U.S. Military Kills 14 More People Accused of Smuggling Drugs on Boats

 

U.S. Military Kills 14 More People Accused of Smuggling Drugs on Boats

 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the three strikes hit four boats in international waters and that there had been one survivor.

 

Helene Cooper Eric Schmitt

By Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/us/politics/us-military-boat-strikes.html

Oct. 28, 2025

 

The Trump administration launched another round of deadly strikes on vessels it accused of smuggling drugs, killing 14 people in four boats in its growing military campaign off the Central and South American coasts, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday.

 

Mr. Hegseth said that the strikes — three of them — took place on Monday in international waters and that there had been one survivor. They bring the overall death toll to 57 in the campaign, which began in September.

 

A U.S. military official, discussing operations on the condition of anonymity, said the lone survivor was picked up in waters near the coasts of Mexico and Guatemala.

 

Mr. Hegseth said that Mexican search and rescue authorities had “accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue,” but he did not release further details.

 

“The four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and carrying narcotics,” Mr. Hegseth said in a post on social media announcing the strikes and accompanied by a video. He said eight men were on the boats in the first, four men were on the boat in the second strike and three men were on the boat that was struck third.

 

He did not provide geographic details beyond saying the strikes took place in the eastern Pacific. After launching a series of strikes in the Caribbean near the coast of Venezuela, the Trump administration has more recently directing the U.S. military to strike boats in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of Colombia.

 

Two Air Force B-1 bombers from Texas flew off the coast of Venezuela in international air space on Monday, the latest effort by the Trump administration to pressure the country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, to leave his nation, two U.S. officials said on Tuesday, discussing operational matters on the condition of anonymity.

 

It was the second time in less than a week that the B-1s have flown such a mission. The long-range B-1 bombers, from Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas, can carry up to 75,000 pounds of guided and unguided munitions, the largest nonnuclear payload of any aircraft in the Air Force arsenal.

 

Earlier this month, at least two B-52 bombers from Louisiana flew for several hours off the Venezuelan coast in international air space in what one senior U.S. official called “a show of force.” The B-52s can carry dozens of precision-guided bombs.

 

At roughly the same time, an elite Army Special Operations aviation unit conducted flights in the southern Caribbean Sea near the coast of Venezuela. The helicopters, belonging to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, were flying training missions, not rehearsals for a possible military action inside Venezuela, military officials said.

 

Mr. Hegseth has also ordered the deployment of the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford as well as its accompanying warships and attack planes to waters off Latin America, the Pentagon said last week, in a further, dramatic escalation of military might in the region.

 

The Pentagon has not said when the Ford, the Navy’s most modern and technologically advanced carrier, will arrive. It is heading to Latin America from the Croatian coast, where it had been on a monthslong European deployment. Navy officials have speculated that the arrival could come in the first half of November, depending on weather conditions.

 

It was unclear how hurricane season in the region might affect the heavy American naval buildup.

 

Since late August, the U.S. military has deployed about 10,000 troops to the Caribbean, about half of them on eight warships and half in Puerto Rico, for what the administration says is a counterterrorism and counternarcotics mission. The Ford carries about 5,000 sailors and has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters.

 

Mr. Hegseth in his social media post Tuesday compared the strikes against the boat cartels to America’s wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan over the past 24 years.

 

“These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same,” he said.

 

A broad range of outside experts 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 armed hostilities. But the Trump administration has asserted that the president has the power to “determine,” without any authorization from Congress, that drug cartels and those who work for them are enemy combatants.

 

Mr. Trump has falsely asserted that each destroyed boat saves 25,000 American lives. In reality, about 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, but most of those deaths are fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. South America produces cocaine.

 

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

 

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.