After a roughly eight-week pause in operations, the U.S. military has resumed its controversial counter-narcotics offensive in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, carrying out a lethal strike that killed two people the department identifies as drug traffickers, the Department of Defense announced Monday.
This latest action pushes the cumulative death toll from the nearly year-long campaign, which has targeted alleged smuggling vessels off Latin America’s Caribbean coast and in the Eastern Pacific across more than 60 strikes, past 210, according to official tallies.
In a social media statement, U.S. Southern Command confirmed that its forces “executed a lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narcotrafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific.” Consistent with nearly all previous official announcements about strikes in the region, the Pentagon has not released any public evidence confirming the targeted vessel was actually transporting illicit narcotics. Monday’s strike is the first confirmed offensive action the U.S. has announced since the devastating back-to-back June 24 earthquakes that killed thousands across Central America and the Caribbean.
Gen. Francis Donovan, commander of U.S. Southern Command, reaffirmed the military’s commitment to the campaign in remarks following the strike: “We are committed to imposing total systemic friction on narco-terrorists — disrupting their operations, dismantling their leadership, and eliminating cartel terror across the region.”
The resumed strike comes as the Trump administration pushes to expand its counter-cartel offensive from maritime waters onto land across multiple Latin American nations, negotiating bilateral access agreements with regional allies. Earlier this month, during an official visit to Panama, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras had agreed to permit joint U.S. military counter-criminal operations on their sovereign territory. Guatemalan officials quickly issued a formal denial that any such agreement had been reached. Ecuador previously launched joint land-based counter-narcotics missions alongside U.S. forces back in March.
President Donald Trump has framed the United States as being in an “armed conflict” with transnational Latin American drug cartels, justifying the escalating maritime strikes as a necessary measure to cut off the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S. and curb the rising number of fatal overdoses that claim thousands of American lives annually. To date, however, the administration has released little verifiable evidence to back its claims that those killed in the strikes are indeed “narcoterrorists.”
The campaign has faced growing pushback from legal and policy critics, who have raised questions both about the legality of the cross-border maritime strikes and their overall public health impact. Critics point out that the vast majority of fentanyl, the drug responsible for the majority of fatal overdoses in the U.S., is trafficked overland through Mexico, not smuggled by small boats across the Eastern Pacific. Fentanyl is primarily produced in Mexico using precursor chemicals imported from China and India, making maritime smuggling of finished drugs a secondary threat.
Since the strikes launched in early September of last year, the campaign has drawn intense scrutiny from Democratic members of Congress and military legal scholars. In May, the Pentagon’s independent inspector general announced it would launch a review to assess whether U.S. military forces followed established official targeting protocols when carrying out the strikes. The inspector general’s office clarified, however, that the evaluation will only examine compliance with the military’s standard six-phase Joint Targeting Cycle, and will not assess the broader legality of the strike campaign itself.
