The Pentagon announced Thursday that it has conducted another boat strike on a small vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Footage of the strike, shared by the U.S. Southern Command, showed the moment the boat was bombed from above.
“On Dec. 4, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the post said.
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth championed the strike.
Responding to an X post from the producer of The Charlie Kirk Show Andrew Kolvet — commending the U.S. government’s targeting of the boats — Hegseth wrote, “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.”
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
The last U.S. strike on a boat — that the Trump administration claims was another drug-smuggling vessel — was three weeks ago.
Thursday’s was the 22nd strike the U.S. military has conducted against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since it began targeting them in September, killing 87 people in total.
Earlier this week, the family of a Colombian man killed in a boat strike in the Caribbean to a leading human rights agency, arguing the man’s death was an extrajudicial killing.
The petition filed by U.S.-based human rights lawyer Daniel Kovalik, on behalf of the family of Alejandro Carranza, says he was killed after the U.S. military on Sept. 15 while he was sailing along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, and that his death violated human rights conventions.
The strike that killed Carranza also killed two others. At the time, when probed by reporters for evidence of criminal activity on board, Trump told the press that bags of cocaine and fentanyl were found floating in the ocean.
No evidence of the floating bags was presented.
Carranza’s lawyer also says the family does not have access to the resources necessary to obtain reparations in Colombia, and they have received death threats from right-wing paramilitary groups in the country for denouncing the death of their loved one.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Leave a Reply