UN special rapporteur concludes US strikes may constitute crimes against humanity
The US military has destroyed Ecuadorian fishing vessels in at least eight joint counter-narcotics operations in the eastern Pacific since early September, according to reporting by The Guardian. The operations have unfolded under an agreement between President Donald Trump and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa that grants US personnel immunity from criminal prosecution, drawing criticism from human rights organizations and a finding from a special rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Council that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the strikes constitute crimes against humanity.
Analysts described the shift as the US’s counter-narcotics strategy in Latin America entering a new phase. Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Noboa “has offered Ecuador as a ‘laboratory’ for the implementation of this new phase.” Freeman, who has also reported on the boat attacks in Ecuador for The New Yorker magazine, said Noboa “is interested in the optics of a very lethal crackdown and in making Ecuador a place where the Trump administration can refine those methods and show them off.” Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, said joint operations are likely to expand across the region even as some practices continue. “We’re still doing the bad old stuff,” Isacson said. On 19 September, four people were killed in the Caribbean; as with the other airstrikes, the US has not disclosed their identities or any of the alleged evidence linking them to criminal activity, according to The Guardian.
The recent wave of operations began in early September. US forces intercepted the Ecuadorian vessel Manta on 5 September before it was destroyed. On September 8, a US patrol vessel intercepted the fishing boat Don Rufo in international waters near Ecuador. Captain Mero Calderón, 50, described the encounter to The Guardian: “The gringos were all armed as if they were going to war. I tried to show them our catch to prove that we were there working, but they wouldn’t listen.” US personnel brought “two huge bombs aboard, took us to their ship, handcuffed and blindfolded us, and blew our boat to pieces,” Calderón said.
Six of the Don Rufo crew were handed over to local authorities, but another 10 crew members fishing in a smaller vessel not equipped to return to shore remained at sea until the Ecuadorian navy rescued them on September 10, after Rubio had already departed for Peru. US Southern Command posted an edited 14-second video of the operation and said “intelligence confirmed” that the vessel was being used by a gang as a “floating refuelling station” for speedboats allegedly carrying drugs. The fishers deny the allegations. The Don Rufo was one of eight operations involving Ecuadorian boats in just over two weeks, the latest on September 16, following the same pattern of crew removal followed by vessel destruction.
The shift to joint operations marks a departure from the nearly 70 unilateral US airstrikes in the Pacific and Caribbean that have killed 234 people since last year. Unlike those earlier strikes, crews have been removed before the vessels were sunk. Although Ecuador does not produce cocaine like neighbouring Colombia and Peru, over the past decade it has become a major trafficking hub because of its access to the Pacific, including the area where the attacks on boats have been taking place, according to The Guardian.
Noboa signed an agreement with the White House authorizing the joint operations and granting US military personnel involved in counter-narcotics operations immunity from criminal prosecution. The operations have also extended to land, with US troops taking part in raids last Thursday. The agreement has not been withdrawn despite pushback from voters, according to The Guardian.
Trump has framed the operations as part of a broader campaign. “Like ISIS, they should be killed, exiled or detained as enemy combatants without the possibility of release, which is what we’re doing,” Trump said on Tuesday. Trump has pressured Latin American presidents to join an anti-drug cartel coalition he created called Shield of the Americas; with Peru and Colombia recently joining, the group now includes all but a few countries still governed by the left, such as Mexico and Brazil. So far, the coalition’s primary goal appears to have been increasing joint operations against alleged drug traffickers.
During his recent trip to Ecuador, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the decision on what approach to take was “a strike-by-strike or operation-by-operation determination” that depended on the threat and location of the boat, but that the US would “still blow up ships if need be.” Rubio was in Quito on September 9, when Ecuador’s Noboa presented him with Ecuador’s highest-ranking National Order of Merit, the Grand Cross, for what The Guardian described as “helping to promote peace in the region.”
Human rights organizations have described the airstrikes as extrajudicial killings. A special rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Council concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the strikes constitute “crimes against humanity.” Despite Trump’s claims, available data show the operations have had no impact on the volume of cocaine entering the United States, according to The Guardian.
In Ecuador, the local NGO Permanent Committee for the Defence of Human Rights estimates that more than 220 fishers have been subjected to “violent boardings, arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture and the destruction of vessels” in this year’s US operations. None of the fishers remains in custody; while some are still facing prosecution, many have already been acquitted for lack of evidence. Fernando Bastías, the committee’s lawyer, said: “Fishers are losing their livelihoods when the US destroys the boats. Besides, if the US says the vessels were being used to refuel drug boats, why destroy the evidence?” A US Southern Command spokesperson said the command conducts operations “in compliance with US and international law” and that leaving boats “intact could permit their reuse by criminal networks.”
The human rights concerns extend beyond the boat strikes. Ecuador’s Noboa has pursued what The Guardian described as a controversial “iron-fist” approach to gangs, issuing repeated states of emergency and expanding the role of the armed forces. The crackdown has done little to reduce violence and has eroded human rights, according to the report. The most notable example of abuse came last year in the case of the “Guayaquil Four,” the forced disappearance of four Afro-Ecuadorian boys between the ages of 11 and 15; all four were found dead, their bodies charred and dismembered. Journalists and human rights groups have managed to identify some of the victims of the broader US campaign, who in many cases were innocent or, when suspected of involvement in criminal activity, poor people at the bottom of trafficking networks.
Three cases from earlier this year remain unclaimed by US forces. The first occurred on January 20, when the fishing vessel Fiorella disappeared with eight crew members aboard; days earlier, some had told relatives they were being monitored by drones and by a vessel on which they said they had seen a US flag. Human rights organizations and journalists identified two more cases with similar patterns in late March, although those fishers survived. The Washington Post reported that the three cases were part of a covert CIA program; the agency declined to comment. A US Southern Command spokesperson said it had no knowledge of, nor were its forces “involved in the incidents described in reports involving the Fiorella.”
Both the husband and brother of María Mero, 43, were aboard the Fiorella: Gabriel Aladino Mero Delgado, 44, and Jefferson Ariel Mero Cueva, 25. “Where did they take them? Do they have them in the US, in a prison somewhere? We don’t want any trouble; we just want them to send them back to us,” she told The Guardian. “They were fishers, not criminals. Let the great president come here to my house and see whether I have luxuries, anything that would show I’m a drug trafficker. No, because all of us here are poor, and we just want our loved ones back.” The families say they have spent months trying to get answers from the Ecuadorian government, so far without success.