The US military on Monday carried out three deadly strikes on four vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean, announced Pete Hegseth, the Trump administration’s defense secretary, on Tuesday.
Fourteen were killed in the attacks while one survived, Hegseth said in an X post.
Prior to Monday’s strikes, US forces in recent weeks had carried out at least eight strikes against boats in the Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast, killing about 40 people that the Trump administration has insisted were involved in drug smuggling.
Hegseth accused those on the vessels destroyed Monday of being “narco-terrorists,” adding that they were “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and carrying narcotics”. He didn’t elaborate but said Mexican authorities “assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue” of the sole survivor. He didn’t say if that person would stay in their custody or be handed over to the US.
In a strike earlier in October which had two survivors, the US military rescued the pair and later repatriated them to Colombia and Ecuador.
Some federal lawmakers have expressed concern that they have not been briefed by the Trump administration on the strikes. In an interview Sunday on the conservative Fox News channel, Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican US senator of Kentucky, criticized the strikes as “extrajudicial killings”.
Some in the president’s Republican party have spoken in favor of the attacks as they have been conducted.
A bipartisan US Senate war powers resolution that would have blocked the Trump administration’s use of strikes within or against Venezuela failed earlier in October.
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