Why is Trump blowing up Venezuelan "drug boats"?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising

0:17Marianna Spring:and often hidden ways the US has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:39Today we're going to do one of our AmeriCast Under the Radar episodes where we specifically look at important events that are going under-reported because of all the other news that there is out of the Trump administration. And today we want to look at the stories about boats allegedly smuggling drugs from Venezuela into the United States, which the Trump administration are simply blowing out of the water and then taking those videos and proudly posting them on social media. Welcome to AmeriCast.

1:11Marianna Spring:AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. When Donald Trump calls, they say, yes, sir. Right away, sir. Happy to lick your boot, sir. We are the sickest country in the world. Oh, dear. Are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry? Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?

1:38Hello, it's Sarah in the BBC's Washington Bureau.

1:41Marianna Spring:And it is Mariana, a.k.a. Misinformation, in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London. And it's Justin sitting alongside Mariana in those same worldwide headquarters. We've not sat next to each other in ages. No, it's really exciting. I've been in San Francisco. I've actually been in America, you see. Yeah, which gives you kudos that I can't even pretend to have. And we're going to talk later on. I should say right at the beginning, we are going to talk about another thing as well that we all might have missed if we hadn't decided to talk about it today. But it is really interesting. Conservative commentators, MAGA influencers, criticising the choice of the Super Bowl halftime show, this all important piece of Americana, the one for the next Super Bowl, which is in early 2026.

2:23And they have selected the Puerto Rican pop star Bad Bunny as the halftime show headliner next year. And that has caused quite a row. So we will get to that later.

2:34Marianna Spring:Particularly because Justin's new specialist subject is apparently Bad Bunny. All I can say is I know more about Bad Bunny than you might think by looking at me. OK, but before we talk about Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl, let's first talk about something else. And AmeriCaster Ruth in Cambridgeshire has emailed in. She says, would you be able to talk a bit about the recent sinking of Venezuelan boats, allegedly carrying drugs by US forces and leading to the killing of the people on board? Is this legal internationally? is anyone except Venezuela reacting to it. What are the implications of this?

3:08Marianna Spring:Sarah? Well, let me run you through just exactly what it is that's been going on because, you know, under any other circumstances, this would be an enormous story. But, you know, there's so much news coming out of the White House all the time as we know that there are things like this that we don't talk enough about. So Friday last week, Pete Hegseth, the Defence Secretary or War Secretary, as he calls himself, said that American forces had killed four people during a military strike on a boat that was off the coast of Venezuela. He said that it was trafficking drugs. And in fact, he posted on X, the strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics.

3:49Now, they've produced no evidence for that whatsoever. And because of the strike, the boat was blown up before they could try to even get any evidence. The people on board were killed, not arrested. And this is not the first time. This has been going on for about a month or so. There have been at least three separate strikes that have killed a total of about 17 people over the last few weeks. And you won't be surprised that international lawyers, the UN, other people have been very critical of this, saying governments can't just go around murdering alleged drug traffickers, particularly not in international waters, when there's no evidence whatsoever that they've actually committed any of these crimes.

4:24And Republicans have been quite critical about it as well. Let's have a listen, though, to what Donald Trump had to say when he was speaking at an event on Sunday celebrating the Navy's 250th birthday. He said that these strikes are about protecting American citizens. In recent weeks, the Navy has supported our mission to blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water. You see that?

4:53And, you know, there are no boats in the water anymore. You can't find any. We're having a hard time finding them. But, you know, it's a pretty tough thing we've been doing, but you have to think of it this way. Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25 ,000 American people and the destruction of families. So when you think of it that way, what we're doing is actually an act of kindness. But we did another one last night. Now we just can't find any. You know, it's the old story. We're so good at it. that there are no boats. In fact, even fishing boats, nobody wants to go into the water anymore.

5:31Sorry to tell you that. But we're stopping drugs coming into America, if that's OK. We're stopping drugs at a level that nobody's ever seen before.

5:40Marianna Spring:It feels like there are some numbers there that possibly need querying, not least this line where he says, every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25 ,000 American people and the destruction of families. I guess there's two different points, isn't there? The exact numbers here, which there doesn't seem to be necessarily evidence to support the exact numbers. But obviously there is a significant impact of drugs on the US. And that's, I guess, just in what he's sort of getting at here. Yeah. And he knows it'll be popular. There's not really a big blowback in the United States itself to what he's portraying as and what will seem to most people to be the killing of people who don't deserve to stay alive because they're wreaking havoc with people's lives in the United States.

