Scoop - The U.S. military staged a helicopter rescue to pick up survivors from Thursday's strike and is holding them on a Navy ship. w/@idreesali114

SummaryCompaniesU.S. strike targeted submarine-like vessel, source saysSurvivors rescued by helicopter, may be prisoners of warFirst known survivors from U.S. strikesOct 17 (Reuters) - The U.S. military is holding two survivors aboard a Navy ship after rescuing them from a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean hit by a U.S. strike that killed two others, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.The disclosure, which has not been previously reported, raises the possibility that the survivors from Thursday's strike are the first prisoners of war in a conflict declared by President Donald Trump against a "narcoterrorist" threat he says is emanating from Venezuela.Read about innovative ideas and the people working on solutions to global crises with the Reuters Beacon newsletter. Sign up here.The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.One of the sources said the vessel struck on Thursday moved below the water and was possibly a semi-submersible, which is a submarine-like vessel used by drug traffickers to avoid detection.Five sources familiar with the matter said the U.S. military staged a helicopter rescue to pick up the survivors of the attack and bring them back to the U.S. warship.Prior to Thursday's operation, U.S. military strikes against suspected drug boats off Venezuela had not left any known survivors and videos presented by the Trump administration showed vessels being destroyed.The Trump administration has said the previous strikes killed 27 people, raising alarms among some legal experts and Democratic lawmakers, who question whether they adhere to the laws of war.The strikes come against the backdrop of a U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean that includes guided missile destroyers, F-35 fighter jets, a nuclear submarine and around 6,500 troops as Trump escalates a standoff with the Venezuelan government.On Wednesday, Trump disclosed he had authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela, adding to speculation in Caracas that the United States is attempting to topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.In a letter this week to the United Nations' 15-member Security Council, seen by Reuters, Venezuela's U.N. Ambassador Samuel Moncada asked for a U.N. determination that the U.S. strikes off its coast are illegal and to issue a statement backing Venezuela's sovereignty.Earlier this month, the Pentagon disclosed to Congress in a notification reviewed by Reuters that Trump has determined the United States is engaged in "a non-international armed conflict."The document aimed to explain the Trump administration's legal rationale for unleashing U.S. military force in the Caribbean.Less than a week ago, the Pentagon announced its counter-narcotics operations in the region would not be led by the Miami-based Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military activities in Latin America.Instead, the Pentagon said a task force was being created that would be led by II Marine Expeditionary Force, a unit capable of rapid overseas operations that is based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.That decision came as a surprise to U.S. military-watchers, since a combatant command like Southern Command would normally lead any high-profile operations.On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the admiral who leads U.S. Southern Command will step down at the end of this year, two years ahead of schedule, in a surprise move.Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Editing by Alistair BellOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tabPhil Stewart has reported from more than 60 countries, including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, China and South Sudan. An award-winning Washington-based national security reporter, Phil has appeared on NPR, PBS NewsHour, Fox News and other programs and moderated national security events, including at the Reagan National Defense Forum and the German Marshall Fund. He is a recipient of the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the Joe Galloway Award.National security correspondent focusing on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Reports on U.S. military activity and operations throughout the world and the impact that they have. Has reported from over two dozen countries to include Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the Middle East, Asia and Europe. From Karachi, Pakistan.

The US carried out a strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Thursday that did not kill everyone on board, two US officials told CNN. There are believed to be survivors among the crew, but their status is unclear. The US military has carried out at least six strikes to date on six separate boats in the Caribbean, but Thursday’s was not made public by the administration – unlike the previous five strikes – and appeared to be the first time an attack had not instantly killed everyone on board. Reuters was first to report on Thursday’s strike. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not have an immediate comment. CNN has reached out to the White House for comment. The Trump administration has produced a classified legal opinion that justifies lethal strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, CNN has reported. The opinion is significant, legal experts previously told CNN, because it appears to justify giving the president power to designate drug traffickers as enemy combatants and have them summarily killed without legal review. Historically, those involved in drug trafficking were considered criminals with due process rights, with the Coast Guard interdicting drug-trafficking vessels and arresting smugglers. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he had also authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on illegal flows of migrants and drugs from the South American nation, but stopped short of saying they would have authority to remove President Nicolas Maduro. This story has been updated with additional details.

