US President Donald Trump has escalated Washington’s fight against drug cartels by ordering the destruction of a Venezuelan vessel suspected of smuggling narcotics in the Caribbean, killing 11 people on board.

Speaking in Mexico City on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the unprecedented action, saying American forces could have intercepted the boat but “on the President’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again.” Rubio added that the decision reflected a no-tolerance policy toward narco-terrorism.

The U.S. military described the incident as a “precision operation” carried out on Tuesday. Rubio argued that traffickers were given no warning because “a boat full of cocaine or fentanyl” posed “an immediate threat to the United States.”

Trump later claimed that the vessel’s crew were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang designated as a terrorist organisation by Washington, and said “massive amounts of drugs” were recovered. “We have tapes of them speaking, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

The Pentagon has not released evidence or detailed why lethal force was chosen instead of 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,” he warned.

However, the strike has drawn strong criticism from legal scholars who argue it violated international norms. Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at Notre Dame, said the action “violated fundamental principles of international law,” stressing that the U.S. had “no right to intentionally kill these suspects.”

The attack marks a dramatic escalation in U.S. counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean.