On November 10, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted on X:
“At the direction of President Trump, two lethal kinetic strikes were conducted on vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations. These vessels were known by our intelligence to be associated with illicit narcotics smuggling, were carrying narcotics, and were transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route in the Eastern Pacific.Both strikes were conducted in international waters, and three male narco-terrorists were aboard each vessel.
All six were killed. No U.S. forces were harmed. Under President Trump, we are protecting the homeland and killing these cartel terrorists who wish to harm our country and its people.”
E.U. and U.N. officials decry President Trump’s use of the military against narcos, but as usual offer no alternative solution and refuse to condemn Latin American governments for allowing drugs to flow out of their countries into the U.S. and Europe. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, set them straight.
The U.S. began deploying Navy warships and personnel to the Caribbean in mid-August as part of anti-narcotrafficking operations to stem the flow of drugs into the United States. President Trump announced on September 2, 2025, that the Navy had carried out its first airstrike in the Caribbean on a boat from Venezuela, killing all eleven people on board. As of November 10, 2025, at least seventy-six narcos have been killed in nineteen strikes on twenty vessels, ten in the Caribbean Sea and ten in the Eastern Pacific.
The UN human rights chief Volker Turk condemned the strikes, saying they violate international law and amount to extrajudicial killings. He argued the U.S. has provided no evidence that anyone on the boats posed an imminent threat to life and urged Washington to stop the attacks and use law enforcement methods instead.
At the CELAC-EU summit in Colombia, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas reminded leaders that force is lawful only in self-defence or with a UN mandate. Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof called for calm, Mexico’s Juan Ramon de la Fuente stressed sovereignty, and Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro called the deaths extrajudicial executions and identified at least one Colombian victim. European Council President António Costa urged dialogue over confrontation.
The criticism is ironic, given that Europe relies on America for its defense, Mexico functions as a narco state where the president and other politicians operate at the mercy of the cartels, and Colombian officials have been heavily sanctioned by the United States for enabling narcotrafficking. In the past two years, 2023 and 2024, Colombia saw staggering political violence, with more than thirty-four politicians and candidates killed in the 2024 election cycle alone. The previous year was described as the most violent on record for attacks on public officials.