The family of a Colombian fisherman has alleged the U.S. government illegally killed him when it launched a military boat strike in September.
Alejandro Carranza was killed on Sept. 15 when his boat was targeted in an anti-narcotics U.S. military campaign. On Tuesday, Carranza’s family filed a formal complaint against the U.S. government with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The complaint alleges that Carranza was simply fishing when his boat was targeted in the deadly strike. HIs family said there were no drugs on his boat.
“We know that Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense, was responsible for ordering the bombing of boats like those of Alejandro Carranza Medina and the murder of all those on such boats,” the complaint says.
MARCO PERDOMO via Getty Images
More than 80 people have been killed so far by U.S. strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s administration have argued that the extrajudicial killings are targeting drug smugglers.
The same month Carranza was killed, Hegseth ordered back-to-back strikes on a Venezuelan boat off Trinidad’s coast, The Washington Post reported.
The act has been described as a war crime, and Hegseth has pivoted to casting blame for the second strike on Joint Special Operations Command Adm. Frank Bradley.
While Trump has claimed these targeted boats are carrying deadly drugs like fentanyl into the U.S., he’s offered no evidence, and many of the boats in question are too small and ill-equipped to travel to the U.S.
Carranza’s wife, Katerine Hernandez, told AFP that her husband was a “good man” who was heading out the day of his death to catch fish for his family.
“Why did they just take his life like that?” she asked an AFP reporter. “The fisherman have a right to live. Why didn’t they just detain him?”
While Trump has bragged about killing alleged “narcoterrorists,” he most recently freed former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández from prison, who was serving a 45-year sentence for his role in helping drug traffickers move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Trump defended pardoning the convicted drug trafficker.
“They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country,” Trump said. “And they said it was a Biden administration set-up. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them.”