America’s Extrajudicial Killings: How U.S. Presidents Used the War on Drugs to Justify Illegal Assassinations

The story begins with about eighty poor men in small boats. Since early September, United States Reaper drones and naval assets have destroyed nineteen craft in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing at least seventy-six people, probably more. Most were Venezuelan or Colombian fishermen and casual labourers moving small loads of contraband along short coastal routes. Washington now insists these are “narco-terrorists” and that the killings are lawful because the president is fighting a “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels under his Article II powers as commander-in-chief. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has supplied the magic words to make it all look legal. It always does.

This is not a Trump novelty. It is the logical end point of a twenty-five-year architecture in which presidents from Clinton through Bush and Obama normalised killing outside battlefields, outside courts and increasingly outside the truth. The so-called war on drugs is only the latest pretext. The legal machine was built for the war on terror. The habit of killing first and rationalising later is now permanent.

What has changed is not method, but target: today the victims are poor fishermen in boats, labelled “cartel assets” to keep the paperwork clean.

From torture memos to kill lists

On paper, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is the unit that “advises the executive branch on questions of law”. In practice, for two decades it has functioned as the president’s in-house counsel for activities that would otherwise be plainly criminal.

In the early two-thousands, John Yoo and colleagues at OLC drafted the torture memoranda that redefined “severe pain” into near meaninglessness and stretched presidential war powers to claim that criminal torture statutes could not restrict the commander-in-chief. The core move was simple: call it war, and the domestic criminal code falls silent.

The same office later produced secret opinions on warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention and targeted killing, including the killing of American citizens abroad. The 2010 opinion on Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric, explained why the prohibition on murdering United States nationals overseas did not apply when the president signed off on the strike.

In 2011, Awlaki was killed by a drone in Yemen on the personal authority of President Obama. He was the first United States citizen deliberately assassinated in this way. Two weeks later a separate drone strike killed his sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen, as he ate at an outdoor café. No court ever authorised either killing. When the family sued, the case was dismissed on standing and “political question” grounds.

That is the tradition in which today’s narcoboat memo sits.

A roll call of presidents and their dead

The continuity matters. Trump is not an aberration in this field. He is an inheritor.

Clinton presided over the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 without United Nations Security Council authorisation. The legal basis under the UN Charter was, at best, contested, and the campaign included strikes that killed large numbers of civilians with no credible self-defence rationale. The Serb state posed no meaningful threat to American national security. Bombing it anyway set a precedent for “humanitarian” wars where law is retrofitted to policy.

Bush embedded the idea that the globe is a single, undifferentiated battlefield. The torture regime, secret prisons and “extraordinary rendition” system were not only about interrogations. They rested on a wider view that anyone labelled an “unlawful combatant” could be detained or killed anywhere on Earth with minimal oversight.

Obama industrialised remote killing. Drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia became routine, with “signature strikes” allowed against unknown individuals whose behaviour matched an algorithmic pattern. His lawyers argued that Libya did not amount to “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution because the risk to American personnel was low. In other words, if only the other side can die, Congress does not need to be asked.

Trump, first term inherited the drone infrastructure and relaxed reporting rules. Civilian casualty counts in Iraq and Syria rose. Outside public view, the bureaucratic logic of the kill list continued.

Trump, second term has now pushed into open water. Instead of “high-value targets” in remote provinces, the victims are working-class fishermen in the Caribbean. The legal frame is identical. Treat a dispersed criminal market as an “enemy force”. Decline to specify who was actually killed. Assert that the OLC has ticked the box.

By the time you arrive at nineteen destroyed boats and at least seventy-six corpses, the shock is not that it is happening. The shock is how banal it feels inside the Washington machine.

War powers eaten away, one “limited strike” at a time

On paper, Congress holds the war power. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 says presidents may deploy armed forces into “hostilities” only with prior congressional authorisation or in response to actual attack. In practice, every president since Nixon has treated that limit as advisory.

Clinton bombed Bosnia and Yugoslavia without specific authorisation. Obama’s lawyers argued that bombing Libya did not constitute “hostilities” at all, and so the sixty-day clock never started. The current Trump administration has ordered strikes on Iran and now on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific without any serious effort to involve Congress, relying on the same idea that “limited” air operations are beneath the constitutional threshold.

Once you accept that logic, a pattern emerges. If the president can use force anywhere, at any time, so long as American casualties are unlikely, then remote killing becomes politically painless. Dead foreigners do not trigger the legal mechanisms that dead United States soldiers do.

The narcoboat campaign is a direct child of that doctrine. It exploits the gap between the scale of violence on the water and the lack of visible risk in Washington.

The war on drugs as pretext

If this were about drugs, the targets would look very different.

Colombia produces the majority of the world’s cocaine. Global UN data shows record production, with thousands of tons estimated annually, driven chiefly by coca cultivation in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. The main trafficking routes are well known: from the Andean states through Central America and Mexico to North America, and across the Atlantic and West Africa to Europe.

Venezuela is, at most, a marginal transit country in that system. UNODC reporting and the 2025 World Drug Report indicate that only a small fraction of Colombian cocaine flows through Venezuelan territory, that the country itself has no significant coca cultivation, and that its law enforcement cooperation has historically been among the strongest in the region. Public analysis by former UNODC director Pino Arlacchi reinforces this picture: roughly five percent of regional cocaine transits via Venezuela; far more moves through Central America and Ecuador.

By contrast, Ecuadorian ports such as Guayaquil have become major cocaine export hubs, with European authorities repeatedly finding multi-ton shipments hidden in banana containers. Homicide rates in Ecuador have exploded as transnational groups fight over those routes.

Yet it is not Ecuadorian boats being blown out of the water.

The moral and strategic corrosion

At this point, the legal and factual position is clear enough. The boat strikes are founded on a manufactured “war”, directed at a marginal node in the cocaine trade, and justified by an office that has repeatedly stretched law to fit predetermined policy.

The moral position is even clearer.

Killing seventy or eighty men at sea, many of them poor coastal workers, without charge or trial and without any meaningful prospect of identifying their bodies or compensating their families, is not drug control. It is not deterrence. It is an act of exemplary violence designed to send a message to a government Washington dislikes.

Call it what it is: political killing. It will be read that way in Latin America, regardless of the language in the memo.

There is also the question of reciprocity. If the United States insists it may sink Venezuelan boats in international waters on suspicion of trafficking, does it accept that Venezuela may sink U.S. yachts near Florida on suspicion of money-laundering or sanctions-busting? If not, this is not “law”. It is simple hegemony.

Liability and the thinness of the shield

For United States officers and intelligence personnel, the most important point is the one that will not appear in the glossy talking points.

An internal OLC opinion does not bind foreign courts. It does not bind international tribunals. It does not bind successors in Washington. The torture lawyers of the Bush years have already faced proceedings in foreign jurisdictions and detailed legal opinions setting out their potential criminal liability. There is no reason in principle why those who sign, plan or execute today’s narcoboat strikes are safe forever.

The memo that tells them they are immune relies on a legal theory that serious jurists outside the executive branch have doubted for two decades. It may protect them from a U.S. prosecutor. It will not protect them from history, nor from the precedent they are now creating for others.

Because once you normalise killing civilians at sea in the name of a fabricated war on drugs, you invite your rivals to adopt the same posture. You hand them the script and show them how to read it.

Trump is only the latest occupant of the Oval Office to order killings without trial. The system that makes those killings normal, legal-looking and politically cost-free is far larger than one man. If there is any lesson in the deaths of those men in the Caribbean, it is that a republic cannot subcontract its conscience to a secret office and expect to remain a republic for long.