Coast Guard Searches for Survivors After More Boat Strikes

The U.S. military attacked a convoy of three boats in the eastern Pacific on Tuesday, and two more on Wednesday, as part of the Trump administration’s campaign against people suspected of drug trafficking.

The U.S. Coast Guard is searching for an undetermined number of survivors of a U.S. military strike against several boats in the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, the Pentagon and Coast Guard said on Wednesday.

It was the fourth known instance of people surviving, at least initially, one of the 35 military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.

Later on Wednesday, the military’s U.S. Southern Command said that a separate “lethal kinetic strike” had killed five people in two boats that day. It did not say where the boats were traveling when the military attacked. There was no mention of survivors.

The Trump administration says the boats that have been targeted since September were trafficking in narcotics but has provided no evidence to support that assertion. Only two people have been rescued, and at least 115 have been killed in the strikes.

The Coast Guard said in a statement that it was notified by the Pentagon on Tuesday that there were “mariners in distress” — people in the water — in an unspecified area of the Pacific Ocean.

“The U.S. Coast Guard is coordinating search and rescue operations with vessels in the area, and a Coast Guard C-130 aircraft is en route to provide further search coverage with the ability to drop a survival raft and supplies,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.

In a separate statement on Wednesday, Southern Command said that on orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, it opened fire the day before on a three-boat convoy after intelligence analysts determined that the boats were traveling along “known narco-trafficking routes and had transferred narcotics between the three vessels prior to the strikes.”

Three people on the first boat were killed in the initial strike, Southern Command said. “The remaining narco-terrorists abandoned the other two vessels, jumping overboard and distancing themselves before follow-on engagements sank their respective vessels,” it continued in its statement.

Following the strikes, Southern Command said, it “immediately notified” the Coast Guard to launch search-and-rescue missions. Spokesmen for Southern Command and the Coast Guard said they did not know how many survivors of the first strike jumped in the water or which vessels were searching for them.

There have been three other known instances in which people traveling on one of the boats attacked by U.S. Special Operations forces survived at least the first volley.

In the first strike, on Sept. 2, nine people were killed in the initial strike on a boat in the Caribbean. About 30 minutes later, two survivors, shirtless, clung to the hull, tried unsuccessfully to flip it back over, then climbed on it and slipped off into the water, over and over, according to lawmakers and congressional staff who viewed a video of the strike and its aftermath or were briefed on it.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander of the operation at the time, gave an order for a follow-up strike, which killed the two survivors and ignited a controversy over whether the survivors of the first one remained “in the fight” or were technically shipwrecked, making it a war crime to kill them.

On Oct. 16, the military struck a semisubmersible craft in the Caribbean. Two men were killed, but two others from the boat were rescued by the U.S. military and repatriated within days to Colombia and Ecuador. Neither of the two survivors was prosecuted.

Nearly two weeks later, the Trump administration announced that it had killed 14 people in four boats on Oct. 27 in the eastern Pacific. Mr. Hegseth said that the strikes — three of them — took place in international waters and that there had been one survivor. Mexican search-and-rescue authorities — the closest vessels to the strikes — were dispatched and combed the area, but could find no trace of the survivor.

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