One of the worst things about Donald Trump’s America in the 2020s — I know, I know, it’s hard to pick — is the return of all the horrible stuff you foolishly thought our flawed nation was done with after the reckonings of the 1970s.
The American quagmire in Iran makes Vietnam look practically wise in comparison. Then it came out last week that the government was spying in Minnesota on what should be constitutionally protected protest activity by labor unions or environmental groups, in a callback to the notorious illegal FBI op known as COINTELPRO.
Oh, and the CIA is murdering* people in Latin America again.
The asterisk is for “allegedly,” based on a report last week in the Washington Post that confirmed growing suspicions about mysterious drone attacks last winter by “gringos” that struck at least three fishing boats that had sailed deep into Pacific Ocean waters from an impoverished coastal village in Ecuador.
One of the fishing vessels remains missing, its eight crew members presumed dead. The survivors of the other attacks remain traumatized from their injuries and their subsequent interrogation by men who wore no military uniforms — but had U.S. flag patches and spoke with American accents.
In March, the crew of the Negra Francisca Duarte II was returning to its Ecuadorian port in Manta with a fresh catch of seafood and, its sailors insist, no illegal drugs when it noticed a blue ship was trailing it on the horizon. Moments later, drones flew over the fishing craft and began dropping explosives.
“The boys were there, hurt and scared. Some got a fire extinguisher to try to put out the fire, but there were too many flames,” the captain of the Negra Francisca, Hernán Flores, told the New York Times, which published the first U.S. media account of the mysterious attack. Flores said injured sailors jumped into the ocean or scrambled onto lifeboats, and all were at first relieved when the blue boat arrived to rescue them.
Instead, according to the Times and other accounts, their ordeal was only beginning. The survivors were bound, hooded, and interrogated by the strange English speakers, who offered no medical treatment for their wounds. The boat headed north and transferred the crew members into custody in El Salvador, where officials soon released them — not charged with any crime, after the attack that nearly killed them.
The initial Times article did not confirm whom the men were working for, but it noted extensive data showing how each of the three attacked fishing boats had been tracked by a maritime patrol plane that was registered to a UPS mailbox in Richmond, Va., and flew from Tennessee to a military airstrip in El Salvador in November.
After the Times wrote about the three mystery boat attacks, the Post followed up with a report that the attacks were a special covert operation conducted by the CIA. These secret strikes have amplified a series of publicly acknowledged boat attacks in both the Pacific and the Caribbean by the U.S. military that have now killed more than 220 people since Trump returned to the White House 19 months ago.
Last week’s news reports built upon research and more than 100 interviews by the group Human Rights Watch, which is troubled by the lack of both legality and morality in a partnership forged between the United States and Ecuador. This includes not only the three boat attacks but a land assault against a farm near the border with Colombia, which also found no drugs, but in which farmers said they were tortured by the Ecuadorian military.
“The two countries’ security relationship is deepening at a moment when both governments have engaged in serious human rights violations fueled by their insistence on framing their confrontations with organized crime groups as a kind of war,” the rights group wrote.
It’s no secret that drug cartels have enlisted some fishing boats — sometimes through desperation to boost their meager income, but often through extortion — to aid their smuggling operations out of South and Central America.
But these alleged CIA drone strikes raise stark questions about the Trump regime’s strategy that is literally shoot first, ask questions later. Why are some sailors executed at sea when there’s not even evidence to charge the survivors with a crime? Even if some of these boats are tied to narcotics trafficking, what’s the legal and moral justification for a death sentence for low-level drug offenses?
There’s also this: What are these extrajudicial killings even accomplishing, beyond cementing the image around the world that Trump is running a violent criminal enterprise? The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has assessed that — some 230 or so lost human lives later — these U.S. boat attacks have had zero impact on reducing the flow of cocaine into the United States. That’s in part because most drugs that come into the United States by sea pass through larger commercial ports, not small fishing villages.
Instead, the biggest impact from the military drone strikes has been the series of so-called snuff videos that either Trump or Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has posted to social media platforms showing boats in gentle tropical waters getting blown to smithereens, in shock and awe tribute to their regime’s power to kill with impunity. But the secret, allegedly CIA attacks are not even that.
What is even the point of this cruelty?
I’m writing this column to honor the on-the-ground courage of Human Rights Watch and amplify the excellent journalism of Times and Post reporters — and because I’m furious that this story has drawn so little attention, and even less outrage.
Deep into the second year of Trump’s strongman second presidency, the news media is overwhelmed by the Caligula-like craziness of his regime and its fights over matters as small as a ballroom and as big as the Strait of Hormuz, not to mention the frequent weather disasters made worse by the climate crisis the president believes is a hoax. Some maimed or missing fishermen in a tiny village on the bottom side of the planet aren’t making the cut.
Which is probably exactly what the regime is going for. Trump and his MAGA minions would like nothing more than to numb you, me, and the rest of us to their growing archipelago of death, a bloodstained map that stretches from the icy streets of Minneapolis to a dingy detention site in Newark, N.J., and from a bomb-blasted island off Iran to the sickbeds in an African refugee camp. They want us to feel numb as their authoritarian death cult expands, and we cannot allow that to happen.
The truth is that the United States will remain a global pariah — a pitiful, helpless giant — as long as there is no accountability for these war crimes, including, or perhaps especially, the terror perpetrated by mystery men with American flag patches on the high seas. That means public hearings, trials, prison sentences, and the kind of truth and reconciliation this nation has not seen before.
Certainly the fishermen of Manta, Ecuador, will never forget the horrors that rained down upon them from a clear Pacific sky.
Simon Villacreses, a 52-year-old crew member of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, told Reuters that he suffered a head injury in the assault, and remains traumatized months later. “They started pointing guns at us. They took us aboard, put hoods over our heads and tied our hands behind our backs,” he said of the “gringos.”
The rattled Villacreses has not been back to sea since, telling the reporter, “Maybe I’ve given up fishing for good.” His livelihood has been destroyed by the criminal enterprise run out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Our outrage is not enough. We need to be relentless in the pursuit of justice.
