US government will investigate itself over ‘narco-boat’ war crime allegations

The inspector general of the US Department of War will investigate whether America’s ‘narco-terrorist’ boat strikes are war crimes. US attacks on alleged cartel smugglers have been carried out in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September 2025.

The bombings were seen as precursor attacks to the 3 January raid which saw Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro kidnapped by US special forces. Yet the strikes have continued well into 2026.

The NGO Airwars says there have been 193 deaths across 56 incidents. The US maintains killings have been legal. Many legal experts say this is patently untrue.

The inquiry aims to:

determine whether DoW Components followed the established framework of the six-phase Joint Targeting Cycle when conducting targeting operations in the U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) area of responsibility.

Adding:

We may revise the objective as the evaluation proceeds, and we will also consider suggestions from
management for additional or revised objectives.

Sean Parnell, then-chief spokesperson at the Pentagon, said in November 2025:

Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both US and international law, with all actions in complete compliance with the law of armed conflict.

The most recent strike was on 8 May. The US shared footage on social media:

US hemispheric plans

US belligerence across the Americas has increased under Trump. This has included brinkmanship over Greenland, rumours of an invasion of Canada and threats against Cuba.

The CIA recently killed a mid-level cartel boss with a car bomb in Mexico City, reports say. The Mexican authorities claim they gave no permission for US covert operations inside their borders. Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are part of this project too.

Historian Nikhil Pal Singh wrote in Equator magazine on 14 January 2026:

From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is creating a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity

Singh accused Trump of conflating:

immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”.

All in a bid to combine:

the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors.

The Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism investigated the backgrounds of 13 of those killed in ‘narco’ strikes:

finding they came from extremely poor communities across the region, with little or no apparent connection to organized drug networks. The reporting described the victims as day laborers who took work on the boats out of desperation, not as figures with any meaningful role in the drug trade.

The US war machine will investigate itself. And the Canary will await the findings with bated breath. But substantial evidence already suggests the new ‘war on drugs’ is very much like the old ‘war on drugs’. It is a war on the impoverished, the displaced and the racialised, waged by a increasingly erratic and violent empire. Trump wants to remake the Americas in his own bloodthirsty image — and that is precisely what he is doing.

Featured image via wong yu liang

By Joe Glenton

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