WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military launched its eighth strike against an alleged drug-carrying vessel, killing two people in the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday, marking an expansion of the Trump administration’s campaign against drug trafficking in South America.
The attack Tuesday night was a departure from the seven previous U.S. strikes that had targeted vessels in the Caribbean. Hegseth said on social media that the latest strike killed two people, bringing the death toll to at least 34 from attacks that began last month.
The strike marks an expansion of the military’s targeting area in South American waters as well as a shift to Colombia, where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producer is smuggled. Hegseth’s post also draws a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown.
“Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people,” Hegseth said, adding “there will be no refuge or forgiveness — only justice.”
Republican President Donald Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and proclaiming the criminal organizations as unlawful combatants, relying on the same legal authority used by President George W. Bush’s administration when it declared a war on terrorism.
In a brief video Hegseth posted Wednesday, a small boat, half-filled with brown packages, is seen moving along the water. Several seconds into the video, the boat explodes and is seen floating motionless on the water in flames.
The administration has sidestepped prosecuting any of the occupants of the alleged drug-running vessels after returning two survivors of an earlier strike to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.
Ecuadorian officials later said they released the man that was returned to their country, saying that they had no evidence he committed a crime in their country.
The U.S. military has built up an unusually large force in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off the coast of Venezuela since this summer, raising speculation that Trump could try to topple raising Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He faces charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.
The bulk of American overdose deaths are from fentanyl, which is transported by land from Mexico. While Venezuela is a major drug transit zone, about 75% of the cocaine produced in Colombia is smuggled through the eastern Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean.
