Family of Colombian fisherman killed in attack on US ship files complaint for murder

the family of a Colombian who died in a US military attack on a ship in the Caribbean has filed a complaint against the United States before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The family of Alejandro Carranza Medina, 42, murdered on September 15, rejected claims that there were drugs on the ship targeted by Washington’s military anti-narcotics campaign and insisted it was a fisherman simply doing his job in the open sea.

“We know that Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense of the United States, was responsible for ordering the bombing of ships like Alejandro Carranza Medina’s and the murder of everyone on board those ships,” reads the complaint to which News had access on Wednesday.

American attacks in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 80 people on ships that Washington claims, without providing evidence, were transporting drugs from Venezuela. Legal experts and lawmakers critical of the attacks have argued that military action against suspected drug smuggling ships is legally dubious.

Relatives and governments of the victims insist that some of the dead were fishermen, and human rights groups say the attacks are illegal even if the targets were actually drug traffickers.

The IACHR complaint said Hegseth gave the orders “despite the fact that he did not know the identity of the targets of these attacks and extrajudicial executions” which, he said, were “ratified” by President Trump.

The IACHR is a quasi-judicial body of the Organization of American States, created to protect human rights in the region.

At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Hegseth said The United States “has barely begun to attack narcoships and throw narcoterrorists to the bottom of the ocean.” He noted a recent lull in strikes and explained that “it’s hard to find ships to attack right now.”

“Deterrence has to matter,” he said. “Not arrest and deliver and then do it again, the rinse and repeat approach of previous administrations.”

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has called the US attacks “extrajudicial executions”, has promised to support the family in their search for justice.

“My lawyer Dan Kovalik has begun the legal defense of the Carranza family, victims of the American murder of Alejandro Carranza, the Santa Marta fisherman killed by a missile fired at his boat in the Caribbean and poor people in solidarity,” Petro wrote on social media on Monday.

A “good man,” says the widow

In an interview with News in October, Carranza’s widow, Katerine Hernández.He said he had been a “good man.”

He left four children.

“He had no ties to drug trafficking and his daily activity was fishing,” Hernández said.

“Why did they take his life like that?” he asked during the interview. “The fishermen have the right to live. Why weren’t they arrested?”

Before his last trip, Carranza told his father that he was headed to a place “with good fish.”

Days passed without contact, until the family found out about the attack on television.

“Days went by and he didn’t call,” Hernández said.

Friends interviewed by News also insisted that Carranza was a fisherman.

“He went out to sea to fish for sawfish, tuna and snapper, which at this time of year are very far away,” said César Henríquez, who has known him since he was little.

“He always returned to Santa Marta, secured his boat and returned home. I never knew him to do anything wrong,” Henríquez told News.