Coast Guard suspends search for alleged drug smugglers who jumped overboard after U.S. strike
The US Coast Guard announced Friday that it had called off a one-day search for several people who jumped overboard in the eastern Pacific when their suspected drug-trafficking boats were targeted by the US military.
The military says it struck a group of three boats on Tuesday – part of a months-long airstrikes campaign that the Trump administration says targets Latin American drug cartels at sea. But after the first boat was struck, killing three people, up to eight people aboard the other two boats abandoned their ships, U.S. officials said. told CBS News earlier this week.
The Coast Guard said in a statement that the people were believed to be missing about 400 nautical miles from the Mexico-Guatemala border. The search lasted about 65 hours and covered an ocean area that stretched more than 1,090 nautical miles, but several search boats spotted no “survivors or debris,” according to the coast guard.
“At this point in the response, the likelihood of a positive outcome, based on elapsed time, environmental conditions and resources available to a person in the water, is very low,” Coast Guard Capt. Patrick Dill said in the release.
The search was conducted by a Coast Guard aircraft that took off from California, a vessel in the area that belonged to the Coast Guard’s emergency assistance system and three other nearby vessels that were requested for assistance. The Coast Guard said in its statement that “available assets were extremely limited due to distance and range constraints.”
A Coast Guard spokesperson told CBS News Friday that 40-knot winds and nine-foot seas were reported in the area.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro – who has clashed with the Trump administration in recent months – wrote on Friday that the population appeared to have survived the strikes. He said the Colombian navy was ready to help.
The US military carried out at least 35 boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific between September 2 and December 31, killing at least 115 people.
The military has reported survivors in a handful of boat collisions — and has faced scrutiny in how it has handled those cases. Two survivors of a mid-October strike were held by the US Navy then repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador. A survivor of a late October operation is presumed dead after the Mexican navy called off its search.
And in the Trump administration’s first round of boat strikes, on September 2, two people survived the initial attack but were killed in a subsequent strike. Congressional Democrats who viewed video of the operation critical the second strike, alleging that the military had killed castaways who no longer posed a threat, but Republican lawmakers called the strike justifiable, arguing that survivors appeared to still be in the fight.
The boat strikes are part of a broader military buildup in the region, amid a growing U.S. pressure campaign against the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Trump administration has accused Maduro’s government of working with drug cartels, which it denies.
These operations have drawn criticism from lawmakers who say the president is operating without congressional authorization. The Trump administration has defended strikes as much as necessary to fight drug trafficking, calling the targets “illegal combatants”.
