U.S. Military Strikes Four Alleged Drug Boats in Eastern Pacific, Killing 14

The Washington Post

13:33 JST, October 29, 2025

The U.S. military struck four vessels suspected of carrying drugs in the eastern Pacific, officials said Tuesday, a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against traffickers in the Western Hemisphere.

Fourteen alleged traffickers were killed in the strikes, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media, bringing the total to nearly 60 killed in more than a dozen strikes since early September. The latest operation, carried out Monday, included a rescue mission of one survivor launched by Mexican authorities, Hegseth said.

Hegseth posted an announcement with video of three strikes showing the vessels exploding or bursting into flames. In one of the strikes, two boats were pulled alongside each other and seemingly stationary when they were hit. U.S. military forces have surged into the Caribbean Sea to support the military campaign, including roughly 10,000 troops, a fleet of eight warships, and an aircraft carrier and associated warships on their way from Europe.

Mexican officials said in social media posts Tuesday afternoon that the Mexican navy was conducting a search-and-rescue operation 400 miles southwest of the resort city of Acapulco using both a patrol vessel and a maritime patrol aircraft. The operation was undertaken after a request from the U.S. Coast Guard, Mexican officials said, linking it to a survivor of one of the vessels hit by the U.S. military.

President Donald Trump has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of overseeing narcotics trafficking operations into the United States, prompting speculation that the buildup is aimed at unseating Maduro through coercion or force. Trump, speaking last week, said that “the land is next,” indicating that military action may move ashore in coming days.

Experts in international law and some members of Congress have questioned the legal authority for the strikes, noting that the people targeted are alleged criminals, rather than soldiers or terrorists posing an imminent threat to the United States. Trump has said the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with drug traffickers, whom he has described as narcoterrorists, and pointed to the plague of drug overdoses as an assault on Americans that must be stopped.

While Trump and Hegseth have said the attacks are aimed at stemming the flow of narcotics to the U.S., it is unclear what effect the strikes will have on cartel bosses who have outfoxed drug enforcement for decades.

The U.S. “will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them,” Hegseth said Tuesday of the suspected traffickers, using the language of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he served as an infantry officer. U.S. commanders throughout numerous administrations touted killing low-level militants as a measure of success that ultimately proved elusive.

The Pentagon declined to further describe its operations in the Western Hemisphere. “The Department will not discuss military strategy with the media,” Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said.

The Trump administration has not made public any evidence verifying its claims that the targets of the attacks were confirmed drug smugglers or that the boats involved were in fact carrying illicit drugs. The synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is the cause of most drug overdose deaths in the U.S., is most commonly produced in Mexico. The strikes in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean point to alleged traffickers hauling cocaine from Colombia and Ecuador. Venezuela is a minor player in drug trafficking, officials and experts have said.

Maduro, speaking on Venezuelan television, last week accused the Trump administration of “inventing a new eternal war” despite having “promised they would never again get involved in a war.”

The boat strikes began in early September in the Caribbean, and initially appeared to focus on a route between Venezuela and the nearby island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, a transit hub for marijuana and cocaine heading to West Africa and Europe rather than the U.S., officials familiar with the matter have said.

The first U.S. strikes on boats in the eastern Pacific occurred last week, off the coast of South America, along what Hegseth referred to as a “known narco-trafficking route.” Without providing evidence, he called those aboard “terrorists” and said they were “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling.”

Long-range bombers and attack helicopters have flown near Venezuela in recent weeks, and the USS Gravely, a guided missile destroyer, docked at Trinidad and Tobago on Sunday for what the military called training exercises. Trump also has authorized the CIA to conduct covert missions inside Venezuela.

The mission is further bolstered by advanced F-35 fighter jets deployed to Puerto Rico and overseen by a new joint task force activated this month under the command of a senior Marine Corps officer, Lt. Gen. Calvert Worth Jr.