The search for survivors of a U.S. military strike against several boats in the eastern Pacific this week stretched into its fourth day on Friday, as hopes dimmed for rescuing anyone amid high seas and fierce winds.
In response to questions from The New York Times, the Coast Guard said in a statement on Friday that it was coordinating a search with several vessels, including fishing boats and ships from other nations, in an area about 400 nautical miles southwest of Mexico’s border with Guatemala.
The Coast Guard said it also launched an HC-130J Super Hercules reconnaissance aircraft from Sacramento, Calif., to sweep an area covering more than 1,000 nautical miles, and issued an urgent broadcast to mariners in the region. Altogether, the ships and the plane had spent a total of about 65 hours as of Friday searching for survivors, the service said.
But the Coast Guard noted that conditions in the area included nine-foot seas and winds approaching 50 miles per hour. Coast Guard officials said that in the past, such long-distance search operations typically lasted four to five days before being called off.
The strike on Tuesday was the fourth known instance of people surviving, at least initially, one of the 35 military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific that have killed 115 people since early September.
A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
The search for an undetermined number of survivors from the latest strike began around 3 p.m. Pacific time on Tuesday after the Coast Guard said on Wednesday that it was notified by the Pentagon that there were “mariners in distress” — people in the water — in an unspecified area of the Pacific Ocean.
In a separate statement on Wednesday, the military’s Southern Command said that on orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, it opened fire the day before on a three-boat convoy after intelligence analysts determined that the boats were traveling along “known narcotrafficking routes and had transferred narcotics between the three vessels prior to the strikes.”
Three people on the first boat were killed in the initial strike, Southern Command said. “The remaining narcoterrorists abandoned the other two vessels, jumping overboard and distancing themselves before follow-on engagements sank their respective vessels,” the statement said.
After the strikes, Southern Command said, it “immediately notified” the Coast Guard to begin search-and-rescue missions. Spokesmen for Southern Command and the Coast Guard declined on Friday to say how many survivors jumped in the water after the first strike.
Southern Command has routinely identified the number of people killed in previous strikes, including when multiple boats were involved. Former military officials said that Southern Command and the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, which conducts the strikes, most likely knew how many people were on the two boats that were abandoned, so it was unclear why the military was not making those numbers available.
There have been three other known instances in which people traveling on one of the boats attacked by U.S. Special Operations forces survived at least the first volley.
In the first strike, on Sept. 2, nine people were killed in the initial strike on a boat in the Caribbean. About 30 minutes later, two survivors, shirtless, clung to the hull, tried unsuccessfully to flip it back over, then climbed on it and slipped off into the water, over and over, according to lawmakers and congressional staff members who viewed a video of the strike and its aftermath or were briefed on it.
Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander of the operation at the time, gave an order for a follow-up strike, which killed the two survivors and ignited a controversy over whether the survivors of the first one remained “in the fight” or were technically shipwrecked, making it a war crime to kill them.
On Oct. 16, the military struck a semisubmersible craft in the Caribbean. Two men were killed, but two others from the boat were rescued by the U.S. military and repatriated within days to Colombia and Ecuador. Neither survivor was prosecuted.
Nearly two weeks later, the Trump administration announced that it had killed 14 people in four boats on Oct. 27 in the eastern Pacific. Mr. Hegseth said that the strikes — three of them — took place in international waters and that there had been one survivor. Mexican search-and-rescue authorities — the closest vessels to the strikes — were dispatched and combed the area, but could find no trace of the survivor.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
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