The Trump administration’s controversial and deadly campaign targeting alleged drug traffickers at sea has now expanded from the Caribbean into the Pacific Ocean.
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the most recent strike — which took place Tuesday — in a post on social media platform X along with video of the fatal strike. Hegseth said the boat “was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, was transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route, and carrying narcotics.”
Hegseth said the strike took place in the “Eastern Pacific” without further details, but the New York Times reported that the strike took place near Colombia’s Pacific Coast. Colombia last week accused the U.S. of killing some of its citizens in its waters in the Caribbean. One of them was Alejandro Carranza, whose wife, Katerine Hernandez, told reporters that he was a fisherman with no ties to drug traffickers.
The Pacific strike was the eighth lethal strike on alleged traffickers at sea so far since they began last month. The Trump administration recently added several Latin American criminal organization to the State Department’s list of terror organizations and declared the U.S. is now in an “armed conflict” with the groups.
The U.S. military buildup off South America’s shores already had begun pulling in at least some U.S. Navy assets from the Pacific. The Navy has sent at least three ships from the 3rd Fleet’s area of operations — which includes Hawaii — to join operations in the Caribbean, dispatching at least one from Washington state and at least two from San Diego.
It’s not clear what forces are currently in the Eastern Pacific, but Navy vessels and units stationed in Hawaii previously have been called up for anti-drug operations. In 2020, Pearl Harbor-based destroyers USS Preble and USS Halsey as well as the Kaneohe-based Helicopter Maritime Squadron 37 deployed to join a massive interagency task force that included the Coast Guard, U.S. Border Patrol, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeting transnational crime in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
When asked if any ships from Pearl Harbor have been sent to support current operations, a spokesperson for the Oahu-based Pacific Fleet responded with an email stating “thank you for your query, we are in receipt and are unable to respond during the government shutdown. The Department of the Navy continues to defend the nation, conducting ongoing operations worldwide.”
U.S. Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in South America, did not respond as of press time.
U.S. Rep. Ed Case (D, Hawaii), said that he supports efforts to stop drugs from coming into the U.S., but that “the administration is not providing key details, such as whether these are actually drug traffickers, and whether these strikes are occurring in the territorial waters of other countries. Without such details, there are the obvious questions whether innocent people are being killed arbitrarily, whether alleged criminals are being summarily executed without any due process.”
The administration has said that it intends to increasingly shift the military’s attention and resources toward missions like border security and fighting drug cartels in Latin America from operations in places like Asia and the Middle East.
“This continues a disturbing trend by this administration to divert Defense Department assets and personnel away from other critical missions, such as Indo-Pacific national defense, to missions like border security that are more effectively and efficiently delivered by specialized services like the (Coast Guard) and other Homeland Security agencies,” Case said. “That clearly spreads our Defense Department too thin, especially when we need its maximum focus on the Indo-Pacific and the People’s Republic of China.”
Strikes near Venezuela
Much of the U.S. military buildup — and most of the strikes so far — have been near Venezuela. The Trump administration has said it seeks “regime change” in the country and in August it offered a reward of $50 million for the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, accusing him of being “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world.”
But even before the current buildup, both top military commanders and enlisted troops in Hawaii had been making the rounds in South America. The U.S. has been competing with China for influence across the globe, including in Latin America.
In March, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Stephan Koehler took a trip to South America, visiting both Chile and Peru and meeting with top officials and sailors in their navies. In August, soldiers from the 25th Infantry Division’s jungle warfare school on Oahu went to Panama to train both Panamanian troops and U.S. Marines.
China has invested heavily in port facilities and other infrastructure projects in an effort to promote trade across South America and the Caribbean. But while Beijing has pumped money into Latin America, it has at times drawn backlash too.
Chinese fishing boats have pushed their way into waters in South America in defiance of local authorities. Beijing also has been accused of intentionally lax oversight of chemicals produced in China that have been used to produce drugs in Latin America.
In 2020, a massive fleet of Chinese fishing boats sailed to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands and made their way down the South American Pacific coast taking fish and squid even as local authorities confronted them. Two years later, Ecuador sent sailors to Hawaii to participate in the Rim of the Pacific Exercise — the first time each country of South America’s Pacific coast attended.
During RIMPAC 2024, Chilean Navy Commodore Alberto Guerrero served as deputy commander of the international RIMPAC Task Force and personnel from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and — for the first time — Brazil also participated.
Rob York, director of regional affairs at Honolulu think-tank Pacific Forum, said in the early days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled stronger engagement and potential investment in Latin America. Rubio, a Cuban American, was vocal on issues of human rights and promoting democracy and trade in the region during his time in the U.S. Senate.
“There is a concern about the rising influence of China and the Americas, and so that those early statements by the administration led to hopes that the United States was going to be more proactive in trying to compete with them,” York said. “It now looks like their means of addressing conditions in Latin America and getting them to go along with U.S. Objectives, it’s all stick — we don’t really see carrot. It’s all stick, and stick can be enforced in a variety of ways. Tariffs are a big one for this administration, of course.”
York said that approach could quickly sour America’s southern neighbors on working with the U.S. and said “my concern is that you’re going to see in the future a lot more success by politicians in these countries and campaigning on resisting the U.S.” He said that to meet economic needs, these new leaders “in all likelihood, they would try to position themselves, probably as members of the emerging alternative order that China and Russia promote.”
China criticized
U.S. officials have for years accused Beijing of defying international law in the Pacific, particularly in disputes with neighboring countries over territorial navigation rights in the South China Sea — a critical waterway that a third of all international trade moves through.
The Chinese military has routinely harassed and attacked fishermen from the Philippines and Vietnam. Case said that it’s “a major concern” that the U.S. stands accused of flouting the law and regional bullying, saying “this simply enables the PRC to call us hypocrites and undermines the reliance we place on international law and the partnerships we need to counter the PRC’s aggressive activities, especially in the Philippines, Taiwan and other countries in the Western Pacific.”
Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Manoa, said that “China and other U.S. cold adversaries are never at a loss for arguments that the U.S. is an outlaw state. Now they have a new one. Nevertheless, you have to question how much the battle of narratives really affects the policies of other countries.”
York said that in the Pacific, China will “talk about the lawlessness of the U.S. regime and say that they don’t live up to their words when they talk about the lawlessness of the PRCs behavior in the South China Sea and elsewhere … (but) I don’t think the PRC’s arguments and the narratives that it tries to spread amongst its neighbors — who have experienced the effects of its illegal fishing — to convince them, suddenly, China was right about all that.”
Since former President Barack Obama was in office, the U.S. has sought a “pivot to the Pacific,” shifting its focus to critical trade routes linking to booming East Asian economies. But wars in the Mideast., and recently Ukraine, have upended those efforts. Now, advocates of a Pacific focus worry this will pull away more resources.
“There will probably never be a pivot in the sense of an absence of conflicts elsewhere in the world that might attract U.S. attention and resources away from the Asia-Pacific,” Roy said. “But on the other hand this region will always be a major focus and absorber of U.S. attention and resources as long as the U.S. is a superpower. So the pivot both will never happen, but also has already happened.”
However, York noted that the strikes at sea are being watched from the other side of the Pacific.
“It’s another data point for many people in the world that the United States really only focuses on itself and is not interested in the affairs of Southeast Asia, in the Pacific Islands, or any of the other places where the contest for influence (with China) is very much inconclusive,” York said. “(Trump is) less concerned with the idea of the United States as a kind of beacon or an example. This administration seems to be much more concerned with whether or not international relations benefit the United States directly and immediately.”
Source: The Garden Island
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