WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military said Thursday that it has carried out another deadly strike on a vessel accused of trafficking drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
U.S. Southern Command said on social media that the boat “was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” It said the strike killed two people. A video linked to the post shows a boat moving through the water before exploding in flames.
The strike was announced just hours after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that “some top cartel drug-traffickers” in the region “have decided to cease all narcotics operations INDEFINITELY due to recent (highly effective) kinetic strikes in the Caribbean.” However, Hegseth did not provide any details or information to back up this claim, made in a post on his personal account on social media.
Neither U.S. Southern Command nor the Pentagon would answer follow-up questions about Hegseth’s claim.
The boat attacks, which began in September 2025, have slowed in frequency since January — a month that only saw one strike after the raid that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. By contrast, the Pentagon struck more than dozen boats in December 2025.
Thursday’s attack raises the death toll from the Trump administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats to 128 people. Last week, the military said that figure was up to 126 people, with the inclusion of those presumed dead after being lost at sea. That figure included 116 people who were killed immediately in at least 36 attacks carried out since early September in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, U.S. Southern Command said. Ten others are believed dead because searchers did not locate them following a strike.
Meanwhile, the families of two Trinidadian nationals killed in a Trump administration boat strike in Octobersued the federal government last week, calling the attack a war crime and part of an “unprecedented and manifestly unlawful U.S. military campaign.” The suit is believed to be the first wrongful death case arising from the campaign and will test the legal justification of the attacks, which many experts say are a brazen violation of the laws of armed conflict.
President Donald Trump has said the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with cartels in Latin America and has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs. But his administration has offered little evidence to support its claims of killing “narcoterrorists.”