LatinNews Daily - 20 April 2026

Region: On 19 April US Southern Command (Southcom) carried out a "lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations" in the Caribbean, killing "three male narco-terrorists". Southcom stated that the vessel "was travelling along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations". This came after Southcom announced on 13 April that two other alleged drug traffickers were killed in a strike on a boat in the Eastern Pacific region, which followed the 11 April announcement of strikes on two other alleged narco-boats which killed five people in the Eastern Pacific. These strikes were carried out as part of Operation Southern Spear, which is being carried out by the US Defence Department as part of a mission to “crush illicit activity in the Western Hemisphere in partnership with U.S. Coast Guard through the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department”. A 19 April report by the New York Times (NYT), which has been tracking the boat attacks since they began in September 2025, tallies 52 strikes, which have killed a total of at least 180 people. A previous NYT piece published in October 2025 cites legal experts such as Geoffrey Corn, a professor of criminal and military law at Texas Tech University, as saying that they believed the killings were illegal.

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