The Trump administration has, since early September of last year, conducted a sustained campaign of armed strikes against vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, designated by the executive as engaged in narco-trafficking. As of this week, the count of those killed has reached at least two hundred and eleven. The legal architecture of the campaign rests on the long-standing authority of the Commander-in-Chief to direct the armed forces against those who, by whatever name, wage war against the lives and welfare of the American people. The cartels that have moved fentanyl and cocaine into the body of this country by the ton are a legitimate object of military force. The administration has, in its designations, treated these organizations as terrorist enterprises; the law of nations has long permitted the use of lethal force against such entities operating abroad, and the vessels are struck on the high seas, beyond the territorial waters of any state, in waters where the law recognizes the right of any sovereign to suppress the carriage of lethal cargo. High-seas doctrine and the law of armed conflict provide the architecture in which the executive has acted. The campaign is an exercise of ordered authority against a disordered trade that has cost this country a generation of its young.
On Thursday, the U.S. military struck a vessel moving at speed through the eastern Pacific; its ordnance found the hull and the boat burst into flame. The strike killed three people aboard. No one aboard was taken alive, identified, or recovered. The boat had been named a smuggler’s, and on that naming the three were burned. Across the months of this campaign, at least two hundred and eleven people have been killed in strikes of this kind — broken by explosive ordnance, burned by ignited fuel, or sunk with the wreckage into the deep water.
In the early days of the campaign, U.S. military forces struck three boats in sequence. The first strike killed three people aboard the first boat. The crews of the second and third boats, when the first boat was hit, jumped overboard into the open Pacific and swam away from the burning craft, distancing themselves from the vessels before they were hit. The U.S. military then struck the second and third boats while these crews were in the water. Burning fuel and wreckage fell into the sea around the swimmers. The surface of the ocean around them was set alight. Concussive blast from the second and third detonations reached those who had swum clear of the first boat. The men who had escaped the first burning vessel were killed by the second and third strikes. The U.S. has not said how many went into the sea. The Coast Guard was notified days later, after the military reported people in the water, and tasked with a search that covered more than a thousand miles of open Pacific, roughly four hundred miles southwest of the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The sea was running high — nine-foot seas, forty-knot wind. The likelihood of finding anyone alive diminished with each day. The people in the water were not recovered.
Those who died at the moment of the strikes died by explosive ordnance — fragmentation, blast trauma, bodies broken by the force of detonation. Those aboard the burning vessels died by fire as marine fuel ignited and the hulls went up; they burned on the struck boats. Those in the water when the second and third boats were struck died as burning fuel and wreckage fell on them from above, as the surface of the sea around them caught and burned, as the concussive overpressure of the second and third detonations reached their bodies in the open water. Those who survived the blasts and were still floating in the hours that followed died by drowning — salt water in the lungs, the body losing heat, the muscles ceasing, the dark taking them — over hours, in the high sea, beyond the sight of any shore. The bodies were not recovered. The names were not released. They are dead.
The magistrate, Paul writes, is God’s servant for the good of the ordered commonwealth. He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the avenger who carries out wrath on the wrongdoer. This is a doctrine of standing. Those who traffic the poison that has come into the body of this country are not inside the protection of the covenant. They are not of the household. They are the foot-loose and violent, foreign to the polis, engaged in a trade whose every act is a bearing of arms against the young of this country. Romans 13 places the bearing of the sword in the hands of the ruling authority as a sacred trust. The household of the covenant is not coextensive with the docket of the courts; the sword the magistrate carries was never conditioned on a verdict first obtained, and it does not wait on one now. The deaths at sea are not a cost the nation bears. They are the wages their trade was always carrying. The trade carried the wages from the first vessel. The magistrate did not impose them; he collected them. The magistrate has done what the magistrate was constituted to do: he has drawn the sword. The order is operating as it was designed to operate. The dividing wall is standing. The wicked are not numbered among the people of the covenant, and the sword finds them where they are.
Judas I Mather is a fictional antagonist in Main Street Independent’s editorial architecture — a religious-legalist heteronym voiced from inside the machinery that fuses Scripture, constitutional doctrine, and hierarchy. The positions this column expresses are NOT the publication’s positions; they are rendered sincerely and accurately as satire so the reader can see the betrayal at work. Nothing here is an endorsement.