Dead Bodies

 Trump's campaign of serial murder in the Caribbean Sea has now left upwards of thirty bodies in the ocean. And his fight over social media this weekend with Colombian president Gustavo Petro seemed to underscore what we all already suspected at this point: many of the people Trump is killing in these extrajudicial executions are not drug traffickers at all—but just ordinary and completely innocent fishermen. 

Petro on Saturday accused the U.S. government of murdering one of his country's citizens in these strikes—and he was no "narco-terrorist." In September, the Colombian president claimed, a fisherman by the name of Alejandro Carranza was adrift in a small craft that had lost power. He had sent out a distress signal. Instead of obeying the universal law of the sea and of humanity by rendering him aid—the U.S. government blasted him from the skies. He had no ties to drug traffickers whatsoever. 

The news came as a family in Trinidad has also stepped forward in recent days to say they fear their relative may have died in one of these strikes as well—a young man who was preparing to return to Trinidad from Venezuela. He disappeared at sea before ever reaching home—probably killed at the hands of a U.S. drone—leaving his family to stare out at the ocean waiting for a ship that will never come, like characters out of a J.M. Synge tragedy.

Earlier in this string of murders, we had no information whatsoever about the people the administration was sending to a watery grave. Trump and Hegseth kept sharing their home-made snuff films of these massacres on social media; they kept bragging about the number of people they had just shot to death from the skies, without charge or trial or any justification in self-defense or the laws of war. But the casualties of these atrocities went nameless and faceless. 

We could only wonder—as Harold Pinter once wrote (in a poem he read aloud during his 2005 Nobel Lecture, in condemnation of civilian casualties in the Iraq War):

Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

But now—this week—we have some of the answers to these questions. We have a family in Trinidad saying: you murdered our boy. "Donald Trump took a father, a brother, an uncle, a nephew from families"—as one of the relatives of the murdered Trinidadian fishermen reportedly told journalists. We have a president in Colombia saying: you are killing my people. The fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers are coming forward to call Trump what he is: a murderer. 

And if we still don't believe the accusations—well, Trump told on himself long before any of these bereaved family members came forward to point the finger. Weeks ago, Trump joked that "even fishermen" were afraid to go into the waters off the coast of Venezuela now. When everyone was horrified by this callous remark—which suggested, after all, that perfectly innocent people should be afraid for their lives, just for seeking a living—Trump doubled down on it. 

He has since repeated this comment just about every time he's been asked in the press about the killings. He revels in it. J.D. Vance has even made a similar "joke." These guys are admitting in broad daylight that they don't care whether their drone strikes end up hitting perfectly innocent fishermen. And now, the president of Colombia comes forward to tell us: that is indeed whom they have hit. They murdered a completely innocent man, just trying to eke out a hard living from the sea. 

The game here appears to be that Trump and Hegseth are just picking boats at random to detonate—in order to deter others from making the journey. That's called terrorism: the killing and maiming of non-combatants indiscriminately in order to extort political objectives from a civilian population. Trump and Hegseth are terrorists. They are murderers. 

Yet—their hypocrisy knowing no bounds—these men are louder than anyone in their denunciation of "criminals" and "terrorists." Trump right now is arresting protesters on bogus "terrorism" accusations—just for exercising their constitutional rights. 

He has also undertaken a campaign of retaliation against people with murder convictions who received commutations of their sentences under Biden. His officials have even sought to pressure state officials to bring secondary capital charges against these people. Since Biden ensured, through an act of executive clemency, that the federal government cannot execute them—Trump is trying to get them killed on the orders of state governments instead. 

Meanwhile, there will be no legal consequences whatsoever for Trump's flagrant murders in the Caribbean Sea—murders that he is not even trying to hide at this point; murders that he has claimed openly and boasted and joked about. He orders the death penalty for someone languishing in a federal prison for a decades-old murder rap; and then he turns around himself and gleefully orders the killing of thirty civilians for purposes of abjectly terrorizing an innocent population. 

In this we see revealed all The hypocrisy, falsity, and callousness of the Law, to quote Hugh MacDiarmid:

The infernal sadism that hauls to the scaffold
A poor woman sick at both ends, and places
A congenital idiot playing with his dolls
In the Electric Chair—yet kisses the bloody hands
of mass murderers...

I do not expect there will be any justice under the law for Carranza and the other innocent victims of these drone strikes. Not from U.S. courts. Not under this Supreme Court, which has already declared Trump personally immune from criminal liability for just about anything he does in his official role. 

The glaring double standard for murder that MacDiarmid describes will persist—where the poor can be sent to the death chamber for killing; whereas Trump gets to brag about it in public. 

All we can do—if we hope for justice—is to trust to the larger forces of history and memory, which will never cease to exonerate the innocent and condemn the true murderers. All we can do—as MacDiarmid put it—is to "Subject" Trump and his kind "in all connections to endless boycott [...] And hold them thus beyond the human pale / To meet the vengeance there that does not fail."