US military strike on boat in Caribbean targeted Colombians signaling broader campaign against drug groups

By Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — At least one US military strike in the Caribbean over the last two months targeted Colombian nationals on a boat that had left from Colombia, according to two people briefed by the Pentagon about the strikes.

The deliberate targeting of Colombians, which has not been previously reported, suggests that the US military’s campaign against suspected narcotics trafficking groups in the Caribbean is wider than previously believed as President Donald Trump threatened further military and covert action Wednesday.

The US military has carried out at least five strikes to date on five separate boats in the Caribbean. The third publicly acknowledged strike on September 19 targeted a boat leaving Colombia, the sources said.

The boat was suspected of carrying Colombians affiliated with Colombian terrorist organizations, the sources said, but the Pentagon was unable to determine the individual identities of each person on the boats before they struck them.

The Trump administration has produced a classified legal opinion that justifies lethal strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, CNN has reported.

The opinion is significant, legal experts previously told CNN, because it appears to justify giving the president power to designate drug traffickers as enemy combatants and have them summarily killed without legal review. Historically, those involved in drug trafficking were considered criminals with due process rights, with the Coast Guard interdicting drug-trafficking vessels and arresting smugglers.

Trump said Wednesday that he had also authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on illegal flows of migrants and drugs from the South American nation, but stopped short of saying they would have authority to remove President Nicolas Maduro.

“We have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea, so you get to see that, but we’re going to stop them by land also,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

The remarks are Trump’s most expansive comments on his decision to expand the CIA’s authority to conduct lethal targeting and carry out covert action in the region, as CNN first reported last week.

On Capitol Hill Wednesday, Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee forcibly defended the strikes, saying Trump is “doing exactly what he should be doing.” But Democrats pushed back, with Sen. Peter Welch telling CNN that Congress is “abdicating its responsibility by not doing oversight.” The Vermont Democrat said, “We have asked for, what’s the legal basis upon which you’re doing this? No answer. So what you have is a situation where the chief executive is making a decision on his own, without any oversight, without any accountability about who gets killed. And that’s not an acceptable situation.”

CNN has reached out to Colombia’s foreign ministry for comment. Referring to the vessel that was struck on September 19, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said at the time on X: “If the boat was sunk in the Dominican Republic, then it is possible that they were Colombians. This means that officials from the US and the Dominican Republic would be guilty of the murder of Colombian citizens.”

Asked about the strike, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told CNN that every strike taken by the US military has “been against designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores.”

“On the campaign trail, President Trump promised to take on the cartels – and he has taken unprecedented action to stop the scourge of narcoterrorism that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans,” Kelly said. She added that “the President will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice.”

Also on Wednesday, three US Air Force B-52 bombers flew off the coast of Venezuela for more than four hours, according to open-source flight data reviewed by CNN. The bombers took off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana before dawn.

Two of them kept their location beacons activated inside Venezuela’s flight information region (FIR), at one point coming within 53 miles of La Orchila Island. At their closest point, the planes flew 132 miles from the Venezuelan mainland, at around 11:20 a.m. local time. The bombers remained in a part of Venezuela’s flight information region that is international airspace, but controlled by the country’s aviation authority. Venezuela’s FIR extends far beyond the country’s airspace.

CNN has reached out to the Pentagon for comment on the flights.

Colombian President Petro also said on X earlier this month that “indications show” the fourth US military strike on a boat in the Caribbean also targeted Colombians. “The aggression is against all of Latin America and the Caribbean.” The US had announced days earlier that it had hit a fourth boat in the Caribbean.

The White House denied Petro’s claims in a statement, saying that “the United States looks forward to President Petro publicly retracting his baseless and reprehensible statement.”

But sources told CNN that while the fourth US military strike may not have targeted Colombians, at least the one previous strike on September 19 did.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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CNN’s Kevin Liptak, Avery Schmitz, Thomas Bordeaux, Ellis Kim, and Arlette Saenz contributed to this story.