6:21But, as our questioner suggests, she uses the word allegedly. I mean, you don't know who's on these boats. You don't know what's on the boats. You don't know if there are US citizens on the boats who have all sorts of protections under US law. But you don't know anyway. Maybe there are people who've been kidnapped on these boats. Maybe there aren't drugs on the boats. They just don't know. And in those terms, it seems like an act of recklessness. As Sarah's dead right, in any other time, we'd be talking about it all the time. and so would Americans, but it's just kind of gone under the radar. So, you know, quite apart from, we'll get to this in a second, the legality of it, because that's something for you, Sarah, to weigh in on what people are saying about the constitutional legality of what he's doing.

7:06It just seems to me to be the most staggeringly reckless thing to do, even if you can make the case that there are drugs that come across that stretch of water and they are carried in boats. You don't know that it's these ones. Why is it reckless? though? Reckless because you think there will be retaliation from Venezuela or morally reckless? I think it's reckless because you don't know who you're killing. And the idea that Americans are now, the American armed forces are killing people in international waters who they don't know who they are or what they're doing, seems to me to be an order of recklessness that we just haven't seen before.

7:45Tells you a huge amount, though, about the Trump administration, not just that they're prepared to do this, but that they're pleased with it. They're boasting about it. They will post on social media about it. They will celebrate it. I mean, there's a kind of torturous legal justification for them being able to do it, but they don't feel obligated to make that every time. I mean, you heard Donald Trump there. He's very happy to say, look, you know, we see these people, we think they're doing bad things and we blow them up. And they're proud of it, of, you know, something that, as you say, is highly controversial and potentially reckless.

8:15There There is a sort of justification whereby, first of all, Donald Trump signed a directive back in July authorizing lethal force against certain Latin American drug cartels. And to do so, he designated them as terrorist organizations, I guess, saying that they do such harm to America by smuggling drugs in. And of course, in some cases, illegal immigrants as well, that he defines that as terrorism. It's not, you know, this is not al Qaeda that we're talking about here or ISIS, but he says that they're terrorist organizations. then he says that these are terrorists that they're striking in the waters and that they're doing so in self-defense because those boats would be coming with drugs to America to harm Americans so yeah so firstly you're saying drug smugglers are terrorists and secondly you're saying that stopping drugs coming into the country is self-defense in a way that could be you know defined as such an international law and allow what's basically military action being taken against them.

9:10So that is, I mean, it's trying quite hard, I think, to come up with something that they're calling, was it non-international armed conflict with drug cartels allows them to take this action. And that would be, you know, it is a source of great debate among legal scholars and things and less so a source of outrage on the streets of America. And we should say as well, Pete Hegseth, the war secretary, as we must call him, directly contradicts what I've just said about not knowing who's on board the boat. In fact, let's let him, let's hear from him. He was asked specifically about it by Fox News' Pete Doocy.

9:46You have said the strikes will continue against narco-terrorists. Every video of a cartel boat blowing up looks like it is a trailer for a Bad Boys movie sequel. But how is that legal? We have every authorization needed. These are designated as foreign terrorist organizations. They're a threat to the homeland. They're a threat to the American people. They've been poisoning our people for far too long. And President Trump said no more. They're effectively designated just like al-Qaeda, which if I saw al-Qaeda in the conduct of doing something that was going to threaten and kill Americans, I had the right to do that in Iraq and Afghanistan.

10:21If you're in our hemisphere and you're in the Caribbean, if you're north of Venezuela and you want to traffic drugs to the United States, you are a legitimate target of the United States military. And in each one of these strikes, we know where they're coming from. We know who they work for. We know where they're going. We know what they're carrying. We know how many people are on that boat. And that's why these are legitimate, clean kills in pursuit of defending the homeland. And we hope it deters those foreign terrorist organizations from doing it because the American people deserve to be defended.

10:48Marianna Spring:Before we get into the use of that word terrorist, and I'm sure that we will in a second, but just on what the reporter asked, you know, saying every video of a cartel boat blowing up looks like a trailer for a movie, essentially. That has been that is one of the things that the Trump administration have been doing. They've been sharing these clips on social media and they are quite literally, you know, very eye catching. They're the kinds of things that do kind of look like a video game. Yeah, yeah. It looks like a video game, something out of a film. What I would say, though, and I find this quite interesting because I've spoken about it quite a lot.

