President Gustavo Petro urged prosecutors to investigate the "murders" and identify the victims as soon as possible. He shared a video of people digging what appears to be a grave on a beach in La Guajira in the north of Colombia, with a mutilated body lying on the sand nearby.

The body and another were discovered on the beach near a fishing village last week.

The United States has deployed a major naval force to the Caribbean and Pacific and has launched strikes on boats since September, killing at least 87 people in what it claimed were attacks on drug smugglers, without providing evidence.

The victims' families and governments said many were fishermen.

"These are murders," said Petro of the two men he said appeared to be "boatmen, apparently citizens of the Dominican Republic." He urged countries of the Caribbean to "unite without fear to end the massacre."

The family of a Colombian man killed in one of the US Caribbean strikes has lodged a complaint against the United States with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The family of Alejandro Carranza Medina, killed on September 15, rejected assertions there were any drugs on the vessel targeted and insisted he was a fisherman just doing his job on the open sea.

Theirs is the first formal complaint related to the US strikes which rights groups say are illegal regardless of whether the occupants are drug smugglers.

Petro's fierce criticism of the US actions has earned him sanctions and an unproven accusation of being a drug leader.

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