War on Drugs

Britain and Colombia Cut Off U.S. Intelligence Access Over Caribbean Boat Bombings

The two U.S. allies were OK with helping arrest suspected drug smugglers, but not with helping kill them.

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British Royal Navy ship HMS Severn (P282) steams into position for a precision maneuvering exercise with ships from other participating navies during the Tradewinds exercise in the Caribbean Sea. 19 June 2015. | U.S. Navy photo courtesy of the Mexican Navy
British Royal Navy ship HMS Severn (P282) steams into position for a precision maneuvering exercise with ships from other participating navies during the Tradewinds exercise in the Caribbean Sea. 19 June 2015. (U.S. Navy photo courtesy of the Mexican Navy)

Colombian President Gustavo Petro publicly ordered the military to stop sharing information with the U.S. government on Tuesday in response to U.S. military strikes against suspected smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea. And Britain privately did the same over a month ago, according to a CNN report published the same day. Both countries have been happy to cooperate with Washington against drug trafficking, but think that the decision to kill the suspected smugglers at sea is a step too far.

At least one of the people killed in the boat bombings was a Colombian citizen. "He may have been carrying fish, or he may have been carrying cocaine, but he had not been sentenced to death," Petro said in a speech on Sunday, according to the Associated Press. "There was no need to murder him." After Petro criticized the U.S. military campaign last month, the U.S. Treasury accused Petro of being complicit in drug smuggling and imposed financial sanctions on him, his wife, and his son.

Although Britain is usually not thought of as a Caribbean country, it used to be a major colonial power there and still has several Caribbean territories. For the past few years, Britain has both been carrying out its own antidrug patrols and passing along tips to the U.S. Coast Guard through the Joint Interagency Task Force South in Florida. After the U.S. began bombing suspects, the British government determined that the intelligence sharing was illegal.

Another neighboring country whose citizens were killed, Trinidad and Tobago, has been more supportive of the campaign. "I have no sympathy for traffickers; the US military should kill them all violently," Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said in a September 2025 statement.


The Trump administration has acknowledged that it is choosing to kill suspects that it could have arrested otherwise. "Instead of interdicting [the boat], on the president's orders, we blew it up," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters after the first boat strike in September 2025. He argued that arresting traffickers and seizing their cargo "doesn't work" because cartels plan for those losses anyway. Administration lawyers argue that drug cartels are wartime enemies, so they can be killed rather than arrested, while also denying that the president is limited by constitutional war powers in this campaign.

One of the problems, as Petro pointed out, is that it's impossible to tell which of the victims were carrying cocaine and which were carrying fish. The independent Venezuelan newspaper El Pitazo reports that one of the destroyed boats was carrying drugs, and that it left from an area frequented by drug smugglers, migrants, and fishermen alike. On the other hand, Ecuador released one of the boat strike survivors for lack of evidence, and the family of one Trinidadian victim insists that he was only a fisherman.

The Trump administration has strongly signalled that the antidrug campaign is really a pretext to overthrow Venezuela's socialist President Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump accuses of drug smuggling. After Maduro's disputed 2018 reelection, Venezuela's parliament invoked a constitutional process to install a new president, and American leaders from both parties have declared Maduro an illegitimate leader. Rubio, according to The Atlantic, used the drug issue to push President Donald Trump away from negotiations with Maduro and toward a forcible regime change policy.

The U.S. military has built up its forces in the Caribbean—including the world's largest aircraft carrier, as of this week—far beyond what is necessary to blow up small speedboats. "I'm not gonna tell you what I'm gonna do with Venezuela, if I was gonna do it or if I wasn't going to do it," Trump told CBS News earlier this month. Whatever he's planning, at least two important U.S. allies have decided to count themselves out, because they don't have faith in the administration's restraint.