11:20Marianna Spring:But Donald Trump's social media team and the administration's social media team are famously or infamously quite good at rage bait, posting the kinds of stuff that will trigger a reaction. and when they've posted different content around for example issues like immigration often that content has actually been quite successful if that's the right way of describing it at evoking a reaction on either side either lots of support or lots of people disagreeing interestingly this stuff i don't think is cut through in the same way it's almost why we're talking about it in this under the radar sense because there have been people reacting to it kind of saying whoa what's going on here but it almost feels like the step between the boat being blown up and then your life I don't know that the gap there feels longer than perhaps when it comes to illegal immigration, for example.

12:02Or the putting of the sombreros on the Democrats who went to see Donald Trump, which caused so much outrage, but also made some people laugh a lot. But it was kind of just it didn't have that kind of sense of, well, nobody died.

12:14Marianna Spring:Yeah, it's quite literally a stunt. Whereas if someone is if there is a boat being blown up and people are being killed by the US, it's kind of like, oh, hang on. This isn't really a stunt anymore. This isn't like, you know, an AI generated video or something that's not real. it is real and I was thinking about this actually just in the context of having just been in San Francisco for this documentary I'm doing about social media algorithms and I obviously witnessed in a way that feels so different to the UK and I'm sure Sarah you you see it a lot in different ways but the impact that drugs do and can have and particularly there in San Francisco where there were you know entire areas that there were lovely areas but there were also areas where there was clearly a really serious public health problem and it's kind of interesting because also you wonder whether, you know, if people are seeing these boats being blown up, will they expect in six months, a year, that they're not going to see those same scenes on the streets of America?

13:01Marianna Spring:Well, the line there is probably not quite so straight as it might be useful to Donald Trump's administration. You make a very good point, Mariana, because it is visible, I mean, quite particularly in California, but in cities all over America, the way fentanyl use has changed the drug problem, because we're accustomed to there being serious drug problems in the UK and in Europe, the same as there is America, many other countries for decades now. And it's done, you know, heroin, crack, cocaine. They've done huge harm to people, to societies, to families. And you can see the effect in homelessness and crime.

13:35But fentanyl is of a different order. And it is, as you say, even if you're lucky enough to have a family who's not been affected by it, you can see it on the streets almost daily, which, yeah, depending on your response might give you huge compassion for the people who've been afflicted and their loved ones or make you furious that this is causing some kind of public hazard on your way to enjoying yourself. But one way or another, you cannot escape what the effects of the fentanyl problem have been in America. So, yeah, people are probably more motivated to take serious action to deal with it.

14:10But that's a different question, of course, from whether or not there is any legality around being able to just simply blow boats out of the water and say after the fact we know who was on them and we know what they were doing without producing any evidence whatsoever. And it's also is it terrorism? I mean because these people these drug lords are awful people and there's no one is defending them but are they really terrorists? I mean they like the United States as a market.

14:38Marianna Spring:That word is so weaponized though isn't it? It's like terrorist has come to just mean enemy often when Donald Trump is using it. But actually terrorist in the sense that we define it, like here at the BBC, for example, is usually to do with a prescribed organisation. It's like a group of people with a very obvious, often goal. And I guess you could argue maybe there is some kind of ideological motive or motive to cause harm. But really, I mean, most of this stuff is about money, is it not? Yeah, the motive isn't to cause harm that damages the market. The motive is to keep the market going, isn't it?

15:09I just think that's weird. I also, I mean, you think, Sarah, when you when you look at what the legal justifications are, this will be a bit of prehistory for Mariana. But Barack Obama had a drone strike that killed a U.S. citizen. I think it was in Yemen, a guy called Anwar Orlaki. And it was a big issue at the time, wasn't it? Because he was a U.S. citizen. He was killed deliberately in a drone strike. Obama signed it off when he was president. I don't think there's any doubt at all that he wanted to kill Americans and he wasn't someone who was friendly towards the United States and he was a U.S.

15:47citizen. But, you know, the fact that he was a U.S. citizen, I remember at the time, the fact that he was a U.S. citizen, I mean, entire screeds have been written by constitutional scholars about the killing of Anwar Aulaki. I mean, to the extent that I remember his name and I don't remember very much, but, you know, it was a really big deal. And it just seems to me that now all of that kind of is just being chucked out of the window and you're just seeing people killed willy-nilly. And as I say, they don't, I mean, all right, I suppose I should take Pete Hegseth's word for it, but what if there was an American citizen on one of these boats?

