标签： South America

Two days after the U.S. military published imagery of its latest strike on a vessel accused of drug trafficking in the Caribbean, a United Nations investigation has delivered a damning conclusion: the ongoing U.S. campaign of airstrikes on maritime targets outside American territorial waters violates international law, and may qualify as crimes against humanity. The findings, released Monday in an official briefing note by the UN Human Rights Council, come from special rapporteur Ben Saul, who has documented the scale of the operations launched by the U.S. as part of its counternarcotics initiative.
Saul’s investigation confirms that between September of last year and the present, the U.S. has carried out no fewer than 68 such strikes across the Caribbean and Pacific, resulting in the deaths of more than 220 people. Even in cases where targets can be accurately verified as members of internationally designated terrorist or drug trafficking groups, Saul argues the strikes do not meet the legal standard for triggering the right to self-defense under international law. For self-defense to apply, the targeted group would need to have launched an active armed attack against the U.S. — a threshold the U.S. has not met in any of these cases, according to the report.
The UN findings land just 48 hours after U.S. Southern Command, the military body overseeing operations in the region, confirmed its latest attack. In an official statement accompanying grainy aerial footage of the strike, the command said confirmed intelligence proved the targeted vessel was actively involved in narco-trafficking, and that the operation killed four individuals labeled as narco-terrorists. But Saul’s report pushes back hard on the legal justification for the entire campaign, noting that the strikes amount to a pattern of serial extrajudicial killings that violate the fundamental right to life. “Such attacks are unjustified in national or personal self-defence or under international humanitarian law, the international law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions, or international counter-terrorism law,” Saul wrote in the briefing.
Going a step further, the special rapporteur concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe the 68 documented strikes that killed 223 people meet the definition of the crime against humanity of murder under customary international law.
The U.S. launched its expanded counternarcotics air campaign, codenamed Operation Southern Spear, in early September of last year. From its launch, the initiative has faced sharp criticism and controversy. U.S. defense leaders have defended the mission, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previously stating the operation focuses on removing “narco-terrorists from our hemisphere” and protecting the U.S. from the flow of illicit drugs that kill thousands of American citizens annually. However, the U.S. has yet to publicly release definitive, verifiable evidence proving all targeted vessels were actively engaged in drug trafficking.
Critics of the operation have included regional leaders, but two of the most prominent opponents have been removed from power in controversial circumstances over the past year. Nicolás Maduro, the then-Venezuelan president who repeatedly spoke out against the strikes, was captured by U.S. forces in a dramatic, widely contested overnight raid on Caracas earlier this year. Meanwhile, Gustavo Petro, the left-wing former president of Colombia who also opposed Operation Southern Spear, left office in August after a Trump-backed candidate won the country’s June presidential election.
As of Tuesday, the UN report has not yet received an official response from the U.S. government. BBC News has reached out to the White House and State Department for comment on the findings.

Half a decade after the shocking assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise sent the already unstable Caribbean nation into a tailspin of chaos, 18 alleged co-conspirators in the killing have been transferred by air from Haiti to South Florida to face trial in U.S. courts.

The attack that took Moise’s life unfolded in July 2021, when a team of gunmen, most of whom were identified as Colombian mercenaries, stormed the president’s private residence in Port-au-Prince and fatally shot him in his bedroom. The brazen, high-profile murder sent immediate shockwaves across Haiti and the international community, as observers and everyday Haitians alike grappled with how a sitting head of state could be killed with such startling impunity.

For years, formal investigations into the assassination in Haiti have ground to a complete halt. Widespread gang domination of large swathes of the country and a total breakdown of law and order have left the Haitian justice system unable to pursue viable cases against the remaining suspects. That institutional collapse has placed the full burden of pursuing accountability on U.S. law enforcement and prosecutors, who have chosen to try the suspects in Florida courts.

According to official statements from U.S. authorities, the planning and financial backing for the assassination plot were coordinated across three locations: Florida, the neighboring Dominican Republic, and Haiti itself. To date, 30 individuals have been formally indicted on charges connected to Moise’s killing, and Sunday’s extradition marks a major milestone in the long-running investigation.

In a public post on X, Jason Reding Quiñones, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, framed the extradition as a key new step in the ongoing push for justice. “Five years later, we are still bringing defendants before American courts, and we are not finished,” he wrote. FBI Special Agent Brett Skiles echoed that commitment, noting that the multi-national, coordinated operation to take the suspects into custody demonstrates the bureau’s unwavering dedication to holding every person involved in the plot accountable.

