U.S. Southern Command is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports stemming from the military mission to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to two government officials. Instead, the Pentagon itself is accepting reports directly.
After the U.S. attacked Venezuela in Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3, U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, which oversees military operations in Latin America, then soon learned that SOUTHCOM has no mechanism for submitting these reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to its Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which is operated by the war secretary and was established to help limit unintended civilian deaths.
Airwars began sending reports of civilian harm incidents on Monday.
“A few days after the strikes, the DoD’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence team reached out to us to understand if we had been documenting civilian harm from U.S. actions,” said Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars. “Until SOUTHCOM establishes their own mechanism — as CENTCOM and AFRICOM have — we will be submitting cases directly to the Center of Excellence after we publish them.”
The need for the Pentagon to pick up SOUTHCOM’s slack follows a deemphasis on civilian harm mitigation and corresponding budget cuts across the military as a result of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s efforts to gut programs to reduce civilian casualties. Experts and insiders say that even a small number of civilian casualty reports is now too much for SOUTHCOM to handle. Two government officials told The Intercept that personnel devoted to civilian harm tracking and mitigation at SOUTHCOM had been whittled down from four staff to one contractor.
Personnel devoted to civilian harm tracking and mitigation at SOUTHCOM has been whittled down from four staff to one contractor.
SOUTHCOM’s inability to adequately track civilian harm comes as members of the Senate Armed Services Committee are set to receive a classified briefing on the the U.S. attack on Venezuela on Tuesday and President Donald Trump’s pick to head SOUTHCOM — Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Francis L. Donovan — heads to Capitol Hill on Thursday for his nomination hearing.
The Intercept reported on cuts to SOUTHCOM’s civilian harm staff last year, and the command has been dodging questions on the subject for months. Return receipts show that queries regarding civilian harm mitigation personnel at SOUTHCOM were read by multiple personnel at the command but never answered.
Col. Emanuel Ortiz, Southern Command’s chief of public affairs, would not say how many personnel devoted to civilian harm issues are at work at the command. “We comply with statutory and regulatory Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR) requirements and have designated personnel to perform these tasks,” he told The Intercept by email, directing additional questions to the Office of the Secretary of War. That office did not provide answers prior to publication.
“Without adequate dedicated staff, it’s unclear how SOUTHCOM is addressing these concerning reports,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “How will they respond to confirmed civilian casualties? How will they prevent similar harm from occurring in the future, and what experts are they consulting to do that?”
Trump claimed the January 3 attacks in Venezuela were “precise” and “perfectly executed.” Hegseth also praised the “precision” of the strikes and the “gallantry” of the personnel who conducted them.
For more than a week, the Department of War has failed to respond to questions from The Intercept regarding civilian casualties during Operation Absolute Resolve. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not reply to questions about whether killing civilians was gallant.
Airwars, for its part, has already found reports of seven incidents in which civilians were killed or injured, or civilian infrastructure was damaged. “So far we have identified at least two civilian harm incidents with a number of named victims — thanks to diligent local reporting in the aftermath of the strikes — alongside a handful of incidents involving damage to civilian infrastructure,” said Tripp.
Those include an airstrike that reportedly killed an elderly woman and left two others injured in Prolongación Soublette in Catia La Mar, in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, on January 3. Another woman was killed and her daughter was injured by an alleged U.S. airstrike on a TV and telephone antenna in the state of Miranda. Two civilians were also reportedly killed near the Oscar Machado Zoluaga Airport in Charallave by an alleged U.S. airstrike early that same morning.
Trump said there were no U.S. deaths in the operation. Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, reported that 100 people were killed in the attacks, and at least as many were wounded. The majority of those killed appear to have been members of the security services. The government of Cuba reported that 32 Cubans, serving in the Venezuelan armed forces and interior ministry, were among those slain in the U.S. attacks.
Experts and lawmakers say the attacks violated U.S. and international law. “President Trump did not seek congressional authorization for this use of force, and Congress did not grant it,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., on the attacks on Venezuela. “Under our Constitution and the law, that makes this action illegal.”
Donovan will appear before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday for his confirmation hearing. He is nominated for promotion to the rank of general and to lead U.S. Southern Command. Last fall, Adm. Alvin Holsey announced his retirement as SOUTHCOM chief years ahead of schedule, raising speculation that he objected to the attacks on alleged drug smuggling boats by Special Operations Command in the SOUTHCOM area of operations. Holsey has never publicly commented on the reason for his shock retirement.
“Never before in my over 20 years on the committee can I recall seeing a combatant commander leave their post this early and amid such turmoil,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, at the time.
The U.S. military has carried out 35 known attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 123 civilians whom it claims are narco-terrorists. Experts and lawmakers have called the boat strikes extrajudicial killings.
The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed two survivors of the initial boat attack on September 2 in a follow-up strike. The two survivors clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked by the U.S. military for roughly 45 minutes before Adm. Frank Bradley, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered a follow-up attack that killed the shipwrecked men.
Following reporting by The Intercept on boat attacks on December 30 and discrepancies in Southern Command’s count of the total number of strikes and casualties, Ortiz disclosed that 11 civilians died as a result of the December 30 boat strikes — eight more people than previously reported.
Since 9/11, America’s forever wars have killed an estimated 940,000 people through direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
In 2022, the Pentagon finally unveiled a comprehensive plan for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian casualties. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provided a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses civilian harm. This was followed by the far more detailed Defense Department Instruction 3000.17, which was issued to help implement the plan while establishing the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.
“The U.S. military has spent the last few years working to overhaul how it prevents and responds to civilian harm, efforts that were mandated by Congress on a bipartisan basis and actually began under the first Trump administration,” CIVIC’s Shiel told The Intercept. “Part of these efforts were commitments to ensure commands had the resources and expertise they needed to adequately integrate civilian protection into their planning and to investigate and learn from instances of civilian harm when they happened.”
Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants and dismantling its CHMR efforts to firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force last year, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the law of war.
“The U.S. remains the military with the most sophisticated set of policies and procedures for receiving reports on civilian harm and processing claims through established channels, compared to its allies — though as we have seen with the Yemen campaign last year, these have yet to lead to transparent outcomes for affected civilians,” said Tripp, referencing attacks that reportedly killed hundreds of civilians, including scores of people at an immigrant detention center. “The fact that SOUTHCOM appears not to have incorporated the systems that are outlined quite clearly in policies, such as the 2024 Department of Defense Instruction 3000.17, is a worrying sign. In the face of a wider erosion of international norms, basic mechanisms to protect civilians from the lethal use of force are needed more than ever.”
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