Maduro Calls U.S. Attack on Boat ‘A Heinous Crime.’ Then Trump Announces Another.
"One thing Kuo didn't mention: "...most of the main routes of cocaine trafficking in 2023 and 2024 into the US passed through Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, rather than Venezuela." Apparently most of the cocaine from Venezuela goes to Europe, not to America."
It appears it is possible Trump is intentionally trying to start a war with Venezuela.
The Venezuela leader, Nicolás Maduro, said that the Trump administration was trying to start a war in the Caribbean.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela speaking at a news conference in Caracas on Monday. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
By Julie Turkewitz and Isayen Herrera Isayen Herrera reported from Caracas, Venezuela. Sept. 15, 2025Updated 7:29 p.m. ET Leer en español
The deadly attack President Trump ordered early this month on what he said was a drug-smuggling Venezuelan boat was a “heinous crime,” Venezuela’s president said on Monday — just before Mr. Trump boasted of destroying a second boat.
Speaking to reporters in Caracas, the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, said that the Sept. 2 attack, which killed 11 people, violated U.S. and international laws. If the United States believed that the boat’s passengers were drug traffickers — as Americans officials have claimed — they should have been captured, he said.
Mr. Maduro called the action “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country” and said the United States was trying to goad Venezuela into a “major war.” The American goal, Mr. Maduro said, was “regime change for oil,” not drug interdiction, which the Trump administration has said is a main goal in the region.
Not long after he spoke, Mr. Trump announced on social media that the U.S. military had conducted another strike on Monday morning “against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists” in international waters, heading from Venezuela. The attack killed three people, he said. He justified the second strike, like the first one, by saying that cartels transporting drugs pose a threat to U.S. national security.
There was no immediate response from the Maduro government to the latest attack.
The day’s events marked a continued escalation in tensions between the two nations. The United States began moving warships and troops into the Caribbean near Venezuela in late August, a move Mr. Trump has said is aimed at countering drug trafficking and protecting American lives from illicit drugs like cocaine and fentanyl.
“BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” he wrote on his website, Truth Social.
In a statement, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump, in ordering the first strike, had “acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring poison to our shores.”
President Trump announced on social media that the U.S. military had conducted another strike on Monday. Eric Lee for The New York Times
“Evil narcoterrorists are trying to poison our homeland as over 100,000 Americans die from overdoses every year,” she said, adding that Mr. Trump was “delivering on his promise to take on the cartels and eliminate these national security threats from murdering more Americans.”
After U.S. forces bombed a boat on Sept. 2, Mr. Trump said that those on the vessel were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, and that they had been transporting drugs in international waters.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most recent public data, about 74 percent of cocaine shipments in 2019 were transported through the Pacific, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador, compared with 24 percent through the Caribbean.
Cocaine is a dangerous drug that can have serious consequences, according to public health experts. But fentanyl has a much higher overdose rate. which is almost entirely produced in Mexico with chemicals imported from China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department and the Congressional Research Service.
Many legal specialists, including retired top military lawyers .. https://www.thecipherbrief.com/a-dangerous-precedent-what-happens-when-military-lawyers-go-silent, have called it a crime for the United States to summarily kill suspected smugglers as if they were wartime combatants, rather than arrest them and try them in criminal court. Drug trafficking is not an offense punishable by death in the United States, and Congress has not authorized a war against cartels.
In ordering the strikes on people it accuses of drug trafficking, Mr. Trump has used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, they say.
The White House has not provided a detailed legal rationale for strikes, but it has suggested that using deadly military force was permissible under the laws of armed conflict to defend the country from drugs because, the administration says, 100,000 Americans die annually from overdoses.
Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
Julie Turkewitz is the Andes Bureau Chief for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia, covering Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. See more on: Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump
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"One thing Kuo didn't mention: "...most of the main routes of cocaine trafficking in 2023 and 2024 into the US passed through Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, rather than Venezuela." Apparently most of the cocaine from Venezuela goes to Europe, not to America."
