Kill Them All
The order: Kill everybody.
Two men survived the first strike. They clung to the wreckage of their boat, burning fuel on the water around them, somewhere between Venezuela and Trinidad. A U.S. military aircraft circled overhead. The men were alive. They were visible. They were not a threat.
The second strike killed them both.
That was September 2, 2025. By November, the U.S. military had struck twenty-two boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. More than eighty people were dead. The administration has not explained how it distinguishes fishing boats from drug boats before firing. They say they know. They do not say how.
Robert Sánchez was forty-two years old. He had spent thirty years fishing the waters off Güiria, Venezuela—since he was twelve, learning the currents and the stars from his father. He could navigate at night without instruments. He earned about a hundred dollars a month. He dreamed of saving enough for a 75-horsepower outboard engine. He had four children.
In late August, he told his mother he’d be back in a couple of days. His family made sure his grandmother took her blood pressure medication before they told her he wasn’t coming back.
On December 2, 2025, at 11:30 a.m., President Trump convened his Cabinet. The agenda included the Caribbean boat campaign. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s placard read “SSecretary of War”—a typo no one had fixed. The budget director doodled a cloud on his notepad. The President’s eyes fluttered closed while Hegseth spoke.
When Hegseth mentioned the difficulty of identifying which boats carried drugs before firing, the room laughed. Later he noted they’d had “a bit of a pause” in the campaign, because it’s been “hard to find boats to strike.”
Twenty-two boats struck. Eighty-plus dead. The room laughed.
The war on drugs doesn’t want fewer drugs. It wants more enemies.
THE HISTORY
This war is older than most Americans realize. Nixon declared it in 1971, but the architecture was already in place; built during the Cold War, when winning mattered more than what we became to win.
In Laos, the CIA’s airline flew guns into the mountains and flew opium out. In Afghanistan, poppy production exploded under the warlords we funded to fight the Soviets—and when American soldiers arrived decades later, they were ordered to guard the same poppy fields. Heroin addiction back home spiked in parallel. The soldiers knew. In Central America, the Contras partnered with Colombian cartels while the agency looked away. Cocaine flowed north. Guns flowed south. The crack epidemic that devastated Black neighborhoods wasn’t an accident. It was a transaction.
We didn’t fight the drug trade. We were the drug trade. We built the fire. Then we declared war on the people trapped in it.
Then came the Sacklers. Their company, Purdue Pharma, manufactured OxyContin. Their marketing created the opioid epidemic. More than 500,000 Americans died. The Sackler name adorned the wings of museums—the Metropolitan in New York, the Louvre in Paris, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian. No helicopters. No bombs. No terror designations. When the lawsuits finally came, the family paid fines from their fortune and walked away. Not one person went to prison.
We know the difference between who gets bombed and who gets a museum wing. We have always known it.
The Sacklers weren’t useful as enemies. Robert Sánchez was.
THE WORD
Here is how the machine works.
First, you construct a category. “Narco-terrorist.” “Drug runner.” “Transnational criminal.” The words are designed to do something specific: they delete the person and leave only the target.
This is not new. Power has always worked through naming. The label precedes the person. The classification creates the criminal before any crime. Once a population can be named, it can be managed. Once it can be managed, it can be eliminated. The naming is not description. It is authorization.
Ask yourself: Who is served by the category? Not the dead. Not their families. Not the addicted. The category serves the ones who do the naming, and the ones who never get named.
But there is something deeper. We do not conjure enemies from nothing. We create the enemies we need. The “narco-terrorist” carries something for us—the shadow we cannot face. The addiction is ours. The demand is ours. The hundred billion dollars a year flowing south is ours. The overdose deaths are in our towns, our families, our blood. But the bomb falls somewhere else. We project onto a fishing boat in the Caribbean what we refuse to see in ourselves, and we call the projection a war.
Robert Sánchez was a fisherman. Forty-two years old. Four children. Thirty years on the water. But once the category exists, none of that matters. The word makes the decision. The bomb follows the word.
People read “narco-terrorist” in a headline and felt nothing. That’s the mechanism working. The naming is the manufacturing. Once the word exists, the person disappears.
The administration has not explained how it distinguishes fishing boats from drug boats before firing. No one seems to care.
THE CURE
Overdose deaths in America fell 27 percent in 2024—from 114,000 to 87,000. The lowest level since June 2020. The CDC credits the decline to widespread naloxone distribution, expanded access to medications like buprenorphine and methadone, and harm reduction programs including syringe services and fentanyl test strips. Seventy lives saved every day by the programs that actually work.
These are not abstractions. They are counselors sitting across from someone in withdrawal at 3 a.m. They are clinic nurses who know their patients’ children’s names. They are syringe exchange vans parked in church lots, staffed by people who were once on the other side of the window. They are the methadone doses that let a mother get her kids to school. They are the Narcan kits that bring people back from the edge so they get another chance to come back all the way.
