By: Insight Crime
September 9, 2025
The United States has significantly escalated its policy of treating organized crime groups as terrorists with a lethal missile strike on an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean.
President Donald Trump announced on September 2 that a military strike against a suspected drug-carrying vessel in the southern Caribbean had killed 11 alleged traffickers.
A grainy video released by officials appears to show several people on a boat traveling in open water before the vessel explodes in flames.
The strike comes as part of a broader military campaign aimed at cutting off drug trafficking routes in the Caribbean and intimidating Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“A lot of other people won’t be doing it again,” Trump said in a press conference. “When they watch that tape, they’re going to say, ‘Let’s not do this.’”
The White House has provided few details about the strike, which raises several strategic and operational questions. Here are five key aspects to understand about this development.
1. The Strike Allegedly Targeted Tren de Aragua, Which Is Not an International Drug Trafficking Group
Trump said the operation targeted members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, referring to them as “narcoterrorists.”
But the administration provided no evidence linking the gang to the alleged smuggling boat, and InSight Crime’s extensive research on Tren de Aragua has found no evidence of its direct involvement in transnational drug smuggling on a significant scale.
Trump also repeated his claim that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro directs the activities of Tren de Aragua, even though US intelligence agencies have contradicted that assessment.
The United States has also claimed that Maduro leads a criminal organization known as the Cartel of the Suns (Cartel de Los Soles). However, the Cartel of the Suns is not a formal organization but rather a description of a system of widespread corruption within the Maduro regime that facilitates drug trafficking.
While the Venezuelan government is complicit in drug trafficking, the US portrayal of the Cartel of the Suns as a coordinated geopolitical operation led by Maduro is inaccurate. In reality, the government permits illicit activities but does not directly manage them.
2. The Strike Is Part of a Broader Military Presence in the Caribbean
This missile strike comes as part of a significant increase in US military activity in the southern Caribbean. In recent weeks, Trump has deployed several naval vessels and thousands of US troops to the region in what officials have described as an anti-trafficking initiative.
Several governments in the region, including Venezuela’s neighbor, Colombia, as well as Mexico and Brazil, have expressed concern about the show of force and the possibility of a military confrontation between the United States and Venezuela.
Other governments, however, have welcomed the aggressive US actions. Guyana, which is involved in a territorial dispute with Venezuela, issued a statement backing the deployment. And Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Venezuela’s island neighbor Trinidad and Tobago supported the lethal strike, saying she has “no sympathy for traffickers” and that the United States “should kill them all violently.”
3. We Don’t Know What the Alleged Drug Boat Was Carrying
The area where the alleged drug boat was blown up is a busy corridor for transporting not only drugs, but also other contraband and even migrants.
The US claim that 11 people were killed in the strike is notable because drug-carrying vessels typically have a crew less than half that size — one or two pilots, an engineer, and one or two additional security personnel.
Sources on the ground in Venezuela told InSight Crime that the boat departed from the coastal state of Sucre and that it may have been carrying a few migrants in addition to the drug trafficking crew. Although that initial reporting remains unconfirmed, it would fit with the patterns of criminal activity generally observed in the area.
What’s more, the drugs — if there were any — may not have had the United States as their ultimate destination. Illicit shipments passing through this region are often destined for Europe or other consumer markets.
4. The US Has Used Deadly Military Force Against Drug Traffickers Before, But It Is Rare
The use of lethal US military force against drug trafficking is rare but not unprecedented.
The most prominent example is the US invasion of Panama in 1989, in which US forces killed hundreds of Panamanian soldiers and civilians while ousting dictator Manuel Noriega in order to bring him to the United States to imprison him on drug trafficking charges.
The United States has also provided indirect support for lethal actions in Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, and other countries.
But the direct military strike against suspected drug traffickers marks a qualitative shift in strategy, with potentially unforeseen implications.
Top US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said the September 2 strike was the first of more to come.
But there is little reason to believe further strikes will have a lasting impact on drug flows. Drug traffickers are adaptable and will simply find new routes and methods to avoid the US military deployments.
Moreover, those targeted by the strikes would not be members of powerful drug trafficking groups but the lowest and most easily replaceable of the drug trafficking chain — often poor fishermen or other coastal residents with limited economic opportunities.
Not only are the strikes costly and likely to be ineffective, they could also be dangerous. Additional strikes increase the risk of a mistaken attack on innocent people or an accidental confrontation with Venezuelan forces, which could lead to a serious conflict.
5. The US Has Offered No Legal Basis for the Strike
The Trump administration has not publicly stated the legal justification for the strike. Trump has reportedly signed secret orders for the military to target drug trafficking groups, which may form the legal basis for the attack, but those have not been made public.
The United States has signed international agreements around the use of military force that prohibit targeting noncombatants, which puts the strike on dubious footing given that purely profit-driven drug traffickers do not pose an imminent security threat to the United States in the same way as violent, ideologically motivated terrorists.
Despite the evident differences, the Trump administration has increasingly used anti-terrorism policies to target organized crime groups. In recent months, his administration has added dozens of organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean, including Tren de Aragua, to the blacklist of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
An FTO designation does not necessarily provide legal authority for extrajudicial killings of drug trafficking suspects with no due process. However, US courts and lawmakers have traditionally been highly deferential to the president’s use of deadly military force against alleged members of groups on the list.