By The Editorial Board The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
Somewhere mingled in the foam and debris of the Caribbean Sea are the remains of at least 17 people who were killed this month by U.S. military forces on the orders of President Trump. They were aboard three speedboats that the Trump administration said were carrying drugs and smugglers from Venezuela.
Perhaps they were. Yet the administration has produced no evidence for its claims. And even if the allegations are correct, blowing up the boats is a lawless exercise in the use of deadly force.
On social media, Mr. Trump assured the public that the passengers were not only drug traffickers but also “narcoterrorists” and members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, which he said was under the control of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Military force was justified as a form of self-defense, he said, because the cartels are “threatening our national security,” and his top aides have vowed to continue the strikes. The self-defense justification looks especially weak after The Times reported .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/us/trump-drug-boat-venezuela-strike.html .. that the first of the three boats turned away from the United States before being destroyed.
With these attacks, Mr. Trump has ordered the summary execution of people who are not at war with the United States in any traditional sense of the term and who may not even have been committing the crime of which he accused them. It is a violation of legal due process that should alarm all Americans. It is even more extreme than his policy of sending migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador, based on questionable claims that they belonged to Tren de Aragua and without any chance to contest the government’s claims. The United States, created in opposition to monarchy, should never become a country where the president can order the indefinite imprisonment or the unilateral killing of people merely because he has deemed them to be criminals.
Drug trafficking is a serious problem, with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl having killed more than 800,000 Americans in the 21st century .. https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-the-opioid-overdose-epidemic.html . It would certainly be reasonable for the Trump administration to increase enforcement in waters around the United States, as it is has at the border. But there are legal ways to do so that stop far short of killing people based on suspicions, never publicly justified, that their boats are carrying drugs.
Until the past few weeks, the standard practice in these cases was for the Coast Guard to interdict the boats, seize the drugs, arrest the crew members and prosecute them. They then have a chance to defend themselves before possibly being convicted and subject to punishment. Federal law, first passed in 1949 and updated many times since, holds that .. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/14/522 .. only the Coast Guard — and not the Navy, the special forces or any other military branch — has the right to conduct law-enforcement operations on the high seas. (The Navy often supports the Coast Guard in these efforts.)
The administration has offered a couple of vague, unpersuasive justifications for its actions. For one thing, it has suggested that the Coast Guard law does not apply because Mr. Trump has declared certain drug cartels to be terrorist organizations. Under the war on terrorism authorizations put in place after Sept. 11, the military can indeed act against people deemed to be terrorists — but only those associated with the 2001 attacks. The administration has also claimed that Mr. Maduro has directed Tren de Aragua to invade the United States, making the situation akin to a war. Yet even intelligence agencies inside the government that Mr. Trump oversees have rejected the argument .. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/us/trump-venezuela-gang-ties-spy-memo.html .. that Mr. Maduro controls Tren de Aragua.
Two Senate Democrats have introduced a resolution calling for an end to armed attacks that are not authorized by Congress, but Republican leaders thus far do not seem to be disturbed by the president’s power grab. In fact, congressional Republicans are considering a draft bill circulated by the White House that would explicitly give Mr. Trump the power to wage war against any drug traffickers he considers terrorists. The one virtue of the draft is that its existence implicitly acknowledges that he lacks that authority now.
In the meantime, Mr. Trump and top administration officials are attempting to obfuscate the illegality of their actions with a crude and unworthy machismo. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said about one of the boats. “This president is not a talker; he’s a doer.” Vice President JD Vance wrote that killing cartel members was the “highest and best use of our military,” and when one social media user told him that killing foreign civilians without due process was a war crime, Mr. Vance responded, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
The model for this conduct seems to be former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom Mr. Trump has praised for shooting drug dealers in the streets without benefit of arrest or trial. Mr. Duterte is now facing trial before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of overseeing the killing of more than 6,000 people suspected of being drug dealers and users. Mr. Trump has also admired China and Singapore for swiftly executing drug traffickers.
