Politics

The United States military killed three more people on Friday in their 39th boat attack in six months, according to a tracker maintained by the New York Times. All told, the strikes by US forces have killed at least 133 people in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained, often without evidence, that they are targeting the boats as an anti-drug smuggling measure. Though, even if people on these boats were confirmed to be transporting drugs, a broad array of legal specialists have held that the “strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings” because the military “cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts,” the Times reported on Saturday.

An 11-second video of the Friday strike, posted by US Southern Command, shows what appears to be a missile hitting a boat in open waters, with a caption claiming without further evidence that the three people killed were “narco-terrorists.”