Petro is indeed an ally of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and a former Marxist guerilla fighter. He and Trump have sparred before, when Petro tried to refuse deportation flights of his own nationals earlier this year.

But a pattern is emerging of possibly innocent victims being killed by the boat strikes. Over the last few weeks, at least 32 people have been killed by the U.S. via seven strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean. Carranza isn’t the only innocent believed to have been killed; the family of 26-year-old Trinidadian fisherman Chad Joseph claims he’s gone missing and that they believe one of the boat strikes likely killed him (along with his neighbor, a man called Samaroo).

The first boat attack, which killed 11 and was carried out on September 2, killed eight people from the Venezuelan town of San Juan de Unare. Soon after, “Venezuelan security officials descended on San Juan de Unare, cut off the electricity and made clear that public pronouncements about the attacks were not welcome, according to four townspeople, including the niece of one of the victims. Posts were deleted,” reports= The New York Times. “The wife of one of the people, who lived in Güiria, a town also on the Venezuelan coast, told The New York Times on the condition that her name not be published that her husband, a fisherman, had gone to work one day and had never returned.”

Meanwhile, last week’s strike—the sixth of this kind conducted by the U.S. in the Caribbean—ended up injuring one Colombian man, 34-year-old Jeison Obando Pérez, along with an Ecuadorian national. Both men were “aboard a semi-submersible that was blown up Thursday” yet they survived and were rescued and treated by U.S. forces. (“Obando Pérez was repatriated Saturday and hospitalized in Colombia with brain trauma and breathing on a ventilator, Armando Benedetti, Colombia’s minister of the interior, said in a social media posting on Saturday night,” per the Times. “Once he is awake, he will be ‘processed by the justice system for drug trafficking,’ Mr. Benedetti said.”)

A few scenarios are possible. One is that the U.S. really is striking narcotraffickers, and that either their families don’t know their dead relatives are narcotraffickers or are obfuscating. Another possibility is that the U.S. is striking innocent fisherman and calling them narcotraffickers. There could, of course, be a mix of smugglers and fishermen.

But the U.S. government is almost definitely acting illegally here. These people are not combatants. We don’t know if they’re affiliated with groups designated terrorist organizations. Congress has not approved these strikes, and Trump doesn’t even appear to be seeking retroactive approval. When some senators did try to check Trump via the War Powers Act, it didn’t go all that well. And rest assured that Petro, Maduro, and all other who stand to profit are going to keep milking this for all it’s worth, using Trump’s inevitable screw-ups as a means of distracting from their own misbehavior.

Scenes from New York: The brainworms are multiplying.