The U.S. military carried out another strike Sunday on a boat it accused of transporting drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people and leaving six others alive, according to the Defense Department. The operation comes as Washington continues its widening campaign against suspected traffickers in Latin America.
The latest attack adds to a series of more than 60 strikes and pushes the reported death toll from U.S. military boat attacks to more than 210 people since the Trump administration began targeting those it describes as “narcoterrorists” in early September.
It remains unclear whether the six survivors from Sunday’s strike, or the two survivors from a June 16 operation, were rescued. In both instances, U.S. Southern Command said it alerted the U.S. Coast Guard. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions about the most recent strike.
As it has in many of its announcements involving strikes in the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, SOUTHCOM said the vessel was targeted along known drug-smuggling routes. The military did not publicly provide evidence that the boat was carrying narcotics.
A black and white video posted on X showed a boat speeding through the water before being struck by a visible projectile and then bursting into flames.
President Trump has described the United States as being in an “armed conflict” with cartels in Latin America, arguing that the strikes are a necessary step to disrupt drug flows into the country and reduce fatal overdoses. His administration, however, has released limited evidence to substantiate its claims that those killed were “narcoterrorists.”
Opponents of the campaign have raised questions about both its legality and its practical impact. One key criticism is that fentanyl, which is linked to many deadly overdoses in the United States, is most often smuggled over land from Mexico, where it is made using precursor chemicals imported from China and India.
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Members of Congress have previously pressed the Pentagon to release “unedited video” of the first military strike in the campaign, following reports that U.S. forces carried out a second attack on survivors of the initial hit.
Some lawmakers have asked whether that follow-up strike could amount to a war crime. The Defense Department, along with several congressional Republicans, has maintained that the survivors may still have posed a threat, making the additional strike justified.
The Pentagon’s watchdog said in May that it planned to look into whether the U.S. military followed an established targeting framework when carrying out the strikes. However, the evaluation is focused specifically on what’s known as the six-phase Joint Targeting Cycle and not on the legality of the strikes, the inspector general’s office said.
