Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday night that the military launched a second lethal strike against what he said were vessels involved in drug trafficking operations in the eastern Pacific.
The first strike, which Hegseth earlier in the day said happened Tuesday, was said to have killed two people. Wednesday night, Hegseth said on X that another vessel in the eastern Pacific had been struck and that three men he called "narco-terrorists" were killed.
The strikes are the first in the eastern Pacific since the Trump administration began attacking vessels that it has claimed were involved in drug trafficking.
Hegseth said in Wednesday night's statement that they would continue, and he characterized the military action as similar to strikes against the terrorist group Al Qaeda.
"These strikes will continue, day after day. These are not simply drug runners — these are narco-terrorists bringing death and destruction to our cities. These DTOs are the 'Al Qaeda' of our hemisphere and will not escape justice," Hegseth said, using an initialism for "drug trafficking organizations."
"We will find them and kill them, until the threat to the American people is extinguished," Hegseth said.
The seven previous U.S. strikes had targeted vessels in the Caribbean.
The two strikes Hegseth announced Wednesday bring the reported death toll to at least 37 in attacks that began last month.
In the strike announced Wednesday night, Hegseth said it "was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and was carrying narcotics."
The strikes represent an expansion of the military’s targeting area, as well as a shift to the waters off South America where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers is smuggled.
President Donald Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and proclaiming the criminal organizations unlawful combatants, relying on the same legal authority President George W. Bush’s administration used for the "war on terrorism."
Some members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, have grown concerned over a lack of information from the Trump administration about the intelligence and strategy underlying its strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats, NBC News reported last week.
Sources said Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill have left briefings about the strikes frustrated with the lack of information.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the U.S. strike and others like it "murder."
“The attack on another boat in the Pacific, we don’t know if it was Ecuadorian or Colombian, left some dead,” Petro wrote on X.
“All the same, it is murder,” he wrote. “Whether it be in the Caribbean or the Pacific, the U.S. government’s strategy violates the norms of international law.”
Trump says strikes on land could be next
Asked about Tuesday's boat attack, Trump insisted that “we have legal authority. We’re allowed to do that.” He said similar strikes could eventually come on land.
“We will hit them very hard when they come in by land,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re totally prepared to do that. And we’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when we come to the land.”
Lawmakers from both political parties have expressed concerns about Trump's ordering the military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details.
Appearing alongside Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended such strikes, saying, “If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States.”
Trump said the strikes he is ordering are meant to save Americans, and “the only way you can’t feel bad about it ... is that you realize that every time you see that happen, you’re saving 25,000 lives.”
Targeting boats in a thoroughfare for cocaine smuggling
Hegseth posted videos online Wednesday purported to show the military strikes in the eastern Pacific.
Both show vessels moving in the water before they erupt in explosions. The second video shows what appear to be bundles or packages floating in the water in the aftermath.
The U.S. military has built up an unusually large force in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela since this summer, raising speculation that Trump could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro faces charges of narcoterrorism in the United States.
In his posts about the strikes, Trump has repeatedly argued that illegal narcotics and the drug fentanyl carried by the vessels have been poisoning Americans.
While the bulk of American overdose deaths are from fentanyl, the drug is transported by land from Mexico. Venezuela is a major drug transit zone, but the eastern Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean, is the primary area for smuggling cocaine.
Colombia and Peru, countries with coastlines on the eastern Pacific, are the world’s top cocaine producers. Wedged between them is Ecuador, whose world-class ports and myriad maritime shipping containers filled with bananas have become the perfect vehicle for drug traffickers to move their product.
The administration has sidestepped prosecuting any occupants of alleged drug-running vessels after it returned two survivors of an earlier strike to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.
Ecuadorian officials later said they released the man who was returned there because they had no evidence he committed a crime in their country.