The group extradited on Sunday includes 17 former Colombian soldiers and one high-ranking former Haitian government official: Joseph Badio, who served in the anti-corruption unit of Haiti’s Ministry of Justice at the time of the assassination. Prosecutors have alleged that a Miami-based private security firm played a central role in recruiting the Colombian ex-soldiers to carry out the plot.

Four co-conspirators already received convictions in a Miami court back in May for their roles in the conspiracy. Their charges include conspiracy to kidnap or kill Moise and conspiracy to provide material support for the assassination, and all four face the possibility of life sentences if the convictions hold. Several other suspects connected to the plot were shot and killed by Haitian police in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 attack.

Notably, the Colombian former soldiers charged in the case have long maintained they were misled about the plot’s end goal. They claim they believed they were hired to take part in a political coup to remove Moise from power, and had no advance knowledge that the operation intended to assassinate the president.

In the five years since Moise’s death, Haiti has been consumed by an unprecedented wave of gang-led violence that has devastated communities and paralyzed daily life. Data from the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti shows that between April and June 2026 alone, at least 1,408 people were killed and another 656 injured in gang-related conflict across the country. The Haitian government is currently scheduled to hold the first presidential and legislative elections since 2016 on December 13, though the vote remains contingent on whether the country’s volatile security situation can stabilize enough to support a free and fair electoral process.

Millions of Cuban residents woke up to a powerless Friday when the island nation suffered its sixth major total or partial grid collapse of the year, cutting electricity across the entire country amid long-running structural energy challenges and international pressure.

Cuba’s Ministry of Energy confirmed the entire national electricity system experienced a “total disconnection”, triggering a widespread outage that disrupted daily life from end to end of the Caribbean island. According to UNE, the state-run national grid operator, restoration work had brought power back to critical priority sites by late Friday, including core infrastructure around Havana’s hospitals and municipal water pumping stations.

The outage originated just before 2 p.m. local time (18:00 GMT) in central Cuba, where a combination of a high-voltage transmission fault and severe adverse weather triggered the cascading system failure, UNE officials explained. Felix Estrada, director of UNE’s national load dispatch division, confirmed that emergency protocols for gradual power restoration were activated immediately, and the recovery process remained ongoing across the country through Saturday.

The repeated blackouts hitting Cuba this year stem from a combination of long-running issues: decades-old, deteriorating electricity infrastructure and chronic domestic fuel shortages, both worsened dramatically by the long-standing U.S. blockade on oil shipments to the communist-governed nation. Cuba relies almost entirely on imported fuel to power its electricity grid, and tightened U.S. sanctions implemented earlier this year have stretched already thin fuel supplies to breaking point. The cascading shortages have not been limited to energy: food and pharmaceutical imports have also grown far scarcer, leaving hospitals unable to operate at full capacity and forcing repeated closures of schools and government administrative offices.

For ordinary Cubans, the rolling outages have become a regular, debilitating part of daily life. “Lately, it’s becoming a habit,” Havana resident Frank Lorenzo told Reuters in an interview Friday. “Before it happened less frequently – once a month… just yesterday we were 24 hours without electricity, they turned it on for just an hour and it went down again.”

Thirty-six-year-old schoolteacher Lidia Fernandez described the compounding stress of overlapping shortages to AFP. “It’s one thing after another: no water, no gas for cooking, no electricity. Honestly, I don’t know how we haven’t gone crazy,” she said. Seventy-eight-year-old Francisco Rodriguez told reporters his home had already spent 28 hours without power by Friday evening, and he feared the outage would stretch on for “several days.”

The frequency of crippling blackouts has already sparked rare unauthorized public protests across the island. Under Cuban law, unapproved demonstrations are illegal, and participants face potential jail time for defying the restriction.

Cuban leadership has pinned responsibility for the ongoing fuel and energy crisis squarely on the United States, particularly the Trump administration’s harsh sanctions regime. Havana has repeatedly denounced a new round of sanctions imposed in August as part of Washington’s broader pressure campaign against the island’s government. For years, regional ally Venezuela supplied Cuba with roughly 35,000 barrels of crude oil per day – covering around half of the island’s total energy needs – but that supply collapsed in January after U.S. actions disrupted Venezuela’s own export capacity. The Trump administration has also threatened steep tariffs on any third country that ships oil to Cuba, and U.S. authorities have already seized multiple fuel shipments bound for Havana.

For its part, the U.S. government has pushed back against Cuban claims, blaming Havana’s poor domestic economic and infrastructure management for the ongoing crisis. Washington also designates Cuba as a “national security threat,” and President Trump has openly discussed efforts to remove the current Cuban leadership, even threatening a “friendly takeover” of the island back in March of this year.