The U.S. Coast Guard said Friday it is still searching for people in the eastern Pacific Ocean who had jumped from alleged drug-smuggling boats after the U.S. military attacked the vessels days earlier. The Coast Guard said the odds of finding survivors were diminishing as time passed.
Search efforts began Tuesday afternoon after the military notified the Coast Guard that survivors were in the water about 400 miles (650 kilometers) southwest of the border between Mexico and Guatemala, the maritime service said in a statement. The Coast Guard dispatched a plane from Sacramento to search an area covering more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers), while issuing an urgent warning to ships nearby.
The Coast Guard said it coordinated more than 65 hours of search efforts, working with other countries as well as civilian ships and boats in the area. Weather during that period included 9-foot seas and 40-knot winds, complicating the operation.
The Coast Guard has not said how many people jumped into the water, and the U.S. has not indicated—if they are not found—how far the death toll may rise from the figures announced earlier. The military said Wednesday it struck five alleged drug-smuggling boats over two days, killing a total of eight people, and that some people jumped overboard and may have survived.
In addition to activating search and rescue, the U.S. Southern Command said it immediately notified the Coast Guard to respond to people who had been reported in the water. Southern Command said the strikes occurred in a part of the eastern Pacific where the Navy does not have any ships operating.
Southern Command said three people were killed when the first boat was struck, while people aboard the other two boats jumped overboard and distanced themselves from the vessels before they were attacked. It also said it notified the Coast Guard to activate search and rescue efforts for the people who jumped overboard before the other boats were hit.
The Coast Guard’s continued search comes as the Trump administration sustains a broader campaign of attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific. Under President Donald Trump’s direction, the U.S. military has been attacking boats since early September, and as of Friday the number of known boat strikes was 35 and the number of people killed was at least 115, according to numbers announced by the Trump administration.
The administration has justified the boat strikes as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States and has asserted that the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, the AP reported. The U.S. has also linked the military build-up in the region to escalating pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been charged with narco-terrorism in the United States.
The AP reported that calling in the Coast Guard has drawn additional attention because of scrutiny after U.S. forces killed survivors of the first attack in early September, followed by a strike to their disabled boat. Some Democratic lawmakers and legal experts said that follow-up strike was a crime, while the Trump administration and some Republican lawmakers said it was legal.
The AP said there have been other survivors of earlier boat strikes, including one for whom the Mexican Navy suspended a search in late October after four days and two other survivors from a submersible vessel strike in the Caribbean who were sent to their home countries, Ecuador and Colombia. Authorities in Ecuador later released the man and said they had no evidence he committed a crime in the country.