Washington’s intensified campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific in 2025 reframes a long-running counternarcotics effort as a counterterrorism operation. Senior US officials regularly label those targeted as “narco-terrorists,” invoking the legal and political weight of counterterrorism to justify lethal force at sea. The campaign’s pace at least 21 strikes on 22 vessels with roughly 83 reported fatalities by mid-November and the near-total lethality of engagements have sparked fierce debate about whether the victims were members of terrorist networks or lower-level traffickers and coerced couriers.
The distinction matters legally and ethically. Treating suspected smugglers as terrorists opens operational latitude for the military, reduces the emphasis on capture and prosecution, and changes the public narrative about legitimacy and proportionality. Critics argue that many maritime trafficking networks rely on expendable crews and coerced couriers, making the “narco-terrorist” label both blunt and potentially misleading.
Washington’s Framing Of Narco-Terrorism
Senior officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have equated certain Latin American criminal groups with terrorists, arguing that their lethality and social damage warrant a comparable response. The administration’s public messaging emphasizes links between trafficking networks and designated terrorist entities, and presents maritime strikes as defensive actions to stop narcotics from reaching US shores. This rhetorical fusion supports a policy choice: use kinetic strikes in international waters rather than risk the diplomatic friction or logistical complexity of boarding, arrest, and prosecution.
Policy Shifts And Designations
In 2025 Washington accelerated efforts to designate select transnational criminal networks as terrorist entities. Groups tied to Venezuelan state actors or violent transnational gangs have been singled out in diplomatic statements. Those designations partly aim to expand sanctions and justify military options, but they also raise questions about intelligence standards and evidentiary thresholds used to classify distinct criminal actors as terrorists.
Eastern Pacific Strikes And The Casualty Profile
Operations in the eastern Pacific became a focal point after coordinated strikes in late October and November. Several reported incidents west of Central and South America destroyed boats on recognized trafficking routes and resulted in multiple fatalities with few survivors. Southern Command’s tally and the administration’s descriptions emphasize operational success and disruption of smuggling corridors, but they offer limited public detail on how individual targets were linked to terrorist structures.
Independent reconstructions and open-source analysts underline a worrying pattern: public disclosures rarely include names, forensic details, or clear chain-of-evidence linking the dead to terrorist leadership. In one notable case, the ELN publicly denied involvement in a vessel the US claimed it operated, illustrating the limits of external verification and the friction such claims create with regional partners.
The Missing Evidence Behind Terrorist Designations
Publicly available information about the campaign shows a consistent gap between assertive operational language and concrete, shareable evidence.Intelligence is claimed to have been used in support of strikes but there is a dearth of declassified corroboration. Part of the reason behind that restraint can be explained operationally in that sources and methods may compromise the continued collection but it causes a credibility gap, especially when lethal force is being applied in an environment where other law-enforcement options might have worked.
Traffickers Versus Coerced Couriers
The counterdrug experts point to the multifaceted hierarchy of maritime trafficking: the decision-makers at the top of the chain do not go on the boats; the crews are frequently paid under wages, forced or lured into service out of economically disadvantaged groups. It is operationally and morally challenging to make a distinction between leaders and low-level operators. In cases where strikes create almost no victims, it becomes virtually impossible to have independent verification of the existence of leadership.
Legal And Human-Rights Scrutiny
There has been alarm by international legal scholars as well as UN human-rights mechanisms. UN special rapporteurs had sounded warning that summary lethal action in the international waters in the absence of a threat or the circumstances of an armed conflict as understood under international law would run the risk of constituting extrajudicial execution. There are increasing calls to make investigations transparent and independent and the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights has urged Washington to hold off strikes until legal standards and accountability procedures have been made clear.
It has been a mixed but usually critical reaction regionally. A number of leaders in Latin America criticized the campaign to be a sovereignty breach and a politicized piece of information that can lead to the escalation of tensions. Even in the US circles of policy makers, senators and oversight officials doubt the constitutionality of the legal justifications and intelligence foundations of the strikes as far as the set standards are concerned.
Strategic Logic Versus Long-Term Risks
In the perspective of Washington, the campaign also deals with the exasperation with restrictions on interdiction and the bleeding impact of illegal flows on US neighborhoods. Advocates believe that the apparent and assertive intervention would break the smuggling habits, and make the use of certain routes less desirable. However, analysts warn that maritime interdictions simply do not have the capacity to bust such a solid trafficking net; cartels will find alternative ways of moving cargo, they will find replacements and will find loopholes in governance on land.
In the long term, there is a threat of destroyed regional cooperation, undermined legal standards of the use of force, and the resentment that may follow the killing of civilian or coerced members of the crew. The absence of the obvious evidence also gives the weapons to the opponents and makes multilateral efforts aimed at enhancing the regional judicial and policing capacity difficult.
Navigating The Narco-Terrorism Narrative And The Evidence Gap
The eastern pacific operation brings out a pressing policy crisis of the need to juggle the urge to fight decisively against illicit flows with the obligations to law, proportionality and multilateral cooperation. In case the US has credibly associated certain crews with terrorist groups that pose a threat to the US life, restricted unilateral force can be justified under narrow legal interpretations. In the case of ambiguous evidence, or withheld evidence, however, the lethal strikes can be seen to violate international standards and compromise the overall counternarcotics and counternetwork approach.
To close the credibility gap in the future, it will either be necessary to share evidence more openly with trusted partners or the shift to joint interdiction, capture and prosecution approaches that focus on saving lives and achieving convictions. Whether the people who were killed were actually narco-terrorists or traffickers will not only determine the legitimacy of the immediate campaign, but also the future precedent of how states respond to threats of transnational organized crime at sea.