---------- [ Insert: Years Later, Philippines Reckons With Duterte’s Brutal Drug War A president’s vow to fight drugs unleashed violence and fostered a culture of impunity. But the crimes are finally getting a look, including from the International Criminal Court. By Sui-Lee Wee and Camille Elemia Reporting from Manila June 29, 2024 [...]When Mr. Duterte left office, his administration said 6,252 people had been killed by security forces — all described by officials as “drug suspects.” Rights groups say the overall death toll stands at roughly 30,000. [...]Reymie Bayunon’s 7-year-old son, Jefferson, was fatally shot in the city of Caloocan in April 2019 after, Ms. Bayunon said, he witnessed a killing in their neighborhood. She sued the police but said she skipped the court hearings after being threatened by a group of officers. [...]While Mr. Duterte has taken full responsibility for the drug war, he has maintained that he would never be tried in an international court. He has said that there are three million drug addicts in the Philippines, adding: “I’d be happy to slaughter them.” [...]Among the cases the I.C.C. is expected to be following is another complaint against the police in Caloocan, north of Manila. Less than three months after Mr. Duterte was inaugurated in 2016, a group of policemen barged into Mary Ann Domingo’s tiny apartment and ushered most of the family out. P - The last time she saw her partner, Luis Bonifacio, alive, he was kneeling on the floor with his arms raised. Her son Gabriel, 19, stayed inside to plead for his father’s life and was also shot dead. Later, Ms. Domingo saw their bodies at the hospital. P - Since 2017, she has pursued a complaint against the officers with the national ombudsman. P - On June 18, a judge ruled that the four police officers who participated in the operation were guilty of homicide. [...]Within days of Mr. Duterte’s becoming president, people like Vincent Go, a freelance news photographer, detected a change. Mr. Go, who worked nights in the Manila region, was getting notified of 10 to 20 crime scenes a night, an astronomical increase in violence. Mr. Go kept seeing the same kind of settings: dead-end alleys, often with no security cameras or witnesses. Rusty guns were frequently left next to the bodies. P - The government’s narrative for such cases was almost always the same: Facing arrest, suspected drug users fought back, and officers had to shoot in self-defense. P - Mr. Go ended up documenting more than 900 crime scenes during Mr. Duterte’s presidency. He shared photographs of corpses with handcuff marks and others with multiple gunshot wounds. Pointing to one, he said, “He was shot five times in the head.” [...]Two of Mr. Jumola’s half brothers met a similar fate. In February 2017, Anthony Ocdin, 23, was also killed by unidentified men in Navotas. He was found with masking tape around his head and a sign on his body that said, “Don’t imitate me, I’m a drug pusher.” Nearly five years later, Angelo Ocdin, 28, was shot in the back by four men in Manila’s Tondo district. P - Cristina Jumola said she now feared for her surviving children. P - Referring to Mr. Duterte, she said, “We want him to be jailed because he ordered the killings of innocent people.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/29/world/asia/philippines-drug-war-duterte-justice.html ] ----------
Brutal repression of drug dealing may be effective at reducing the flow of drugs in some circumstances. But the same is true of many other potential policies that violate the law and basic morality. Free, law-based countries do not shoot or imprison people based on only the government’s accusation that they are breaking the law.
The most successful strategies for reducing drug use involve a mix of law enforcement, prevention measures and treatment programs. The Trump administration, however, has demonstrated little interest in reducing drug abuse. The White House has sought huge cuts to programs designed to bring down that demand, including widely praised addiction medicine and harm reduction efforts, and it is cutting Medicaid, which will leave many users without access to effective treatment programs. It is doing so even though these programs helped produce a 26 percent decline in overdose deaths in 2024 from the year before.
Mr. Trump has always preferred incendiary, and often ineffective, displays of power to quiet, steady programs that work. His attacks at sea fit a disturbing pattern of using the military to address law-enforcement problems. Just as he continues to send the National Guard into cities in a supposed effort to reduce street crime, he wants to achieve the illusion of dominance over drug smuggling, even if his actions make little difference and even if he kills people, guilty or innocent, in the process. The price is a growing number of bodies of nameless foreign citizens who can never defend themselves. It is a moral stain on our nation.
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