It Could Happen Here Weekly 252

Cool Zone Media (0:01)

Cool Zone Media.

Robert Evans (0:03)

Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Carlos Berrios-Polanco (0:28)

Hi, you're listening to It Could Happen Here. My name is Carlos Berrios-Polanco. I'm a journalist and writer and I'll be your host for today's episode, which is about the ongoing campaign of boat strikes by the US military that have turned the oceans around the Americas into killing fields. To give a high level overview of what I'll be talking about today, since September 2nd, 2025, up until the time of recording, the US military has carried out at least 70 strikes on civilian vessels in the Caribbean Basin and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. At least 234 people have been killed by these strikes according to reporting from the New York Times. Per air wars, there have been survivors almost every month of the campaign, but only 3 out of the 28 total have ever been rescued. These strikes originally started in the Caribbean following the mobilization of military assets into the region, which includes the reactivation of the once-dormant Roosevelt Roads military base in Puerto Rico, where I live and am currently recording from.

I'm sure that I've seen some of the aircraft used in these strikes and other military operations in the region from the hill that overlooks the base's airstrip. And I've probably watched every single one of the videos the Trump administration or the US military has posted announcing that these strikes took place. You've likely at least seen one yourself. It's almost always a social media post, sometimes a press release, typically showing a black and white video of a go-fast vessel, colloquially known as a panga or a yola, depending on where you're located.

They're typically sipping across the waves only for a missile to rain down from the sky shortly after the video starts, turning the boat and all the people aboard it into a giant ball of fire. Per Air Wars, these posts almost always follow the same formula, naming who ordered the strike, the amount of people killed, calling them drug traffickers or narco-terrorists, saying they're part of a quote, designated terrorist organization, end quote.

And stating the location where the strike took place.

To be honest with you, even if the victims are blurred out and you rarely get an up-close look at how these people are torn to shreds, these are essentially snuff films that the Trump administration has used to hype up itself and its war on so-called narco-terrorism.

The Trump administration has been laying the fin-legal justification as well as the moral and philosophical foundation for this quote-unquote war since essentially their first day in office. More than two months after the first strike, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth officially announced Operation Southern Spear as the quote, overarching DOW operation to disrupt the flow of narcotics in the Western Hemisphere from drug cartels that the president has named as a designated terrorist organization, parentheses DTOs, per a DOD Inspector General report. Southern Spear's mission statement as well as several documents that created the legal justification for these strikes and other related operations are classified and secret from the public. However, as this Inspector General report states, the aim of Southern Spear is to quote, defend the homeland, protect regional partners, and ensure stability and security across the Western Hemisphere.

Operation Southern Spear has since evolved into Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, which essentially means that several partner countries in the hemisphere are working under Trump's banner of anti-narco-terrorism, whatever that means. The Trump administration has repeatedly said that the people killed in these strikes are quote-unquote, narco-traffickers, and therefore enemy combatants, according to a January 20th, 2025 executive order that labels the groups that the dead allegedly belong to either quote-unquote, foreign terrorist organizations or quote-unquote, specially designated global terrorists. Two terms that sound like they're the same thing, but essentially delineate groups marked by the State Department and the Treasury Department, respectively, as terrorists. There is substantial doubt as to whether the Trump administration is even able to identify these people before massacring them. However, as has been evidently clear to anyone with eyes, these people are not terrorists, and there are serious doubts as to whether they're even actually connected to drug trafficking organizations in a meaningful way. Because these strikes occur in the open ocean, sometimes in international waters, any evidence that could help in identifying the victims sinks beneath the waves relatively quickly, making positive identification nearly impossible. A list compiled by Air Wars identifies 26 victims by their full names. A lot of these names come from media outlets hitting the ground and interviewing people in the communities where the men who've been killed by these strikes used to live. Per the list, a lot of these names come from the Los Angeles Times, the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, the Associated Press, and somewhere identified by Costa Rican authorities as reported by La Nación. As well as a collaborative investigation project titled Los Bombardeados Sin Derecho a la Defensa or the bombed No Right to Defense between Air Wars, el Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística, otherwise known as EL CLIP, and several other Latin American or Caribbean media outlets. The Air Wars list includes names from the first strike up until strikes in May earlier this year. This doesn't mean that they've stopped working on it, just that they haven't been able to identify anyone by their full name after that. In other cases, these outlets and others across the Western Hemisphere have been able to find strike names and general descriptions of these men. Air Wars keeps a list of these in their individual trackers per strike as well. I have all these sources linked in the episode description. I've tried to include English as well as some Spanish language news sources. The lists by Air Wars, the Los Bombardeados investigation, and the Killing Spree report by the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, were huge sources for this piece. So if you're at all interested in learning more about this topic, please go read those.