The US military attacked another suspected drug smuggling ship in the eastern Pacific on Monday, the Pentagon announced, as the Trump administration’s campaign against Venezuela and the region’s alleged drug traffickers intensifies.
“Intelligence officials confirmed that the ship was transiting known drug smuggling routes in the Eastern Pacific and was involved in drug smuggling operations,” the U.S. Southern Command said. wrote at X. “Two male narco-terrorists were killed. No US military forces were harmed.”
In the grainy black-and-white video, a military plane appears to target a low-slung vehicle in the sea below, which then explodes.
In its announcement, the military did not include any evidence to verify its claims.
The strike was the thirtieth of this kind since September, bringing the total number of known victims to 107. according to the Associated Press.
Last week, the president announced what could be the first known land attack of his campaign. When asked about Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump described a Christmas Eve attack on a suspected drug facility.
“We just got knocked out, I don’t know if you read it or saw it, they have a big factory or a great facility…where the ships are coming from,” the president said during an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis on Friday. “We turned that off two nights ago, so we hit them very hard.”
The comments appear to match details from a CNN report on an alleged CIA drone attack on a port facility on a remote part of the Venezuelan coast. The government believes the facility is being used by Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang as part of its drug distribution efforts, sources familiar with the alleged strike told CNN.
The alleged attack struck a vacant facility and resulted in no casualties, the sources said. The CIA has not acknowledged such an attack.
The president has long suggested there could be a broader land campaign against Venezuela.
“I think you’ll find that this is a war,” Trump said in early December. “And soon we will also do that on land.”
Also this month, the Trump administration began seizing sanctioned oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela, a country the White House says is collaborating with human traffickers. (Venezuela denies this and the National Assembly voted this month to criminalize the seizures.)
The president has also reportedly authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in the country.
Venezuela has accused the president of using the strikes as a pretext to force Maduro from power.
But Trump’s domestic critics claim the killings are war crimes against non-combatants, while the Trump administration insists the strikes are justified because it claims the US is engaged in armed conflict with drug groups.
The administration further angered critics when the Pentagon announced this month that it would not release the full video of an attack in which the military allegedly killed two survivors of an initial attack.
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