The authorities in the Dominican Republic said on Sunday that they had recovered cocaine from a speedboat that was recently destroyed in a U.S. military airstrike, part of the Trump administration’s campaign targeting Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels.
It was the first time the Dominican Republic and the United States had carried out a joint operation against “narcoterrorism” in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic’s National Directorate for Drug Control said on social media on Sunday.
It was also the latest development in what the Trump administration has characterized as a counternarcotics and counterterrorism mission in the Caribbean Sea, which has included U.S. military airstrikes on three boats this month.
President Trump has claimed the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules, and as a matter of national self-defense, lawfully order the military to summarily kill drug-running suspects as if they were combatants on a battlefield. The strikes have been condemned by legal experts and Democrats, who say they are illegal.
It was unclear which airstrike the Dominican Republic’s announcement was connected to. The most recent strike, announced by Mr. Trump on social media on Friday, struck a vessel and killed three people aboard, whom the president referred to as “narcoterrorists” without offering more details. He also posted a one-minute surveillance video showing a speedboat being blown up.
The Dominican Republic’s drug control agency said in its statement that officials working with the U.S. Southern Command and the Joint Interagency Task Force South had detected a speedboat that was carrying narcotics, according to intelligence reports. The agency said the boat was heading toward Dominican territory and intended to eventually transport its narcotics to the United States.
After the boat was destroyed, teams from the Dominican Republic’s navy and the drug directorate recovered a total of 377 packages, wrapped in adhesive tape and with different logos, while 60 packages were destroyed in the boat’s explosion, the statement said. The packages were recovered about 80 nautical miles south of Beata Island, off the southern coast of the Dominican Republic.
The statement did not specify when the operation had occurred, and did not provide any more details about those on board.
President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic has pledged to collaborate with the United States against drug trafficking, and his country has emerged as a key security partner for Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has praised the Dominican Republic for intercepting drugs “destined for the streets of the United States.”
Reached by phone, the U.S. Southern Command said that a spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. The Joint Interagency Task Force South did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration has recently ramped up its deadly campaign against drug smugglers in the Caribbean, whom it has accused of bringing fentanyl into the United States. It has ordered several strikes on boats that it claims were linked to trafficking, the first of which Mr. Trump announced on Sept. 2, saying 11 people had been killed. The second strike on Sept. 15 killed three people, he said on social media.
The Pentagon has dispatched a sizable naval armada and aerial fleet of spy aircraft to the Caribbean as part of its campaign there. Military officials, diplomats and analysts have said that a main purpose of the deployment is to ratchet up pressure on Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whom top figures in the Trump administration have called an illegitimate leader and have accused of directing the actions of criminal gangs and drug cartels.
Mr. Maduro condemned the Sept. 2 strike as a “heinous crime” and “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country.”
The strikes have also drawn backlash in the United States, with legal specialists and congressional Democrats assailing them as illegal.
“The president’s decision to use lethal military force against civilians based on unproven claims that they are drug traffickers is morally reprehensible and strategically unsound, and will end up making it harder to prevent dangerous drugs from entering our communities,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
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