The killing was the fourth deadly attack by the United States on a ship in the eastern Pacific in the past four days.
Published April 15, 2026
US forces have killed four more people in the fourth deadly attack on a ship in the eastern Pacific Ocean in the past four days.
U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) announced the attack in a social media post on Tuesday, along with a video showing a stationary boat with an outboard engine being hit by a missile and exploding into a giant fireball.
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Southcom, which oversees U.S. military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, claimed the four people killed were “narco-terrorists,” but provided no evidence to support that claim.
Southcom said the justification for the deadly attack was due to intelligence (no details provided) confirming that “the vessel was sailing along known drug trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and was engaged in drug trafficking activities.”
The recent killings of ship crews in international waters in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean bring the overall death toll to at least 175 since early September, when U.S. President Donald Trump ordered attacks to thwart Latin American cartels that the White House says were transporting drugs to the United States.
Tuesday’s killings came after two people were killed in a U.S. airstrike on Monday, also in the eastern Pacific, and five people were killed in two separate airstrikes on Saturday.
The U.S. Coast Guard has called off the search for one survivor from two reported attacks on Saturday, the Associated Press reported.
International legal experts and rights groups say the US military operation amounted to “extrajudicial killings” on the high seas and that the attack targeted civilian fishing boats.
Legal experts said if some vessels were involved in drug trafficking, the crew should face the law rather than deadly attacks.
Critics have also questioned the effectiveness of U.S. military operations, in part because fentanyl, which is behind many fatal overdoses in the U.S. and is being used by Trump to legitimize his campaign, is typically smuggled into the U.S. by land from Mexico, where it is manufactured using chemicals imported from China and India.
