Colombian President Gustavo Petro has posted a grim video that adds new international pressure to President Donald Trump’s controversial boat strike campaign, and to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has been publicly tied to the deadly operations.
In a post on X, Petro shared pixelated footage said to show two bodies washed up on a beach along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, in the department of La Guajira. “The two bodies found in the region of La Guajira were floating in the sea,” Petro wrote, calling on forensic authorities and Venezuelan officials to help identify them. He said they may have been the victims of “an airstrike at sea,” but did not explicitly name the United States.
Local police told AFP the bodies were discovered on a beach used by fishermen and that the cause of death remains under investigation.
Petro’s post landed as outrage is already building over a U.S. campaign of airstrikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, a mission Trump has billed as a hard line push against “narcoterrorists” and cartels. According to Newsweek, the U.S. military says it has now carried out 22 such strikes on suspected drug running vessels, killing at least 86 people.
U.S. Southern Command has openly tied those operations to Hegseth. In a recent statement on X, the command said, “On Dec. 4, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel,” adding that intelligence showed it was carrying illicit narcotics along a known trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific.
Two BODIES appeared on Colombia’s shores, in Puerto Lopez, La Guajira. All evidence suggests they were Colombian victims of U.S. bombing in the Caribbean — Colombia public media pic.twitter.com/PBvBPOBA8N
— Camila (@camilapress) December 6, 2025
Human rights groups, regional governments, and families of the dead have accused Washington of carrying out extrajudicial killings at sea. A detailed summary of the strikes notes that “governments and families of those killed in the U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats have said many of the dead were civilians, primarily fishers,” even as the Trump administration insists they were narcoterrorists.
At a public event on Sunday, he condemned U.S. military operations and threats in Latin America, saying Washington is trying to pressure Colombia to “do what they want.”
On X, he went further, drawing a contrast between those killed at sea and powerful figures who walk free. “Those who die from missiles are poor fishermen, some of whom, out of necessity, make short trips carrying cocaine for traffickers,” Petro wrote. “Those who are pardoned are former presidents with strong ties to narcoterrorism in Honduras and Colombia… The U.S. is choosing its allies wrongly. Its allies cannot be the traffickers.”
The strikes themselves began in early September, when Trump announced that the U.S. military had destroyed a boat he described as “loaded” with narcotics and carrying a “lot of drugs” bound for the United States. Since then, operations have expanded, and reports have emerged of survivors, double tap follow up strikes, and families insisting their relatives were first time crew or small scale workers rather than cartel bosses.
Spokesperson Sean Parnell has called one major critical account “completely false,” and Hegseth has accused the media of “fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting” aimed at discrediting U.S. forces.
