Two people were killed in the latest U.S. military strike on a boat in the eastern Pacific said to be involved in drug smuggling, U.S. Southern Command said Monday.
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The strike was directed by Gen. Fancis Donovan and took out a vessel that Southern Command said was operated by a U.S.-designated terror group involved in brining illicit drugs to the United States. A more precise location for the strike was not provided.
The deceased were characterized only as male “narco-terrorists,” according to a statement from the command.
Black-and-white video from the perspective of an aircraft overhead was posted with Southern Command’s statement on X and showed what appeared to be a panga or small fishing boat being hit by unknown munitions from the sky, leaving it smoking afterward.
The attack was part of an ongoing enforcement operation against alleged drug traffickers in the eastern Pacific, off Latin American coastlines and in the Caribbean, called Joint Task Force Southern Spear, Southern Command said.
“Applying total systemic friction on the cartels,” it said, adding that no U.S. forces were harmed.
President Donald Trump’s administration has carried out 50 such strikes in his second term, according to an NBC News tally. They have taken out 51 vessels and have killed 170 people, often described by military officials as combatants and narco-terrorists.
The Trump administration has designated major drug cartels as terror groups that it says are sometimes integrated into Latin American governments. It argues the groups’ role in supplying potentially deadly narcotics, such as fentanyl, to the United States amounts to hostile acts of war.
The characterization that those killed in the attacks are drug-smugglers has been disputed at times by family of the dead. Some Democrats in Congress have questioned the legality of the operation’s deadly strikes in the absence of due process or public documentation of alleged links to trafficking.
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