Granted, it is a few dozen bungled policies ago, but remember when we were blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean as part of the administration’s Operation Dude Bro antidrug strategy? Well, the results are in, and they are sadly predictable. From The Washington Post:
In a recent assessment reviewed by The Washington Post, DEA analysts found the strikes had failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire. In a closed-door briefing last month, Pentagon officials told lawmakers the strikes in international waters off South and Central America had not reduced its purity.
As a non expert, I would assume disrupting supply routes would decrease purity. If what you did made them use slower boats and take different routes there would have been less supply and same demand right? Aka more reasons for people to cut it until supply got back up.
So really this tells me it’s more likely that they didn’t disrupt any supply of cocaine, and may have hit normal civilians or someone with marijuana as I remember someone reported bags of weed washing up on a beach…
You dont cram double digit people on a speedboat to smuggle drugs.
Because the weight of all those people could instead be more drugs, and that’s a bunch of people to keep their mouths closed and take a payment.
They were just blowing up anything that was coming to America, because they don’t want anyone from south America coming up north for any reason.
The “theyre drug smugglers” was likely never believed by anyone. It was about showing everyone that they’ll claim you’re a smuggler and kill you.
Those weren’t drug boats. The cartels aren’t stupid, they know boats are one of the easiest ways to get intercepted. They build fucking submarines for smuggling drugs, if boats were enough you think they would go to all that effort?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
Also as the other guy said you don’t cram 6 people on a boat full of drugs. Why would you need the extra people? Are the sharks gonna rob you so you need extra guards? If you’re afraid some rival cartel is gonna intercept you probably want the boat to be lighter so it goes faster and escapes them so less people are better in that case too.
All this means is that most likely those boats were just fishermen or civilians on recreational rides. Oh, and another thing. You don’t get the death penalty in the US for drug smuggling so why would those people be killed even if they were drug smugglers?