Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday the U.S. military carried out three more strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Eastern Pacific, killing 14 “narco-terrorists,” while one individual survived.
The first strike hit a boat with eight people, the second hit a boat with four and the third hit a boat with three, Hegseth said in a post on social platform X. All of the strikes were conducted in international waters and no U.S. service members were injured in the operations, he said.
Hegseth said all of the vessels were operated by a designated terrorist organization (DTO) trafficking narcotics in the Eastern Pacific. It is unclear which DTO Hegseth was referring to.
The defense secretary said that U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) initiated a search and rescue standard protocol regarding the lone survivor and that Mexican search and rescue authorities “accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue.”
“The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own. These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” Hegseth said in his post. “We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”
The U.S. military has continued to strike alleged drug-smuggling vessels in both the Caribbean Sea and in the Eastern Pacific, escalating its campaign in what it argues are operations to prevent illegal drugs from coming to the U.S.
In total, the Trump administration says it has killed 57 “narco-terrorists” since the attacks against alleged drug-smuggling boats began in early September. On Friday, the Defense Department (DOD) said it took out an alleged Tren de Aragua drug boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing six “narco-terrorists.”
The strikes come as the Trump administration has accumulated a massive military presence in the Caribbean, dispatching surveillance jets, fighter planes and warships in an ongoing campaign of which the main target appears to be Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who the U.S. government has deemed an “illegitimate leader.”
The DOD ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, and its escort ships, to head to the Southcom area of responsibility, a region where the administration already has at least 10,000 U.S. forces supporting counternarcotics operations.
