Trump Orders Strike on ‘Venezuelan Drug Vessel’; Rubio Hails Start of Cartel Crackdown

Mexico City — US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that American forces could have intercepted a Venezuelan vessel suspected of carrying narcotics, but President Donald Trump instead ordered it destroyed — an action that killed 11 people.

“Instead of interdicting it, on the President’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Rubio told reporters in Mexico City, calling the strike an unprecedented escalation.

The vessel was destroyed Tuesday in the Caribbean Sea in what Washington described as a “precision operation.”

Rubio defended the move, saying traffickers were given no warning because “a boat full of cocaine or fentanyl” represented “an immediate threat to the United States.” He added, “This President is not a talker; he’s a doer.”

Trump claimed the crew belonged to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang designated by Washington as a terrorist group, and said “massive amounts of drugs” were found on board. “We have tapes of them speaking, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat,” he told reporters at the White House.

The Pentagon has not released evidence or details of the strike, nor clarified why lethal force was used instead of a standard interdiction.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said only that operations against cartels would continue: “Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate.”

The move drew criticism from legal experts who questioned its legitimacy under international law. Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at Notre Dame, said the attack “violated fundamental principles of international law,” stressing that the US had “no right to intentionally kill these suspects.”

With inputs from IANS