Murder at Sea

Since President Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971, US policies of mass incarceration at home and interdiction and enforcement abroad have failed to achieve their stated aims. Instead, they have accelerated violence across the hemisphere. As the historian Alexander Aviña has pointed out, the ‘war on drugs’ is best understood as a ‘war on poor people’. It has recently entered a deadly new phase.

Over the last month, the US government has launched at least eleven strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. The Trump administration has claimed, without providing evidence, that the boats were transporting illegal drugs. The strikes have killed at least 57 people. These are summary executions without trial. Amnesty International has called it a ‘murder spree’.

Five years ago, when I was the director of Latin American studies at a small Catholic college in Mobile, Alabama, a local lawyer approached me looking for help as an expert witness on a federal drug trafficking case (I also helped with translation). The US Coast Guard had detained a group of Colombian men off the coast of Panama with nearly a ton of cocaine on board. They were transported to Florida and eventually moved to a detention centre in Alabama for trial. Each was assigned an attorney.

When I met the client he was visibly afraid. He had been unable to reach his family since his arrest more than six months earlier. He had never intended to enter the United States but now found himself in a cell in Alabama unable to communicate in English.

Born in a small town in an isolated area of western Colombia, he had determinedly avoided involvement in the drug trade, finished high school and worked as a boat captain. He had been hired to transport petrol up the coast, an illicit but not unusual local trade. After the first leg of the trip, however, armed men forced him onto another vessel. They threatened him and his family to ensure he would complete the job. His story of being coerced into trafficking never changed, from the deck of the coast guard ship to his confinement in Alabama.

Many of the 57 people killed by the US military in recent weeks may have been in similar circumstances: poor men forced into drug trafficking either by their economic position or by direct threats of violence. Others may not have been involved in the drug trade at all. Trump and his officials have described the people they’ve killed as ‘narco-terrorists’, but any potential evidence has been destroyed in the attacks. If our client had found himself on a similar boat today, he might be dead.

We eventually reached his family through WhatsApp. We spoke with his sister who shared information on his parents, children and work history. She sent official paperwork, school transcripts and medical records to help the case. She shared videos of family members testifying to his character and images of his home.

Like more than 90 per cent of federal prosecutions, his case ended in a plea bargain. During the sentencing hearing we shared his story in court. It appeared to affect the judge. Yet federal sentencing guidelines meant that, even with a robust defence, there was little we could do. Our client was given more than ten years in federal prison, after which he would be deported.

During the hearing, I was cross-examined by the federal prosecutor. He invoked a scene from the Netflix series Narcos. It was a disturbing line of questioning: peoples’ lives were on the line, and the representative of the US government was drawing on a fictionalised TV series to make his case. It was perhaps a sign of things to come.

The US military is now carrying out extrajudicial executions on the high seas of people who in the past would have been put on trial and, if found guilty, given a federal prison sentence. Gone is any semblance of due process, presumption of innocence or assistance of counsel. Instead, the self-styled ‘secretary of war’ shares videos on social media of each ‘lethal kinetic strike’. The spectacle has little to do with national security, and everything to do with the Trump administration’s dehumanising politics, at home and abroad.