United States Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, announced on Wednesday night (29) that American military personnel carried out another attack against a vessel allegedly transporting drugs in Latin American waters, this time in the Pacific Ocean.
“This vessel, like all others, was known to our intelligence to be involved in the transportation of narcotics, was transiting a known drug trafficking route and was carrying narcotics,” the secretary wrote in the X.
“Four male narco-terrorists were aboard the vessel — and were killed — during the attack, which occurred in international waters. No U.S. forces were harmed in this attack,” Hegseth added.
At the beginning of September, the United States began a series of bombings against vessels it claims were linked to drug trafficking. At first, such attacks were concentrated in the Caribbean Sea, near Venezuela, which led Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship to claim that the operation was an excuse to remove him from power.
However, in recent days, actions also began to occur in the Pacific Ocean, near Colombia – Wednesday’s attack was the sixth in the Pacific in eight days.
In both regions, there have already been 14 attacks, which left 61 people dead – three people survived.
Tensions have risen in the last two weeks, when American President Donald Trump said he has authorized lethal CIA operations in Venezuela and that American forces will carry out ground actions against cartels in the region, in addition to sending the Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier Strike Group to the United States Southern Command (Southcom) area, headed by the largest aircraft carrier in the world.
