero, the captain of an Ecuadoran fishing boat named La Fiorella, called his wife on an emergency line and expressed his alarm at seeing “American aircraft, two drones, and a blue patrol ship” nearby. Mero was right to be worried. Starting in the fall of 2025, the Trump administration, on the pretense of waging a war on drugs, had ramped up a military campaign to bomb supposed drug-running boats in the Caribbean and Pacific—often in concert with regional allies such as Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa. Mero was baffled as to why his boat was seemingly under the gunsight of the US military, since La Fiorella had been inspected and cleared by a local coast guard.

As Drop Site News reported, witnesses saw La Fiorella explode the next day. Its eight crew members, including Mero, all disappeared. There is still no confirmation that the boat was targeted by the US military, but the facts of the case are in keeping with the more than 60 boats in the Caribbean that have been bombed, which have left at least 221 dead (a number that does include probable but unverified kills such as La Fiorella).

Other examples of US-sponsored extrajudicial killing were recently highlighted in a report by Human Rights Watch. According to the organization, the report documents

serious human rights violations in a rural community on the Colombia-Ecuador border, as well as attacks on and the disappearance of fishermen at sea near the Galápagos Islands. Each incident either clearly implicates the US-Ecuador security partnership or surfaces questions about responsibility. Ecuadorian forces tortured and arbitrarily detained four farm workers, and later burned and struck a dairy farm, during what the United States called a “partnered operation.” And drones of unknown origin attacked two fishing vessels, injuring several crew members. A third vessel remains missing.

serious human rights violations in a rural community on the Colombia-Ecuador border, as well as attacks on and the disappearance of........

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