“Both countries have been happy to cooperate with Washington against drug trafficking, but think that the decision to kill the suspected smugglers at sea is a step too far.
At least one of the people killed in the boat bombings was a Colombian citizen. “He may have been carrying fish, or he may have been carrying cocaine, but he had not been sentenced to death,” Petro said in a speech on Sunday, according to the Associated Press. “There was no need to murder him.” After Petro criticized the U.S. military campaign last month, the U.S. Treasury accused Petro of being complicit in drug smuggling and imposed financial sanctions on him, his wife, and his son.
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Another neighboring country whose citizens were killed, Trinidad and Tobago, has been more supportive of the campaign. “I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently,” Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said in a September 2025 statement.
The Trump administration has acknowledged that it is choosing to kill suspects that it could have arrested otherwise. “Instead of interdicting [the boat], on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters after the first boat strike in September 2025. He argued that arresting traffickers and seizing their cargo “doesn’t work” because cartels plan for those losses anyway. Administration lawyers argue that drug cartels are wartime enemies, so they can be killed rather than arrested, while also denying that the president is limited by constitutional war powers in this campaign.”
“A few scenarios are possible. One is that the U.S. really is striking narcotraffickers, and that either their families don’t know their dead relatives are narcotraffickers or are obfuscating. Another possibility is that the U.S. is striking innocent fisherman and calling them narcotraffickers. There could, of course, be a mix of smugglers and fishermen.
But the U.S. government is almost definitely acting illegally here. These people are not combatants. We don’t know if they’re affiliated with groups designated terrorist organizations. Congress has not approved these strikes, and Trump doesn’t even appear to be seeking retroactive approval. When some senators did try to check Trump via the War Powers Act, it didn’t go all that well. And rest assured that Petro, Maduro, and all other who stand to profit are going to keep milking this for all it’s worth, using Trump’s inevitable screw-ups as a means of distracting from their own misbehavior.”
“Colombian President Gustavo Petro says one of the “narcoterrorists” recently killed by U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean was a “fisherman” who had “no ties to the drug trade.” That man’s death, one of at least 32 ordered by President Donald Trump, therefore qualified as “murder,” Petro declared on Saturday.
That much would be true even if the dead man, whom Petro identified as a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, really was smuggling drugs. Trump’s new policy of summarily executing drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and violates long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process.
On September 15, U.S. forces blew up a boat that Trump said was “in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics,” killing three men he described as “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.” But according to Petro, the attack that killed Carranza happened in Colombian waters, and the target was a “Colombian boat” that “was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure.”
Trump reacted angrily to that charge on Sunday, calling Petro “an illegal drug leader” who is “strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs…all over Colombia.” He said the U.S. government would punish Petro by ending all “payments and subsidies” to his country.
Notably, Trump did not actually contradict Petro’s claim that Carranza had been erroneously identified as a Venezuelan “narcoterrorist.” And Trump has repeatedly acknowledged that his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy could threaten innocent fishermen.
After the first strike on an alleged drug boat in early September, Trump joked about the potential for lethal mistakes: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'”
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Trump claims drug traffickers are “murdering” Americans because some of their customers—about 82,000 last year—die after consuming their products. By the same logic, alcohol producers and distributors, who supply a product implicated in an estimated 178,000 deaths a year in the United States, likewise are guilty of murder.
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The Trump administration also argues that the U.S. government is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which makes the boat strikes consistent with the law of war. That claim, Cardozo Law School professor Gabor Rona says, is “utterly without precedent in international law.”
Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the law of war, agrees. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”
Trump, in short, is killing people without a legal justification. There is a word for that.”
The United States military is making extrajudicial illegal killings of potential drug traffickers, apparently killing a boat of Colombians this time. The U.S. is threatening a regime change war with Venezuela.
“President Donald Trump on Sunday announced retaliatory tariffs on Colombia after its president blocked US military deportation flights from landing, the first instance of Trump using economic pressure to force other nations to fall in line with his mass deportation plans since he took office last week.
Hours after Trump’s announcement, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said he ordered the commerce ministry to raise tariffs on US imports by 25%.”
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“Earlier in the day, Petro announced he had blocked two US military flights carrying migrants heading toward the country and called on the United States to establish better protocols in its treatment of migrants. Petro also left the door open to receiving repatriated migrants traveling on civilian planes.
Following Petro’s initial announcement, Trump criticized him on social media while announcing a slate of new sanctions and policies targeting Colombia, including “emergency 25% tariffs” on all imports from the country that will be raised to 50% in a week, a “travel ban” for Colombian citizens, and a revocation of visas for Colombian officials in the US along with “all allies and supporters.”
“These measures are just the beginning. We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.”
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“The US Embassy in Colombia suspended visa processing in retaliation for Colombia’s refusal to accept repatriation flights, a State Department official told CNN on Sunday evening. The suspension applies to immigrant and non-immigrant visas, which typically number in the thousands each day.”
