The US Secretary of State asked if drug boats from allied countries could never face “unilateral execution”
US officials have not yet cited the legal authority that justified Tuesday’s air strike on an alleged venezuelan drug smuggling boat in international waters, while criticism comes from legal experts.
Meanwhile, the United States has ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighter planes in a Puerto Rico aerodrome to carry out operations against drug cartels, two sources on Reuters said in a report published on Friday. Advanced hunter advances add to a more muscular presence in the South Caribbean by the US military in recent weeks.
The strike, announced on Tuesday by US President Donald Trump and members of his administration, killed 11 people. The White House said that the boat was carrying members of Tren from Aragua, a gang, according to the administration, is closely linked to the government of the autocratic leader of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro.
Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told Fox News on Wednesday that the United States “knew exactly who was in this boat, we knew exactly what they were doing and that we knew exactly who they represented”.
For the moment, these details have not been provided, even if a presidential administration is required by the law of adviser on military action not authorized by the congress within 48 hours, a deadline which was adopted on Thursday.
“Disproportionate lethal force”
The Washington office of Latin America (Wola), a non-governmental organization, said in a statement Thursday that American action “violates the letter and the spirit of more than a century of international standards and the United States’s own regulations for maritime operations against civilian ships in international waters”.
“What we have seen so far suggests that the American armed forces have done something that he has never done, to our knowledge, in more than 35 years of military involvement in the prohibition of drugs in the Caribbean Sea: an instant climbing with the disproportionate lethal force against a civilian vessel without any justification for apparent self -defense,” said the organization.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not provide details on the legal examination process preceded strikes when he was asked in equator on Thursday by a Washington Post journalist if drug smugglers from countries who are not adversaries like Venezuela could “face the unilateral execution of American forces”.
In his responseRubio said that the American allies in the region “would help us find these people and explode them if that’s what it takes.”
Debates on the legality of preventive strikes have often occurred in recent years. The administration of Barack Obama withdrew the Islamist activist of American origin Anwar Al-Awlaki, while the Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani was killed by an American strike during the first administration of Trump. The administration of Joe Biden and the current Trump’s White House both supervised strikes on Houthi activists that the United States has accused of threatening international ships in the Red Sea.
But what has happened in recent days can differ from these examples.
“Intentional death apart from hostilities of armed conflict is illegal unless it is to save a life immediately,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, expert in international law and the use of the law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Notre-Dame. “No hostility occurred in the Caribbean.”
Democrats are looking for more information
The current administration, as part of its vast efforts to deport undocumented American residents, sought to represent Tren of Aragua as a terrorist organization, a designation that has been debated by certain expertsAlthough Canada too has appointed the group this year a terrorist entity.
In addition, analysts who follow global drug trafficking interrogated The scope of the presence of the gang on the international scene, as well as the way it is closely linked to the government of Maduro.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States had made a military strike in the South Caribbean, killing 11 people aboard what he said to be a drug-carrying ship operated by the Gang Tren in Aragua who left Venezuela.
Capitol Hill’s criticism this week was relatively circumspect, probably reflecting the fact that a rare domain of the Bipartisan Agreement at the Congress among the Republican and Democratic legislators is the illegitimacy of the leaders of Maduro, taking into account the Venezuelan suspicious elections. The member of the Jim Himes Democratic Congress of Connecticut is one of those who vocalized the concerns concerning the legal authority that the president had to order the strike, For political relationships.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said this week in an opinion piece that it would be a mistake to see international laws applied unevenly, depending on who is targeted.
“If we close our eyes to this example of a badly applied war rules due to the aversion to the venezuelan drug cartels or the fear of illicit drugs, we risk defining a precedent in which our most fundamental right to life suddenly depends on knowing whether Trump or other leaders decide to declare a war against us,” Roth wrote in the goalkeeper.
“Even despicable individuals are entitled to arrest and pursuit rather than a summary murder,” added Roth, while showing the example of the former Philippin President Rodrigo Duterte, which faces a trial at the International Criminal Court linked to blind murders in the war of his administration against drugs.
US allies and adversaries have also been reluctant to offer a reaction in the absence of information, although Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva would have accused the United States Thursday In general terms of violation of international law with its Venezuelan policies.
