sure does, but temporal considerations matter and the United States military has been killing people—at the President and SecDef's direction—in the Caribbean and Pacific for weeks, now, without even the slightest fig leaf of Congressional authorization. In other words, even if there's a formal declaration of war on Venezuela (which will never happen), that doesn't excuse the prior behavior.
Declerations of war are irrelavent to if its an armed conflict (in general declerations of war are obsolete in international law. They might have meaning domestically but do not have meaning in international law).
From what i understand there are two requirements
- the violence has to be intense enough. I think we are there
- the other side has to be an organized armed group capable of conducting warfare. This is the part that seems to be a stretch. The drug runners may be organized but are they really capable of conducting warfare? The quote i found from the red cross is: "Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be considered as "parties to the conflict", meaning that they possess organized armed forces. This means for example that these forces have to be under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations."
Well, here's a somewhat analogous precedent: The US (and other nations) have been fighting piracy in the Horn of Africa area for several years now. No declared war (by anybody - it's not just the US that didn't), but pirates are being killed.
So the precedent is there that this is how we do things. It's not just this operation. (If you don't like that, what do you want? Do you want to require that the military get Congressional approval for every operation in which someone might get killed?)
At least (just today), some members of Congress finally got briefed on the classified intel that leads people to think that these are in fact drug smugglers getting killed.
Look, I'm not saying that bombing these boats is justified. I'm just saying that the Congressional oversight rules are not unique to this operation.