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“Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a Sunday statement that Colombian officials had approved two military flights carrying migrants to Colombia and then revoked the authorization once they were en route”
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“Petro disputed that he had given authorization, writing on X after the secretary of state’s statement, “I will never allow Colombians to be brought in handcuffs on flights. Marco, if officials from the Foreign Ministry allowed this, it would never be under my direction.””
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“The US began using military aircraft to return recent border crossers back to their countries of origin last week.”
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“The Department of Defense “has helped administrations before, but not at this level. So it’s a force multiplier, and it’s sending a strong signal to the world. Our border’s closed,” Homan told ABC News.”
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“Mexico also appeared to turn around a military flight heading for the country last week.
Brazil joined Colombia on Sunday in condemning the Trump administration’s handling of repatriated migrants on deportation flights, denouncing the treatment of Brazilian nationals who arrived in the country Friday as “degrading.”
Brazilian authorities said they found 88 handcuffed deportees on a US flight headed to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, that landed in Manaus due to a “technical error.” Brazilian officials did not authorize the plane to continue on due to “the use of handcuffs and chains, the poor condition of the aircraft, with a faulty air conditioning system, among other problems,” and the migrants were transported to Manaus on a Brazilian Air Force flight.”
“Record numbers of Venezuelan migrants have crossed into the United States from Mexico in recent months, hoping to apply for asylum. U.S. immigration authorities reported 24,819 Venezuelan border crossers in December 2021, compared to just 200 one year prior.
Despite the compelling case many Venezuelans have for seeking refuge in the U.S., the Biden administration is denying many of them that opportunity. Instead it is quietly deporting them to Colombia—a policy that resembles a controversial Trump administration practice.”
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” In March 2021, Biden’s DHS announced an 18-month “temporary protected status” for Venezuelans already present in the U.S. That designation, which protects migrants from expulsion, is reserved for people fleeing an “ongoing armed conflict,” “an environmental disaster, or an epidemic,” or “other extraordinary and temporary conditions.” The designation applies to 320,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. but excludes newcomers, despite the Biden administration’s explicit recognition that America should be a safe haven.”
“Colombia is the second most unequal country in an already unequal Latin America region. Even as its economy has grown in recent decades, the poorest slice of the population is not seeing those benefits, and many lower- and middle-income earners struggle to pay for basic services.”
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“unrest that has convulsed Colombia for more than a month. A tax reform bill proposed by right-wing President Ivan Duque sparked protests in late April, with thousands responding to a call from national labor unions to push against the measure.
The government defended the proposed tax increase as a much-needed measure to repair the economy after fallout from the coronavirus. Those who opposed the legislation saw it as putting another burden on middle-class and poorer families who are already in a precarious position, also because of the coronavirus.”
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“Columbia recently emerged from decades of internal armed conflict, the culmination of an imperfect and still not fully realized peace process. But this helped excise the civil war as the dominant political issue.”
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“The Colombian National Police is very much linked to the military; though a distinctive branch, it falls under the oversight of the Ministry of Defense. The force itself was shaped by the conflict in Colombia, with officers often fighting “on the front lines, wielding tanks and helicopters as they battled guerrilla fighters and destroyed drug labs,” according to the New York Times.
Critics have said the country’s national police needs to reform, moving from a focus on training for battle to one of public safety.”
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““They are treating the protesters as they used to treat the guerrillas, as subversives, because that’s the type of public force that is the police,” Restrepo said. “The military and security forces that we have, that was never reformed.””
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“The government has also alleged that some of the violence and chaos is the work of guerrillas, including the vestiges of the FARC, as well as drug traffickers who have infiltrated the protests. At the end of May, when protests had stretched on for a full month, Duque deployed the military to Cali, saying the increased capacity would help in the areas that have seen “acts of vandalism, violence and low-intensity urban terrorism.” Officials have also said hundreds of police officers have been injured, including by armed civilians.
Restrepo said the government is trying to bring the FARC guerrillas and Colombia’s conflict back to the center of the agenda “to justify the militarization of the police and the techniques that they’re using, the violence [and] brutality that they’re using.” In other words, when it works politically, go back to the us-versus-them paradigm.
This has further enraged protesters who see their legitimate grievances being ignored and their anger recast.”
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“Experts told me it would be a mistake to say all protesters, or even all blockades in cities like Cali, are associated with criminal elements. “That being said, you’re having this context of social protests embedded in a city, in a country where, of course, there are some powerful criminal organizations and guerrilla groups,” the Universidad Icesi’s Albarracín said. At least some of those groups will take advantage of the disorder — and the front lines are already so chaotic and disorganized, it’s hard to know who’s who.”
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“Protests are happening across Colombia, in cities including Cali, Bogotá, and Medellin. But this is not a fully unified movement. Up close, the protests all look very different, with diverse and often localized grievances — and not all of the demands are aligned.”