The U.S. military attacked another vessel that the Trump administration claimed was carrying drugs, but for the first time struck a boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Colombia rather than in the Caribbean Sea, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
The strike, on late Tuesday, killed two or three people on the boat, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
This was the eighth known strike that U.S. Special Operations forces have conducted since Sept. 2, when the military, on President Trump’s orders, began killing people aboard boats believed to be smuggling drugs as if they were enemy combatants in a war rather than criminal suspects.
The administration has previously acknowledged seven strikes, which it said have killed 32 people. It has not yet announced the latest strike, which was earlier reported by CBS News.
The Trump administration has said that each of the attacks were in international waters and that the passengers were members of drug cartels that the State Department had designated terrorist organizations.
The administration has also said intelligence backs its accusations of the passengers’ identities and what they were doing, but it has not offered evidence.
U.S. officials on Wednesday did not immediately identify the group it accused of carrying drugs in the boat it struck off the Colombian coast.
A broad range of outside legal specialists in laws governing the use of armed force have said the campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even criminal suspects — who are not directly participating in hostilities.
The White House has said the strikes are legal as a matter of self-defense and because Mr. Trump has “determined” that the country is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels that his team has deemed to be terrorists. It has not publicly offered a legal theory that explains how to bridge the gap between trafficking an illicit product and organized armed attacks.
The administration has pointed to the fact that around 100,000 Americans die from drug overdoses each year. But the surge in overdoses has been driven by fentanyl, which comes from Mexico.
South America is a source of cocaine. Much of the world’s supply of that drug is produced by three countries there — especially Colombia, which has coastlines in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The majority of the cocaine smuggled into the United States moves through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, U.S. data shows. But the Trump administration has focused its rhetoric on Venezuela and its president, Nicolás Maduro, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States in 2020 and whom the Trump team calls a cartel leader.
Mr. Trump has authorized C.I.A. operations in Venezuela, and the administration is weighing land strikes as some of his aides push to oust Mr. Maduro. Venezuela has a coastline only on the Caribbean, and Mr. Trump described initial boat strikes as having killed Venezuelans and members of a Venezuelan gang.
But the strikes are causing larger turmoil in the region. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has said two strikes, one on Sept. 15 and one on Oct. 3, had killed Colombians and accused the United States of murder. Relatives of a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago said he and a neighbor were killed in an Oct. 14 attack.
Citizens of Colombia and yet another country, Ecuador, were survived an Oct. 16 strike on a semi-submersible vessel, which Mr. Trump later said killed two people. The Navy rescued two survivors and the administration repatriated them, with Mr. Trump saying both would be detained and prosecuted.
However, prosecutors in Ecuador declined to charge that man, and instead released him.
In the seventh strike, the military killed three men accused of smuggling drugs for a Marxist insurgent group in Colombia known as the E.L.N., which the State Department designated as terrorists in 1997.
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.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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