U.S. expands boat strikes and includes Brazil in its anti-narcotics strategy - critical summary review

A small fast boat in open water, a missile, a blurred video posted on X by the US Southern Command, and a sentence saying that "confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel's active involvement in narcotrafficking". That sequence has repeated itself dozens of times since September 2025 in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific, and it has killed more than 220 people, according to Reuters.

For readers in Brazil this looked for months like someone else's war. It stopped looking that way this week. Two Brazilian congresswomen signed an international declaration calling the strikes extrajudicial executions, Donald Trump used the United Nations podium to say Brazil had failed against organised crime, and Lula answered from the same podium, two weeks before Brazilians vote for president.

What a strike on a boat is

The US military detects a vessel it says is running a known drug route, destroys it with everyone on board, and announces the result afterwards on social media. The most recent one publicly reported happened on 19 September in the Caribbean and killed four people, ten days after another Caribbean strike that killed three, according to the Southern Command. Nothing is seized, nobody is arrested, no cargo is shown. The government of Donald Trump has not presented conclusive proof that the boats hit were carrying drugs, according to AFP.

The counting is itself uncertain, because almost nobody knows who died. A platform that has monitored the campaign since September of last year records 234 deaths in 67 strikes against 71 boats. A CNN tally of official announcements reaches at least 234 dead and at least 80 vessels destroyed. The campaign stopped for more than two months and resumed on 24 August, without any public explanation for the pause. More recently, according to reporting by Veja, the tactic has also included intercepting boats, taking the crews off, handing the detainees to partner countries and then destroying the vessel.

Who decides who dies

There is no judge anywhere in that sequence, and that is deliberate. The Trump administration told the US Congress that the country is in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels, classified those killed as "unlawful combatants", and claims the right to carry out the strikes without judicial review on the basis of a classified conclusion by the Department of Justice, according to CNN.

That conclusion was drawn up in 2025 by the department's Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the executive on the legality of its acts. It argues that the president may authorise lethal force against a broad and secret list of cartels because they "represent an imminent threat to Americans". Members of the US Congress and human rights groups have contested the reasoning, arguing that suspected traffickers should be put on trial. Human rights organisations and legal analysts say the strikes may amount to extrajudicial executions.

More than 70 lawmakers from 13 countries use the same words

This week a joint declaration signed by more than 70 legislators put that accusation on the record. The signatories come from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay, plus Puerto Rico. Colombia has the largest delegation, with 28 names; the United States has 15, among them Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Brazil has two: Luciene Cavalcante, of the left-wing PSOL party, and Ana Pimentel, of Lula's Workers' Party.

The text says the strikes "resulted in hundreds of extrajudicial executions of civilians", that there is no evidence any target posed an imminent threat justifying lethal force, and that the identities of most victims remain unknown, leaving families with no safe way to obtain information or seek redress. It also disputes that the campaign works: citing the US government's own assessments, the signatories say the strikes have not significantly reduced the flow of cocaine into the country, and that production in the region has not fallen. They demand an immediate and permanent end to the operations and ask other governments in the Americas not to assist them through intelligence sharing, access to military bases or logistical support.

Francesca Emanuele, senior international policy associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Folha de S.Paulo, the Brazilian daily, that the strikes are inseparable from the Trump administration's attempt to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean. "Any country in the hemisphere that refuses to align with Washington's positions can become the next target of US military action," she said.

Trump answers by expanding

At the 81st UN General Assembly on 22 September, Trump defended the campaign in the strongest terms he has used so far. "The cartels are the Islamic State of the Western Hemisphere," he said, adding that, like the Islamic State, "they must be killed, exiled or imprisoned as combatants, with no possibility of release, as we are doing". He celebrated the capture of Nicolás Maduro, taken by US forces in Caracas and held in the United States since 3 January on four charges linked to drug and arms trafficking, and said his administration is seeking a fundamental change in Cuba.

The hardware is moving in the same direction. CNN reported, citing six people familiar with the planning, that the Pentagon intends to transfer MQ-9 Reaper drones now stationed in Africa to Southern Command, which runs US military operations in South America; one source said it would be "most" of them. F-35 fighters and at least one AC-130 gunship reached the Caribbean in 2025. The Reapers are used for surveillance and for precision strikes, and the transfer precedes planned counternarcotics and counterterrorism operations, possibly including Ecuador, where the government of Daniel Noboa began joint military operations with the United States earlier this year against groups Washington designates as terrorist. In the National Defense Strategy released in January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth set the defence of the western hemisphere as the Pentagon's top priority.

Where Brazil comes in

Months ago Washington designated two Brazilian criminal organisations, the PCC and the Comando Vermelho, as terrorist groups, a decision the Brazilian government called an affront. In a text signed by Trump, the United States said Brazil had "failed" against those organisations and had become "a global cocaine distribution hub", and demanded urgent and forceful measures. Brasília fears the designation could be used as a pretext for intervention, the same justification used for the boat strikes and for the operation that captured Maduro.

On Tuesday the 22nd, the Shield of the Americas, an alliance of conservative-led governments created by the Trump administration, issued a document endorsing the terrorist designation of the PCC and the Comando Vermelho. Fourteen countries signed it, including Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru. Brazil is not a member, and according to people heard by Folha, Brazilian diplomats did not know the document was coming. Analysts quoted by the paper say the practical effects are still unclear, but that the move helps prepare the ground for possible military action against criminal groups accused of drug trafficking.

Lula opened the General Assembly hours earlier. "Brazil does not fit in anyone's backyard," he said, and warned against "foreign interference in electoral processes" without naming the United States. On organised crime he was direct: "We are not going to outsource the responsibility of defending our borders. We do not need aircraft carriers watching our waters. We need cooperation to stop the flow of weapons and money that feeds organised crime." The day before, in an interview with CNN, he said of the strikes: "They killed a lot of people there, in the boats, and they still have not proven a single trafficker. They did not show any drugs, they did not show anything."

Who pays for it at sea

Fishermen in a village on the Colombian coast told CNN Brasil late last year what the campaign looks like from the water. "Fishermen are afraid, they do not want to go far from the shore any more. But close to the shore there is less fish," said Iroldo Mato Manigua. "We used to fish for four or five days, now we have to spend 12 days fishing to get the same amount."

Francisco Cuello Garay said his boats go around 30 nautical miles out, roughly 55 kilometres, to catch tuna. "We have nothing to do with that business, and they start blowing us up. They see us from a distance and bomb us." Some have stopped going out at all.

What to do with this information

Two things are worth following, and both have dates attached. The first is whether the campaign moves from sea to land: the arrival of the Reaper drones under Southern Command, the joint operations already running in Ecuador and the public statements by US officials about intensifying ground operations are the concrete signals, and they are checkable as they happen. The second is how Brasília responds to the pressure over the PCC and the Comando Vermelho, now that fourteen governments in the region have endorsed the designation Brazil rejected and Brazil was not in the room when they did it.

It also helps to read the numbers carefully. Every death toll in this story comes from announcements by the force that carried out the strike, which is why counts differ and why the signatories of the declaration stress that most victims have never been identified. When a candidate promises to get tough on the factions between now and the vote on the 4th, the question underneath is which of those promises depend on the kind of help Washington is offering, and which do not. Which of the two, in what you have heard so far, is your own candidate proposing?