Cesar Valdes and Magdaleno Medina have been in the US illegally for more than 46 years, arriving on separate days in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was still president.
Page A6From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 27 September 2026
Administration gives accused cartel commander a trial; drug boat crews the ocean floor.
As it ran on the front
The Justice Department flew a man Colombian authorities call "Spider" into California this week, the accused commander of a thousand-person cocaine army, headed toward federal charges that could keep him in a cell for the rest of his life. That is due process working exactly as advertised: agents, a plane, a courtroom, a docket number.
Southern Command announced a "kinetic strike" on a go-fast boat, three men aboard, all killed, all labeled "narco-terrorists" in the same release that reported their deaths. No docket number. No indictment. There is no boat to interrogate, because there is no boat left.…
…(cont) Nine days after that, on September 19, it happened again: four more dead, another go-fast vessel, the same phrase — "kinetic strike" — turning up in a second, separate release, as if the wording had become standard equipment.
Three days after that, the United Nations did the arithmetic the administration had left undone. Ben Saul, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, reported that the U.S. has hit 68 boats in international waters since last September, killing at least 223 people, and said the pattern may amount to crimes against humanity.
In the same country, under the same law, in the same week, two men in their eighties and seventies, Cesar Valdes and Magdaleno Medina, both in the U.S. illegally since 1980, were arrested for trafficking and stashing arms. They will get lawyers. They will get a courtroom. No missile hit their boat, because they were arrested on land, with no boat involved at all.
So the same government, in the same month, treats the identical accusation two different ways depending on where you're standing when they find you: on a dock, you get a trial; on the water, you get a strike. The commander in California and the crew on the go-fast boat were accused of the same offense, in the same drug war, under the same flag. One will see a courtroom. The other 223 will not, because the case against them ended when the boat did.
“They flew one accused commander to California with a lawyer, a courtroom, and a docket number, because his name was already in the papers. The men on the other sixty-eight boats got a strike instead of an arraignment, and the UN's counted two hundred twenty-three bodies where the paperwork should be. You want to know what due process costs now? A name people have already heard.”
“Look, these are proven traffickers operating in international waters — that's a lawful use of force against narco-terrorism, full stop. The "68 boats, 223 dead" figure, that's a UN rapporteur talking, not a court, and rapporteurs don't get a vote — did I just say a body count doesn't need a vote? That's not what I meant. What I meant is due process is expensive, and out on the water, we just don't budget for it.”
The receipts
AIR strikes by the United States on alleged drug boats may be crimes against humanity, a United Nations human rights expert said. In a damning report, Ben Saul, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, said US attacks on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean violate…
An accused Colombian narco-terror boss accused of leading a 1,000-member army has been hauled to California to face federal charges that could put him behind bars for life.
Four suspected drug traffickers were killed in a U.S. strike on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea, according to U.S. Southern Command.
· Three ‘narco-terrorists’ killed in the Caribbean by US military forces from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.