A U.S. military strike blew up a boat suspected of moving drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, killing two people, the U.S. Southern Command said.
The strike was the first authorized by Southcom’s new commander, Gen. Francis L. Donovan, a Marine who took charge of U.S. military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean during a ceremony at the Pentagon earlier in the day. It was the 37th strike announced by the Trump administration in the campaign, which began in September. The strikes have claimed 128 lives, according to a tracker maintained by The New York Times.
A 12-second video clip accompanying the announcement showed the boat traveling across the water with two people at the rear, near the outboard motors, and then a sudden explosion that set the vessel ablaze. Southcom, based in Doral, Fla., said in a statement that unspecified intelligence had determined that the boat was “engaged in narco-trafficking operations” and that it was following a known drug smuggling route.
A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the U.S. strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military cannot deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence — even if they are suspected of engaging in criminal acts.
Thursday’s strike was the second of 2026. About two-thirds of the boat strikes that the U.S. military has announced have taken place in the Pacific Ocean.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
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