The US used a military plane disguised as a civilian aircraft for its first deadly Caribbean strike. And here’s the thing: that could be a war crime. For those with a knowledge of off-the-books operations in Latin America, the episode echoes a secret 1990s/2000s air war which once saw a plane full of American missionaries shot down in Peru.

The at-sea strikes came in the context of Donald Trump’s so-called ‘war on drugs’. This narrative was used to destabilise Venezuela, an oil-rich nation. The UN recently condemned that same US aggression. The campaign culminated in the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro in a 3 January special forces raid which killed tens of security personnel and civilians. After the snatch mission, the US almost immediately dropped the Maduro-as-drug-kingpin narrative used to justify the dirty war.

Yet the 2 September 2025 strikes were already attracting controversy. According to the NGO Air Wars, that strike killed up to 11 people. But not straight away. The US followed up on an initial strike with a so-called ‘double-tap’ strike – straight out of the War on Terror playbook.

The allegation that the US had effectively murdered helpless survivors later landed defence secretary Pete Hegseth in trouble. He was accused of war crimes.

The latest allegation is in a similar vein.

‘Perfidy’ at sea is a war crime

The New York Times (NYT) latest report suggests the US may have committed the war crime of perfidy. Here’s one of the key passages:

The nonmilitary appearance is significant, according to legal specialists, because the administration has argued its lethal boat attacks are lawful — not murders — because President Trump “determined” the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels.

They added:

But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.”

The paper quotes a senior military lawyer, major general Steve Lepper:

Shielding your identity is an element of perfidy. If the aircraft flying above is not identifiable as a combatant aircraft, it should not be engaged in combatant activity.

Questions about the lawfulness of the strike have come up in private government sessions:

Questions about perfidy have arisen in closed-door briefings of Congress by military leaders, according to people familiar with the matter, but have not been publicly discussed because the aircraft is classified.

As the paper notes, the focus has previously been on the legality of the follow-up strike:

The public debate has focused on a follow-up strike that killed the two initial survivors, despite a war-law prohibition on targeting the shipwrecked.

But now the allegations have expanded…

Shooting down missionaries

The Central intelligence Agency (CIA) used civilian aircraft in a Latin American counter-narcotics mission in the 1990s/2000s. That mission ended in scandal with the shooting down of missionaries.

The Air Bridge Denial Program operated against cartels in Colombia and Peru. In 2001, a CIA spotter aircraft incorrectly identified a small plane and called in the Peruvian air force to attack it:

Believing that the apparently uncooperative pilot was a drug trafficker, Peru’s A-37 shot down the aircraft, wounding the American pilot and killing two innocent passengers, an American Baptist missionary and her young daughter.

16 CIA officer were “punished” over the incident, reports say. Though senior Republican politician Pete Hoekstra, who was involved in case, said:

In most cases, this amounts to nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

The CIA admitted:

there were problems with the program.

The attack on Venezuela was an outright display of lawlessness. At home and abroad, Donald Trump and his allies are in the business of the same kind of colonialist frontier justice America was built on. US empire is collapsing. And one symptom of these death throes is an increasing reliance on US military reach and power to threaten, bully, and cajole weaker nations in the Western hemisphere.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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