16:22What if they'd got it wrong? I mean, that is a new order of difficulty, it seems to me, constitutionally, if indeed anyone cares anymore. There has been a slightly tortured legal defence of what they're doing. Donald Trump designated certain Latin American drug cartels as terrorist organizations back in July. As we've just been saying, not necessarily everybody's definition of terrorism, simply trying to smuggle drugs and illegal immigrants into America, but he did that to give them the justification to take actions against them that you couldn't take simply against drug smuggling suspects. And they have claimed that these particular strikes of Venezuelan boards are military self-defense, i.e.

17:00these drugs coming into America would do great harm to Americans, so in defending the homeland, and they're stopping them from coming. There was even a leaked memo sent to Congress that's been reported in the media here saying that the government had decided it's in a non-international armed conflict with drug cartels. Now, not quite sure what legal basis you can have for deciding that you're in a non-international armed conflict with these kind of organisations. So they are working around a legal defence. A lot of legal scholars have said that this just doesn't add up to anything. But even even to maintain this, you would still have to demonstrate at some point that you knew it was members of these drug cartels who were on the boats and you knew that they were smuggling drugs into America before you attacked them.

17:47And I think it's the lack of any evidence of that whatsoever, other than Pete Hegseth sort of insisting that they knew this in a rather macho way. We've heard that from this administration before, and it's turned out that they didn't have any evidence around these kind of things. So, yeah, without any form of due process being involved in determining who's on the boats and what they've got on them, that's why it looks as though it's just, yes, murder rather than self-defence. And where the heck, Sarah, is Congress in all of this? Well, where have they been since the 21st of January, Justin, when it came to standing up to the Trump administration and doing any of these kind of things?

18:22I mean, the answer right now, of course, as to where is Congress is, it's shut down. And so they wouldn't be able to do anything about this right now anyway. But no, there aren't big questions being asked about this. People are not being dragged into hearings on the Hill to demand what their justification is. We're not hearing from legal scholars giving evidence about whether or not the justification from the Trump administration holds up. It is, yeah, I mean, as we said at the beginning, flying a little bit under the radar. It's not that nobody knows about it. The strikes are reported. They just don't seem to make the kind of fuss.

18:52Yeah, there are one or two. I mean, it's all the usual suspects, isn't it? People on the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. It is worth saying, and I've heard some people on right-wing podcasts saying, oh, hang on a second, I'm not sure we should be doing this. And Rand Paul, the senator, the libertarian senator, has been critical of it, hasn't he? And I think, Sarah, the other thing is, and we mentioned this right at the beginning, didn't we? You were saying to me, what did I mean by reckless? did I mean they were going to get themselves into a war with Venezuela? Well, when people look back to what happened in Panama, which was right at the end of the 1980s, they invaded.

19:28They seized Manuel Noriega. They brought him back to America, didn't they? And they stuck him in jail. I mean, they tried him and he was found guilty. There was a judicial process. But, you know, they went and took him and brought him back. And you wonder whether the Trump administration, Number one, it just seems to me that is 100 % not what they said they were going to do. They weren't interested in that kind of thing, this sort of international policing actions, etc. Number two, if they did do it then, would they then lose a lot of support in the MAGA base because the MAGA base doesn't want this kind of thing?

20:05Or would it be, you know, a small successful operation? They get rid of a guy who's, you know, stolen an election and all the rest of it. They could tell that story to people. Or would it actually be popular? I don't know what the answer is to that. Well, this is an alternative to that, isn't it? Because what you're discussing, as controversial as it was, the idea of going into another country and arresting the president, bringing him to the United States, that, as you say, is exactly the kind of thing that President Trump said he wasn't going to do, not get the United States involved in that kind of international action.

20:35But it's so much easier, isn't it, just to blow a few boats out of the water, look like you're doing something. as he says, I mean he's right when he says it has deterred a lot of other vessels being on the sea, whether they were there for shipping or any other legitimate purposes or for smuggling drugs. I think what we're witnessing is exactly the alternative to what the United States used to do, which was to use its military might to go into countries and try and tackle the problem at its source. Now they're more than happy to just attack the symptoms rather than the disease, And if that has the desired effect for America, they don't really mind what the consequences are for other countries.

21:14Marianna Spring:Isn't there also an element here about perception? I mean, I know we can't get inside Donald Trump's head or the administration's head, but how these kinds of actions look. Like if you're projecting this image that we are against these people or we are against this thing, you know, whether it's immigration, whether it's drugs, whatever, whether it's another country, a particular idea that this is the approach that they take. And it's kind of like, what is the stuntiest thing that we can do? And we should say here that this is a stunt where people are killed. It's not like some of the other stunts we talk about.