Extrajudicial at sea: 234 dead, and a region that will not say the word

On 22 September 2026, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights while countering terrorism, Ben Saul, published a briefing note for the Human Rights Council. Its conclusion was not hedged. The United States campaign of lethal strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific amounts, he wrote, to serial extrajudicial killings in violation of the right to life — unjustified under self-defence, international humanitarian law, the law of the sea, the narcotics conventions or counter-terrorism law, and potentially constituting crimes against humanity.[1]

On the same day, more than seventy legislators from thirteen countries issued a joint statement recording at least 234 people killed in over 68 strikes since the campaign began on 2 September 2025, and noting the United States government's own assessment that the strikes have not reduced the flow of cocaine.[2]

These are the waters between Trinidad and Venezuela, and the boats left from ports on this side of the hemisphere. With very few exceptions, the governments of this region have declined to describe what is happening in them.

The first strike, on 2 September 2025, killed eleven people.[3] Within hours, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago welcomed the deployment and its stated mission, and said the government would not be taking the matter to CARICOM.[4] That position has held.

It has held even as the deaths became regional. On 13 February 2026, two Saint Lucian nationals, Ricky Joseph and Nafi Williams, were killed in a strike. At the 51st Heads of Government meeting in Saint Lucia on 9 July 2026, the CARICOM Chair, Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre, confirmed that no information had been supplied about their deaths, and that the matter stood — five months on — as a missing persons case. Trinidad and Tobago declined to call the deaths murders.[5]

Two citizens of a CARICOM member state are killed by a foreign power in Caribbean waters. There is no body, no inquest, no post-mortem, no charge sheet, no evidence disclosed to the state of nationality, and no answer to the request made through the regional organisation. A family is told their relatives are missing.

The legal position is not seriously contested outside the government that is conducting the strikes. Interdiction at sea under the narcotics conventions is a policing power: board, search, seize, arrest, prosecute. It does not carry a licence to kill, and suspicion of smuggling has never been a capital offence in any jurisdiction in this hemisphere. Every person killed in those 68 strikes was, in law, a person presumed innocent.

The argument for silence is the argument of a small state: Trinidad and Tobago's security, energy and financial interests all run through Washington, and objecting is expensive. That is a real calculation and it deserves to be stated openly rather than dressed as a factual position about the absence of evidence.

But there is a narrower question that cannot be answered by geopolitics, and it is the one I am pursuing. Have any nationals or residents of Trinidad and Tobago been killed in these strikes? The government has not said. It is not clear that it has asked. I have filed written questions on the point with the Ministry of Foreign and CARICOM Affairs and the Office of the Attorney General.

In Cedros, eleven kilometres from the Venezuelan coast, fishermen say they no longer go out after dark. None of them would give a name.