The U.S. military on Monday carried out three strikes on four ships in the Eastern Pacific that were believed to be carrying drugs, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday.
Hegseth said in statement about X that the strikes killed 14 “narco-terrorists” and that one survived. Mexican authorities took responsibility for rescuing the survivor.
Hegseth said the boats were “operated by designated terrorist organizations (DTOs) involved in drug trafficking in the Eastern Pacific” and said they were known to “our intelligence apparatus.”
The defense minister included a video in his post, marked “unclassified,” showing boats in the water being hit and suddenly bursting into flames.
No further information was provided about the vessels or the suspected drugs they were carrying. Hegseth also did not say where the boats came from.
It was the 11th known in a series of strikes by the Trump administration against suspected drug vessels. the latest occurred Friday in the Caribbean.. Later that day, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell reported that Hegseth had ordered the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group stationed in the Mediterranean to move to the Caribbean in support of President Donald Trump efforts to dismantle “transnational criminal organizations” and “counter narco-terrorism.”
After another round of strikes last week, Trump said his administration had the legal authority to carry them out and said the operations could eventually expand to counter drug traffickers on land.
“We will hit them very hard when they come overland,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We are fully prepared to do this. And we will probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we will do when we come to this land.”
NBC News reported In late September, the US military was preparing options to attack these traffickers inside Venezuela. Four sources said at the time that the strikes could occur within weeks.
