The U.S. military conducted an airstrike on Tuesday against a vessel it accused of smuggling drugs, killing one person and leaving two survivors in the eastern Pacific, U.S. Southern Command said in a social media post.
The result of the strike was unusual. There have rarely been survivors in the 58 attacks against boats the United States has claimed were engaged in drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. And in all but two cases, survivors were lost at sea.
Military experts say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings.
The strike on Tuesday, the first in nearly three weeks after the military accelerated its recent pace of attacks, brought the death toll to at least 194 since September. Bad weather has hampered strike operations in recent weeks, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
Gen. Francis L. Donovan of the Marine Corps, the head of the Southern Command, ordered the strike, the command said in a statement on social media, which included a 19-second video showing a boat speeding along in the water and then exploding.
Southern Command said in its social media post that it had notified the U.S. Coast Guard to activate a “Search and Rescue system.” A second U.S. official said on Wednesday that the Mexican Navy was in charge of the search for the survivors.
Citing unspecified intelligence, the U.S. military claimed that the boat was operated by “Designated Terrorist Organizations” and was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
The Trump administration has not provided evidence that the boats that have been attacked were involved in drug smuggling.
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. Contact him securely on Signal: ericschmitt.36.
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