“Each one of these is individually a crime scene, and the United States is the responsible actor.” — John Walsh
With America preoccupied (as always) with war in the Middle East, another kind of killing is taking place at its back door. Since early September of last year, the United States military has bombed 67 small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific and assassinated 221 supposed “narco-terrorists.” The first full account of this deadly war is the Washington Office on Latin America’s (WOLA) Killing Spree: Extrajudicial Executions in the U.S. Boat Strike Campaign, a 27,000-word report by Adam Isacson, WOLA’s director for defense oversight, and John Walsh, its director for drug policy.
Under U.S. and international law, this is murder, Isacson and Walsh conclude about a policy they see as premeditated killing of civilians who pose no immediate threat to the United States. Its official name is Operation Southern Spear, designed as a war on terror by an inner circle of Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio. So the Donroe Doctrine is really a broader MAGA embrace of extra-judicial killings. Trump might be able to point to Latin America on a map, but this official US policy is about far more than geography.
And it even fails as drug policy. The boat strikes target Andean cocaine while fentanyl (produced in Mexico from Chinese synthetics) drives the American epidemic. As Isacson puts it, bombing these boats is like murdering a street-corner dealer and declaring the entire drug problem solved.
The WOLA report’s darkest implication is domestic. The Justice Department memo underpinning the campaign amounts, Walsh argues, to an open license to kill. For an administration that talks obsessively about the enemy within, the boat strikes might be a dress rehearsal. Graham Greene’s quiet Americans have metastasized into the deadly Americans. Only this time they’re filming their own atrocities and boasting about them on social media. The assassination of that street-corner dealer in Peru might be a dress rehearsal for an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota. America’s southern back porch threatens to become its northern front door.
