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,