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The U.S. bombed two boats in the Pacific Ocean in two days, the Trump administration announced this week, in a major escalation of the U.S.’s aggression as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has vowed that the “strikes will continue, day after day.”
Hegseth announced both strikes in nearly identical posts on X on Wednesday, bringing the total number of publicly announced attacks to nine. They are the first that officials have acknowledged took place in the Pacific Ocean.
The first strike, on Tuesday, killed two people, who Hegseth deemed “terrorists” without evidence. The second killed three, he said. This brings the total acknowledged death toll of the U.S.’s operations in the region to 37 people.
Hegseth said that the strikes took place in the eastern Pacific, and a defense official confirmed to CBS that the first one took place in international waters off the coast of Colombia.
The strikes are yet another expansion of the U.S.’s combat operations in the region, adding to seven other publicly acknowledged strikes and a reported covert CIA operation in Venezuela and across the Caribbean.
The U.S. has acknowledged targeting Venezuelan and Colombian nationals, and has openly sparred with both countries’ governments. But reports have said that two of the victims originated from Trinidad and Tobago, while one of the men in a boat targeted last week was from Ecuador.
President Donald Trump has also pledged to carry out strikes on land. “We will hit them very hard when they come in by land,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “We are totally prepared to do that.”
Though these are the first publicly acknowledged strikes in the Pacific, some analysts have noted that it’s possible at least one previous strike took place in the Pacific as well.
Hegseth invoked Al Qaeda in his posts, further seeking to liken the alleged drug traffickers to terrorists without evidence.
“These strikes will continue, day after day. These are not simply drug runners—these are narco-terrorists bringing death and destruction to our cities. These [Designated Terrorist Organizations] are the ‘Al Qaeda’ of our hemisphere and will not escape justice. We will find them and kill them, until the threat to the American people is extinguished,” Hegseth wrote.
However, members of Congress have said that the Pentagon has not provided any evidence to back their claims of targeting “narco-terrorists.”
Notably, the Ecuadorian man who survived a U.S. strike last week was released from custody by Ecuadorian authorities on Tuesday. Though American officials have claimed that they are striking drug traffickers — the legal justification for which is already extremely dubious, experts have said — the Ecuadorian attorney general’s office said that the man “could not be detained” because he has no record of affiliation with crime.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington) said this week that the administration has yet to provide “any evidence to support the president’s unilateral determinations that these vessels or their activities posed imminent threats … that warranted military force.”
Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, has called for a hearing on the strikes, which many experts have said are illegal.
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