By: Staff Writer
October 7, 2025
The US Department of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on X that US President Donald Trump ordered a lethal strike on a Venezuelan boat last week Friday that was suspected of trafficking narcotics from the South American country that was presumed on its way to the US, killing four in the process.
Hegseth said: “Earlier this morning, on President Trump’s orders, I directed a lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel affiliated with Designated Terrorist Organizations in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike, and no U.S. forces were harmed in the operation. The strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics – headed to America to poison our people.
“Our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route. These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!”
This is the fourth such lethal strike on a Venezuelan boat in the past three months. The death toll from these strikes are now up to 21 suspected Venezuelan drug traffickers.
The first three strikes happened in September, with the first on September 2 killing 11, later in September, two separate strikes killed six, now leading to Friday’s strike killing four.
President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week.
The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times. It adds new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale for why three U.S. military strikes the president ordered on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month, killing all 17 people aboard them, should be seen as lawful rather than murder.
As the Trump administration attempts to justify the air strike, concerns must now be met at the US Southern border with Mexico where cartels have just as much access to the US market.
Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.
Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said in a New York Times article that drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities” — the standard for when there is an armed conflict for legal purposes — against the United States because selling a dangerous product is different from an armed attack.
Nevertheless Trump’s merciless assault on suspected drug cartels will continue and we hope that the scourge of drug trafficking to the US comes to an end.