Journalists Identify Murder Victims Of Trump’s Boat Strike Program

from the death-from-above dept

It’s hard to believe we once were shocked to hear a government figure proudly declare that we kill people based on metadata.

What’s happening now is even more disturbing. We’re killing people simply because they happen to be in boats spotted exiting certain shores and headed towards international waters.

The War on Drugs has always been evil. It has always relied on the ends justifying the malicious means, especially when the means usually meant the killing or incarceration of non-white people.

Under Trump, it’s gotten even worse. Trump has pretended the mere existence of a drug trade — something that involves the exchange of money for goods by consenting adults — justifies the wholesale slaughter of people in boats in international waters.

The Defense Department and Trump himself have posted clips of boat strikes on social media, almost always accompanied by self-serving statements about protecting Americans from foreign-based drug cartels.

But the government has offered very little in support of its social media postings and public statements. Almost no documentation exists to buttress assertions about the at-sea execution of alleged drug traffickers. Almost nothing connects these random murders to cartel activity.

The government has shown absolutely no interest in identifying the victims of its extrajudicial murder program. And why would it? Identifying drone strike victims might undercut the government’s unproven assertions. Worse, it might expose it for what it is: small-scale genocide meant to kill non-white people whose ultimate destination might be the United States.

It’s up to everyone else to do what this government and its historically large deficit won’t do: address the human cost of its antagonism towards any nation located south of the US border. Those doing this heavy lifting don’t have the benefit of billions of dollars of funding or internal pressure to discover the truth. They’re doing it because our government won’t.

Twenty journalists involved with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) have managed to identify 13 victims of Trump administration drone strikes. And even though it’s only a small percentage of the nearly 200 people our nation has murdered in open waters since Trump took office, it still matters.

This administration may prefer these people to remain faceless and nameless, since it makes their killing that much easier to shrug off. But anyone with an operating conscience shouldn’t pretend this effort is too small to matter. It does, and these are the names of a small portion of the people this administration has presumably straight-up murdered — an assumption that should stand until the administration is willing to produce evidence that says otherwise.

Of the 16 victims now identified, eight are Venezuelans: Juan Carlos Fuentes, 43; Luis Ramón Amundarain, 36; Eduard Hidalgo, 46; Dushak Milovcic, 24; and Robert Sánchez, Jesús Carreño, Eduardo Jaime and Luis Alí Martínez, whose ages are unknown. Three are Colombians: Alejandro Andrés Carranza Medina, 42, and Ronald Arregocés and Adrián Lubo (ages unknown). Two are from Ecuador: Pedro Ramón Holguín Holguín, 40, and Carlos Manuel Rodríguez Solórzano, 34; two are Trinidadians: Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo (age unknown); and one is from Saint Lucia: Ricky Joseph (age unknown).

Some of the people murdered by Trump’s Defense Department were simply going from one country to another to secure employment. Some of them may have been transporting drugs, but they were mules, rather than key members of international drug cartels. What’s actually known about the nearly 200 people the administration has killed is minimal. And the one entity that could provide more insight on its drone strike targets isn’t interested in sharing this information with anyone.

In the eight months since the airstrikes began, the US has not provided any evidence that any of the 194 victims were involved in drug trafficking.

Read that again: the US government has not provided evidence about any of its 194 murder victims. Instead, it has produced a steady stream of baseless invective meant to persuade the stupidest of Americans that these killings were justified.

What is being said by government officials doesn’t erase its refusal to provide evidence backing its claim, much less justify killings it’s unwilling to honestly discuss with the US public or its congressional oversight.

A spokesperson for US Southern Command said that all the strikes were “deliberate, lawful and precise, directed specifically at narco-terrorists and their enablers. We have full confidence in the operations and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.”

This is not evidence of anything. This statement is conclusory, which is the exact opposite of evidence, as any court will tell you. It simply says the government is in the right because the government says it’s in the right. That’s not justification. That’s someone representing entities swallowing up billions of federal officers telling the people paying its outsized paycheck “because I said so” and expecting that to be the end of the discussion.

The American public is not the government’s child. It’s actually the other way around. The government is reliant on the public, which makes the general public the adult in this conversation. That far too many MAGA enablers refuse to be the adults in the room makes it that much easier for the government to pretend it owes the public nothing. But that doesn’t change how this actually works. The government works for us, rather than the other way around. And when it doesn’t, it’s up to the public to remind it of its place.

In this case, it took people in other countries to generate the modicum of accountability this nation — under Trump — appears unwilling to do itself. That’s just fucking sad.

Filed Under: boat strikes, donald trump, drug war, extrajudicial killings, murder, pete hegseth, racism, trump administration

Companies: clip, Latin american center for investigative journalism