The U.S. military carried out another strike on a vessel suspected of transporting drugs in the eastern Pacific, killing three men, the Associated Press reported Tuesday, citing the U.S. defense establishment.
The AP said the attack followed a strike a day earlier in the Caribbean Sea that killed two people, continuing a pattern of boat-targeting operations in waters where the U.S. has alleged drug-trafficking routes are used to move narcotics toward the United States.
In the eastern Pacific strike, U.S. Southern Command said it targeted alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes. Southern Command also posted a video on X showing a boat moving across the water before a large explosion left the vessel in flames.
The AP reported that the campaign of destroying alleged drug-trafficking vessels in Latin American waters has been under way since early September, and has killed at least 191 people in total, according to the AP’s accounting of reported deaths tied to the operations.
The strikes, the AP said, have continued even as the Trump administration has been fighting a separate conflict in the Middle East, and the military has ramped up the pace in recent weeks. In its reporting, the AP said the military has not provided evidence that the vessels were actually carrying drugs.
The AP also connected the boat-strike campaign to the broader U.S. effort to build military presence in the region, saying the attacks began as the U.S. increased its largest deployment in generations. The AP added that the strikes took place months before a January raid that captured then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was brought to New York to face drug trafficking charges and has pleaded not guilty.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly framed the effort as more than interdiction, the AP said, describing an “armed conflict” with cartels in Latin America. The AP reported that Trump’s administration has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation aimed at stemming the flow of drugs into the United States and reducing fatal overdoses.
At the same time, the AP reported that critics have challenged both the legal basis for the strikes and the evidence supporting the administration’s characterizations, including its claims about killing “narcoterrorists.” The AP said the administration and the military have offered little evidence to back those claims.
Separately, while Southern Command has released imagery and video tied to the eastern Pacific strike, the AP’s report underscored a core dispute: whether the U.S. has established, to a level critics say is sufficient, that the targeted vessels were carrying drugs or that the actions were lawful under the circumstances.