WASHINGTON — The U.S. military said Wednesday that it had carried out strikes against five more vessels it said were engaged in drug trafficking, killing eight people in all.
U.S. Southern Command said in a statement Wednesday night that two vessels were struck earlier in the day, killing three people in one boat and two in the other. It called them “narco-terrorists.”
The statement did not say where the strikes took place.
“Intelligence confirmed the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes and engaged in narco-trafficking,” U.S. Southern Command said in a post on social media, which included a video.
Earlier Wednesday, it said the U.S. military conducted strikes against three suspected drug boats Tuesday, killing three people.
“On Dec. 30, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted kinetic strikes against three narco-trafficking vessels traveling as a convoy,” U.S. Southern Command said on X, alleging that narcotics were transferred between the vessels before the strikes.
“Three narco-terrorists aboard the first vessel were killed in the first engagement,” Southern Command said in the earlier statement. “The remaining narco-terrorists abandoned the other two vessels, jumping overboard and distancing themselves before follow-on engagements sank their respective vessels.”
The exact location of those strikes was also not specified, nor was it clear from the statement how many people were aboard the two other vessels before they were struck. The statement added that the U.S. Coast Guard was notified after the strikes to activate its search-and-rescue operations.
NBC News has reached out to the Pentagon for more details.
The U.S. has carried out strikes on at least 35 alleged drug boats since September, killing more than 100 people. The majority of the strikes have occurred in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.
President Donald Trump in recent months has ramped up U.S. military presence in the region, as well as his rhetoric toward countries like Venezuela and Colombia.
In the past week, Trump said, the U.S. “knocked out” a facility tied to Venezuela.
“We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from,” Trump told WABC radio of New York City in an interview Friday.
Trump has argued that the strikes on vessels are helping prevent the trafficking of narcotics into the U.S. and that the Venezuelan government is using oil revenue to finance “drug terrorism.”
In a Dec. 18 phone interview with NBC News, Trump declined to rule out a war with Venezuela. Earlier in the month, he ordered a blockade of “sanctioned oil tankers” to and from the country.
On Wednesday, the Treasury Department sanctioned four companies over operations in Venezuela’s oil sector.
