Last week in Guetemala, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held the first hearing of its kind on the murderous U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean and the harm they are causing communities across Latin America. The Center for Constitutional Rights joined the ACLU and UN human rights experts in denouncing the strikes and called for action to stop them. Trump administration officials were in attendance and decried the effort to hold then accountable. Angelo Guisado, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, delivered the following remarks at the hearing:
On September 2, 2025, the United States fired a missile at a boat off the coast of Venezuela, splitting the boat in half, killing nine of the eleven people aboard and leaving two individuals clinging to its remnants. Moments later, the U.S. military fired second, third, and fourth strikes, sinking the vessel and killing the marooned survivors.
To try to justify these executions, the U.S. claims that it had “positively identified” those on the boat as “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” alleging that Venezuela poses a grave threat to the security of the United States by producing and trafficking drugs. The Trump administration further asserted that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro heads a drug cartel that it designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The U.S. has offered this reasoning to justify the 43 boat strikes since, killing at least 150 people, including two of our clients, Rishi Samaroo and Chad Joseph.
The United States’ unprecedented military campaign, Operation Southern Spear, came without any plausible legal justifications. The extrajudicial assassination of civilians in international waters is, plainly, murder. Under any law, the U.S. military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
The world has failed to challenge these assassinations in any meaningful way. I posit that this owes to the global embrace of the terrorism-counterterrorism dialectic and the national security framework that the U.S. has propagated for decades. The framework manipulates the sympathy evoked by attacks to legitimize broad retributive actions that far exceed scope, proportion, and duration. Critically, it also serves to diminish the centrality of human rights protections.
The U.S. has deployed this framework and the national security apparatus to obtain endless impunity. The invocation of “narcoterrorism” has empowered President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to publicize the boat strike videos on social media. They are seen boasting and celebrating the wanton infliction of suffering and death, and lampooning the lives of those caught in their crosshairs. We ask that the Commission look through this thinly veiled cover and recognize the inhumanity these actions reflect and the pain they have caused.
In Latin America especially, the U.S. need only exclaim “national security interests” and out flow missiles, firearms, paramilitary support, sanctions, and election interference. Regional accords and joint programs such as Operation Condor, the School of the Americas, and the Merida Initiative paved the way for the United States’ recent Shield of the Americas Summit, in which twelve countries leapt at the chance to “defend our own sovereignty, our own security, and our own economic prosperity.”
Beyond the boat strikes, this framework has helped authorize the incitement of war with Iran, the recent military actions in Mexico and Ecuador, the escalation of the blockade with Cuba, and the illegal deportation and rendition of countless migrants to CECOT, Guantanamo, and beyond. It also represents a new guise to undermine sovereign prerogatives in Latin America. Historic incursions, interference, and CIA support in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Cuba, and right here in Guatemala should not be regarded as bygone history, but rather a chilling warning to those who believe that human rights and dignity are essential to humanity itself.
