There is something especially disturbing about a government striking a fishing boat from the shadows. A warship is visible. A battlefield is recognisable. Even a conventional airstrike carries, however imperfectly, the architecture of accountability. But a small drone arriving over an apparently ordinary fishing vessel, followed by an explosion and silence, belongs to a darker category, violence without a public explanation.
That is why the reported CIA operation against Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands should alarm anyone who still believes that international law is supposed to restrain powerful states rather than merely inconvenience weak ones. The Washington Post has reported that the mysterious attacks earlier this year were connected to a covert CIA programme. Survivors of two March attacks described drones dropping explosives onto their boats, while another vessel disappeared in January with eight crew members still missing.
The obvious question is whether these fishermen were legitimate targets. If the answer is no and the available accounts certainly raise profound doubts, then Washington has a very serious problem.
The United States may call the campaign counter-narcotics. It may invoke intelligence, national security, terrorism or the increasingly elastic vocabulary of the war on drugs. But labels do not magically transform fishermen into combatants. Nor does the CIA badge provide a special exemption from international law.
Indeed, secrecy may make the legal problem worse. Covert action is not synonymous with lawlessness. Intelligence agencies can conduct secret operations that are lawful. But secrecy cannot be used as a substitute for legal authority. If lethal force is employed against civilians outside an armed conflict, the justification must be exceptionally strong. If people are deliberately targeted without sufficient evidence that they pose an imminent threat, the questions become considerably darker.
And then there is the problem of what happened afterward. Survivors have described being intercepted, restrained, hooded and transported before eventually being handed over to Salvadoran authorities. Reuters has separately reported accounts from fishermen who say their boats were searched by Ecuadorian authorities and found not to contain drugs before being attacked.
If those accounts are accurate, this is not merely a story about mistaken intelligence. It is a story about the consequences of allowing secret military power to operate beyond public scrutiny.
America has spent decades lecturing other countries about sovereignty, human rights and the rules-based international order. Those principles cannot become optional when Washington finds the enemy sufficiently unpleasant. The rules-based order is not a subscription service available only to friendly governments.
Nor should Ecuador's cooperation with the United States be mistaken for a blank cheque. A sovereign government cannot outsource responsibility for violence on its territory—or against its citizens at sea—simply because the operation is politically embarrassing.
There is also a strategic absurdity here. Destroying a fishing boat may produce an impressive explosion. It does not destroy the economic conditions, criminal networks and corruption that sustain drug trafficking. Criminal organisations replace boats and recruits far more easily than governments replace trust.
The greatest danger is therefore not only what happened in the Pacific. It is what such operations teach future presidents.
Once governments become comfortable killing first and explaining later, the threshold for violence quietly falls. The secret operation becomes the normal operation. The extraordinary becomes routine. Accountability becomes an obstacle rather than a principle.
That is how democracies drift into the fog. The fishermen of Ecuador deserve answers. So does Congress. So does Ecuador. And, ultimately, so does the American public. A government powerful enough to kill in secret must also be accountable enough to explain why.
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