The Legal Fabrication of Death in Washington’s Caribbean War

By Misión Verdad  –  Nov 3, 2025

In recent months, under the guise of anti-mafia and anti-terrorist rhetoric, the Donald Trump administration has launched a deadly naval campaign in the Caribbean—and now in the eastern Pacific—that has left over 60 civilians dead.

Unlike previous decades of the “war on drugs,” when the US strategy was sometimes based on the arrest and prosecution of suspects, this new offensive—justified as part of an alleged “non-international armed conflict” with designated terrorist organizations (DTOs)—has turned extrajudicial killing into state policy.

Beyond the legal-formal aspects, what unfolds in these waters is a lethal operation: the legal production of subjects stripped of name, face, and rights who are denied even the possibility of being judged.

In other words, the category of “non-privileged belligerent”—revealed by journalist Nick Turse in an article published by The Intercept as the basis for this violence—is not simply a legal technicality but a power device that erases the humanity of the other in order to legitimize their elimination.

The legal vacuum as a weapon
According to Turse’s report, Pentagon officials admitted to Congress that they “do not know the identities of all the people who were killed in the attacks.” Even worse, they said they do not need to positively identify the people on the boats to carry out the attacks. They only need to demonstrate a connection to a DTO or affiliate.

This logic exposes a perverse inversion of the legal standard: as Representative Sara Jacobs pointed out, “there is a higher evidentiary standard to hold someone than to kill them, which is problematic.”

The law, instead of protecting life, becomes a tool for its suspension. It is here that the figure of the “non-privileged belligerent” acquires its true function: not as a descriptive category but as an operator of lethal exclusion.

As Turse explains, the Pentagon designates survivors of attacks—people adrift at sea after being bombed—as “non-privileged belligerents,” a designation that “denies immunity for acts of war and denies prisoner-of-war status.” This label would only make sense if there were an actual armed conflict.

However, Jacobs makes it clear, “we are not in an armed conflict with these cartels… And so this is just murder.”

Naked life as a legitimate target
The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his work Homo Sacer, shows how sovereign power is constituted through the ability to exclude certain human beings from the legal-political order, transforming them into subjects who can be killed without this constituting a sacrilege, but who cannot be sacrificed in the religious sense.

This figure embodies bare life (zoē), as opposed to political life (bíos). The “non-privileged belligerent” is the contemporary—and technocratic—version of this homo sacer. He is neither an enemy of war nor a common criminal; he is a legal interstice: a body denied the right to a trial, to identity, to representation, and even to the possibility of being named.

Agamben argues that the state of exception—the temporary suspension of law which, in practice, becomes permanent—is the space where the sovereign decides who is inside and who is outside the legal order.

In this case, Trump has not formally declared a state of emergency. Yet, he has acted as if he had: he has ordered lethal attacks without authorization from Congress, he has hidden the legal opinion of the Department of Justice’s Office of the Legal Adviser, and he has unilaterally classified civilians as combatants.

As Turse points out, the US administration “secretly declared a ‘non-international armed conflict’ weeks, if not months, before the first attack.”

In this context, the law does not regulate; it creates the illusion of legitimacy while emptying its content.

Legal fiction as a narrative of power
The official narrative—the “fight against narcoterrorism”—is a structural fiction necessary to present violence as self-defense and not as a crime. However, even this fiction crumbles under the weight of its own contradictions. Sarah Harrison, a former legal adviser to the Pentagon, clearly underscores this to The Intercept:

“Notwithstanding the fictional narrative being pushed by the White House, the US is not in a war with these groups, and the people DoD is targeting are civilians who should be afforded due process.”

What is at stake is not only the legality of the attacks but the legitimacy of the legal subject: What kind of human being can be killed nameless, faceless, without trial? The answer is: one whose humanity has been previously erased by a legal category designed for that very purpose.

The “non-privileged belligerent” does not exist in reality: it is a governmental category functional to the Washingtonian narrative, a functional dehumanization device.

Opacity as a political strategy
The Trump administration does not just kill, it covers it up. As Senator Mark Warner condemned, “Shutting Democrats out of a briefing on US military strikes and withholding the legal justification for those strikes from half the Senate is indefensible and dangerous.”

And as Congressman Seth Moulton confirmed, “their justification for what they are doing so flimsy that it makes the case for the Iraq War look like a slam dunk,”

This opacity is not accidental; it is constitutive of sovereign power in its contemporary form: it decides who lives, who dies, and who does not even deserve to be named. It does so without accountability, without evidence, without transparency.

Furthermore, survivors of the attacks are not prosecuted because “they cannot meet the burden of proof,” revealing that the system is not designed to administer justice but to legitimize elimination.

Beyond the law
What we are witnessing is not an excess of the legal system but its purest logic: law as a technology of power that separates political life from biological life to manage death.

In this context, conventional legal criticism—while necessary—is insufficient. What is needed is a repudiation not only of the illegality but also of the creation of “killable” subjects.

As Agamben writes: “The biopolitical field is the space where life becomes the privileged object of power.”

Another US ‘Strike’ on Small Boat Leaves Three Dead in the Caribbean

In the Caribbean and the Pacific, under the pretext of narcoterrorism, the US has turned the sea into a symbolic extermination camp: bodies disappear in the waters, their names are erased, and their death is filed away as “collateral damage” or “kinetic strike.”

Yet it is not collateral, it is structural, intentional, affirmative of death.

Thus, criticism cannot be limited to demanding transparency or legality. It must question the very possibility of the law becoming a mechanism of dehumanization, as the United States instrumentalized it long before the Trump administration.

As long as there are “non-privileged belligerents,” there will be civilians who can be killed without even being recognized as victims.

 

(Misión Verdad )

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/JRE/SF