The President wasn’t in a war room surrounded by maps and generals. He was in a press briefing, casually leaning against a podium. He wasn’t talking about a battlefield defined by borders and trenches. He was talking about suspected traffickers—men on small boats, ghosts in the machine. No trial. No oversight. No declaration of war. Just death as a casual afternoon update.
THE CASE OF THE DRIFTING BOAT
Alejandro Carranza was a fisherman. He was a man of the salt and the net, a person whose life was measured in the weight of the morning catch. He left home on Colombia’s Caribbean coast on September 14. He was grieving; his brother had died, and the silence of his house had become unbearable. He finally returned to the water, looking for the only rhythm he knew. He never came back.
ITEM 02: Distress Beacon Activated / 04:00 UTC
ITEM 03: Identification: POSITIVE SUSPECTED CARGO
ITEM 04: Engagement: KINETIC STRIKE / NO WARNING
The boat had engine trouble. It drifted into the path of a surveillance drone. A distress signal was raised, a desperate electronic plea for help. But the state does not respond to distress with rescue—it responds with ordinance. There was no warning. No radio hail. No boarding party. No arrest. Just a flash of light on a thermal sensor.
“He was a good man. He fished. That’s what he did. He wasn't a criminal. He was just tired.” — Katerine Hernandez
Why didn’t they just detain them? Alejandro was not a trafficker. He was not armed. He was not named in the initial report. He was not mourned by the press. He was erased by a protocol that views suspicion as a terminal diagnosis.
THE LEGAL LIMEWASH
The DOJ memo remains classified, locked behind the firewalls of national security. It justifies deadly force against “imminent threats,” a phrase that has been weaponized into a legal void. It did not define "imminent." It did not require proof of cargo. It did not require Congressional approval. It simply provided the legal ink to bleach the blood off the floor before the next briefing.
By removing the requirement for a declaration of war, the executive branch has turned the entire planet into a potential kill zone. If you are in proximity to a suspected crime, you are a target. If you are in a boat with a broken engine, you are a "threat."
— PRESIDENT GUSTAVO PETRO
THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE PROTOCOL
This is not a war. It is a protocol. There is no declaration because a declaration requires debate. There is no battlefield because the battlefield is everywhere. There is no enemy uniform because the enemy is anyone the state decides to kill today. There is only suspicion, proximity, and death.
The land is next. That phrase is not a warning from a dystopian novel; it is a directive. It means strikes on soil. It means escalation. It means domestic proximity. If we can execute a fisherman in international waters because he "might" be a smuggler, what stops the drone from hovering over a warehouse in Miami? Over a car in San Diego?
There will be more Alejandros. More names not mentioned in the ledger. More families not warned. More grief not considered a defense in the court of "imminent threat." The machine has decided that the cost of certainty is too high, so it settles for the efficiency of the grave.
WHITE HOUSE BRIEFING · OCTOBER 23, 2025
Reporters asked about the legality of the strikes. The President didn’t hesitate, cleaning his glasses as he spoke.
“We’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We aren't doing the paperwork anymore.”
“They’re going to be, like, dead. That's the deterrent.”
On Congressional oversight: “I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war... Pete, you go to Congress, you tell them about it. What are they going to say, ‘Gee, we don’t want to stop drugs pouring in?’ They’ll clap. They always do.”
This was not a leak. This was not a whistleblower’s secret.
This was a public statement of intent.
No evidence. No oversight. Just death.