This is what the Trump administration has done to those programs: Cut $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Clawed back $11 billion in COVID-era treatment grants. Proposed eliminating a $56 million naloxone training grant. Signed an executive order barring federal funds for “so-called ‘harm reduction’” including syringe exchanges. Slashed Medicaid by $900 billion over the next decade. Laid off 5,000 HHS employees, including entire overdose prevention teams.
We bomb poor fishermen in the Caribbean. We gut treatment programs at home. The math is not complicated.
Treatment saves lives. But treatment doesn’t produce enemies. The empire needs enemies.
THE QUESTION
Robert Sánchez’s youngest son is in the third grade. He keeps asking if his father might have survived the explosion. Maybe he’s still out there. Maybe he’s floating somewhere, waiting to be found.
His family made sure his grandmother took her blood pressure medication before they told her.
Alejandro Carranza Medina was also forty-two. Also a fisherman. Also had four children. His boat was adrift on September 15, engine dead. He was flying a distress signal when the strike came.
His widow asked the only question that matters: “Why did they just take his life like that? The fishermen have the right to live. Why didn’t they just detain them?”
She is asking the wrong question. Due process requires seeing a person. The category had already made the decision.
Sánchez and Carranza weren’t enemy combatants. They were inventory.
Kill them all.
NOTES & SOURCES
Boat Strikes & Victims
Robert Sánchez biography, blood pressure medication, son’s disbelief, 75-horsepower engine dream Associated Press Investigation (November 8, 2025) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trump-has-accused-boat-strike-targets-of-being-narco-terrorists-the-truth-is-more-nuanced-ap-investigation-finds
Alejandro Carranza Medina, widow’s quote (”Why did they just take his life like that?”), distress signal, four children AFP/CBS News (October 22, 2025) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colombian-killed-us-strike-fisherman-wife-says/
Strike count (22 boats, 80+ dead), “narco-terrorist” designations NPR timeline https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/nx-s1-5604895/trump-venezuela-drug-boat-strikes
Cabinet Room Scene (December 2, 2025)
“SSecretary of War” typo, Trump’s eyes closing, Hegseth speaking, budget director doodling Associated Press/PBS News https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-trump-holds-a-cabinet-meeting-as-sept-2-boat-strike-comes-under-bipartisan-scrutiny
Hegseth “kill everybody” order, war crime allegations Washington Post/NPR Fresh Air (December 3, 2025) https://www.npr.org/2025/12/03/nx-s1-5630324/did-the-trump-administration-commit-a-war-crime-in-its-attack-on-a-venezuelan-boat
CIA Drug Trafficking History
Air America, Laos, Hmong opium trade, Cold War operations Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Lawrence Hill Books, 2003)
CIA drug trafficking timeline, Contras, cocaine Institute for Policy Studies/Congressional Record (May 7, 1998) https://irp.fas.org/congress/1998_cr/980507-l.htm
Air America operations, opium allegations PBS Frontline “Guns, Drugs, and the CIA” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/archive/gunsdrugscia.html
CIA Air Operations in Laos CIA Studies in Intelligence https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/CIA-Air-Ops-Laos.pdf
Sackler Family & Opioid Crisis
OxyContin marketing, 500,000+ deaths, museum donations, settlement Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Doubleday, 2021)
$7.4 billion settlement, no prison time NY Attorney General https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2025/attorney-general-james-announces-every-state-has-joined-74-billion-settlement
Metropolitan Museum, Louvre, Guggenheim remove Sackler name CBS News (December 9, 2021) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/metropolitan-museum-of-art-sackler-family-name-removed-purdue-pharma/
900,000 opioid deaths since 1999 PBS News/Purdue settlement https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/judge-formally-approves-opioid-settlement-for-purdue-pharma-and-sackler-family-members-who-own-the-company
Overdose Decline & Treatment Programs
27% decline, 87,000 deaths, 70 lives saved daily, naloxone/buprenorphine/methadone credited CDC (February 25, 2025) https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2025/2025-cdc-reports-decline-in-us-drug-overdose-deaths.html
Trump Administration Cuts
$1 billion SAMHSA cuts, 5,000 HHS layoffs, overdose prevention teams eliminated Drug Policy Alliance https://drugpolicy.org/news/trumps-funding-cuts-jeopardize-fentanyl-overdose-prevention-and-recovery/
$11 billion CDC grants clawed back NPR (March 27, 2025) https://www.npr.org/2025/03/27/nx-s1-5342368/addiction-trump-mental-health-funding
$56 million naloxone training grant proposed elimination CBS News (May 9, 2025) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/overdose-deaths-narcan-naloxone-harm-reduction-samhsa-trump-cuts/
Executive order barring “harm reduction” funding, syringe exchange ban Roll Call (August 5, 2025) https://rollcall.com/2025/08/05/harm-reduction-techniques-being-phased-out-under-trump/
$900 billion+ Medicaid cuts over decade Stateline (November 18, 2025) https://stateline.org/2025/11/18/progress-on-overdose-deaths-could-be-jeopardized-by-federal-cuts-critics-say/
Excellent. And terrible. Thank you for writing this. Now we must spread it far and wide.
When I got to the part about Alejandro Medina it took my breath away. Well worth $8/month.