Two people were killed in the latest U.S. military strike on a boat in the eastern Pacific said to be involved in drug smuggling, U.S. Southern Command said Monday.
The strike, directed by Marine Gen. Francis Donovan, took out a vessel that Southern Command said was operated by a U.S.-designated terrorist group involved in bringing illicit drugs to the U.S. A more precise location for the strike was not provided.
The command characterized the deceased in a statement only as male "narco-terrorists."
Black-and-white video from the perspective of an aircraft overhead posted with Southern Command's statement on X showed what appeared to be a panga or small fishing boat being hit by unknown munitions from the sky, leaving it smoking.
The attack was part of an ongoing enforcement operation against alleged drug traffickers in the eastern Pacific, off Latin American coastlines and in the Caribbean, called Joint Task Force Southern Spear, Southern Command said.
"Applying total systemic friction on the cartels," it said, adding that no U.S. forces were harmed.
President Donald Trump's administration has carried out 50 such strikes in his second term, according to an NBC News tally. They have taken out 51 vessels and killed 170 people, often described by military officials as combatants and narco-terrorists.
The Trump administration has designated major drug cartels as terrorist groups that it says are sometimes integrated into Latin American governments. It argues the groups' role in supplying potentially deadly narcotics, such as fentanyl, to the U.S. amounts to hostile acts of war.
The characterization that those killed in the attacks are drug-smugglers has been disputed at times by families of the dead. Some Democrats in Congress have questioned the legality of the operation's deadly strikes in the absence of due process or public documentation of alleged links to trafficking.