The U.S. military killed an unspecified number of suspected drug traffickers transiting the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela on Thursday, an attack that also resulted in the apprehension of two survivors, according to people familiar with the matter.U.S. forces took the individuals into custody and continue to hold them aboard a Navy vessel in the region, two people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the operation. This is believed to be the first time since the Trump administration dramatically escalated U.S. counternarcotics activities in Latin America that anyone has survived such an attack.It was not clear Friday how many people died in the operation. One official familiar with the situation said the outcome was unexpected and had set off a frenzied debate among Pentagon leaders over what to do with the two people who were detained. This person said it appears military officials had no plan for such a contingency.The Pentagon’s press office did not respond to requests for comment.Follow Trump’s second termPresident Donald Trump, speaking at the White House on Friday, acknowledged the operation but offered no detail other than to say that U.S. forces attacked a “submarine” that was “loaded up” with drugs. “This was not an innocent group of people,” he said.People familiar with the situation said the suspects were targeted while in a semisubmersible, a vessel that moves through the water partially submerged but cannot fully dive like a submarine. Such “narco subs,” as they are sometimes called, have operated in the region for years but are rarely used, suggesting drug traffickers may be shifting to more covert means in an attempt to evade increasing U.S. surveillance efforts.Thursday’s operation, including the capture of survivors, was first reported by Reuters.During his remarks at the White House on Friday, the president was questioned about reports indicating the Venezuelan leader had made overtures to Washington seeking de-escalation. “He’s offered everything; you’re right,” Trump said in response. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to f--- around with the United States.”In the face of mounting questions about the legality of the strikes, the Trump administration has sought to justify the killings by claiming the United States is in “armed conflict” with Latin American drug cartels responsible for “poisoning” Americans, describing such groups as terrorist organizations. The fate of the individuals who were detained Thursday poses significant new legal questions, experts said.Charles Dunlap, the former deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, said that those taken into custody are not entitled to the full rights granted to prisoners of war but would still have to be held in a humane facility and, if tried, given due process.“Though in theory there might be a case for military detention, I think in this instance the captives are likely to be turned over to law enforcement and, if the facts support doing so, processed with a view towards trial in civilian court on drug trafficking allegations,” he said.“The biggest issue today,” Dunlap said, “is the lack of transparency.”On Capitol Hill, Democrats have assailed the administration, calling the boat strikes indefensible. Congress has the sole authority to declare war and has not formally authorized the use of force in this instance, and lawmakers from both parties have been frustrated with what they say is a lack of information from the administration about its objectives in the region.On Friday, a bipartisan group of senators said they would force a vote to block the Trump administration from attacking Venezuela. Last week, Senate Republicans narrowly defeated a similar effort led by Democrats that sought to halt the boat strikes.“The pace of the announcements about the authorization of covert activities and the military planning makes me think there is some chance this could be imminent,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), who is leading the effort alongside Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California).Kaine predicted a measure tailored to Venezuela would attract more support from GOP colleagues.“At some point,” he said, “I believe that this body will say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this is too much.’”Dan Lamothe, Karen DeYoung and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States took survivors into custody after the military struck a suspected drug-carrying vessel in the Caribbean, a defense official and another person familiar with the matter said Friday. It is the first known attack that anyone has escaped alive since President Donald Trump began launching deadly strikes in the waters off Venezuela last month and raises questions about how the U.S. will treat the survivors. Trump later confirmed the attack during an event at the White House. “We attacked a submarine, and that was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs” he said.Secretary of State Rubio did not dispute that there were survivors, but he repeatedly said details would be forthcoming.The strike Thursday, at least the sixth since early September, brought the death toll from the Trump administration’s military action against vessels in the region to at least 28. It is the first to result in survivors who were picked up by the U.S. military. It was not immediately clear what would be done with the survivors, who the defense official said were being held on a U.S. Navy vessel. The official and other person confirmed the strike and the seizing of survivors on the condition of anonymity because the attack had not yet been publicly acknowledged by Trump’s administration.Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration when it declared a war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks. That includes the ability to capture and detain combatants and to use lethal force to take out their leadership. Some legal experts have questioned the legality of the approach. The president’s use of overwhelming military force to combat the cartels, along with his authorization of covert action inside Venezuela, possibly to oust President Nicolás Maduro, stretches the bounds of international law, legal scholars said this week. Trump on Friday appeared to confirm reports that Maduro has offered a stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in recent months to try to stave off mounting pressure from the United States. The New York Times last week first reported about the effort by the Maduro government.Venezuelan government officials have also floated a plan in which Maduro would eventually leave office, according to a former Trump administration official. That plan was also rejected by the White House, the AP reported.“He’s offered everything,” Trump said in an exchange with reporters at the start of his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to f—- around with the United States.” For the survivors of Thursday’s strike, the saga is hardly over. They now face an unclear future and legal landscape, including questions about whether they are now considered to be prisoners of war or defendants in a criminal case. Reuters was first to report news of the strike late Thursday. The strikes in the Caribbean have caused unease among both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, with some Republicans saying they have not received sufficient information on how the strikes are being conducted. A classified briefing for senators on the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month did not include representatives from intelligence agencies or the military command structure for South and Central America.However, most Senate Republicans stood behind the administration last week when a vote on a War Powers Resolution was brought up, which would have required the administration to gain approval from Congress before conducting more strikes.Their willingness to back the administration will be tested again. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, along with Sens. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, is bringing another resolution that would prevent Trump from outright attacking Venezuela without congressional authorization.___Associated Press writers Seung Min Kim, Aamer Madhani and Stephen Groves contributed reporting.

It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route. U.S. Intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics. There were four known narcoterrorists on board the vessel. Two of the terrorists were killed. At least 25,000 Americans would die if I allowed this submarine to come ashore. The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike. Under my watch, the United States of America will not tolerate narcoterrorists trafficking illegal drugs, by land or by sea. Thank you for your attention to this matter!DONALD J. TRUMPPRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTTwo men rescued by the U.S. military after it attacked a boat in the Caribbean Sea were being sent to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador, President Trump said.A Navy guided missile destroyer docked near the entrance to the Panama Canal in Panama City last month. The United States has deployed warships, surveillance planes and an attack submarine to the region.Credit...Enea Lebrun/ReutersOct. 18, 2025The Trump administration is repatriating two survivors of a deadly U.S. strike this week on suspected drug runners in the Caribbean Sea rather than prosecute them or hold them in military detention, President Trump announced on Saturday.The men who survived were being returned to their home countries, Colombia and Ecuador, “for detention and prosecution,” the president said in a posting on his Truth Social account.Mr. Trump also posted a 29-second video showing a semi-submersible vessel that was traveling partially below the water being blown up. He said two other suspected drug smugglers, whom he called “terrorists,” had been killed in the attack.Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 19, 2025, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: 2 Survivors of U.S. Attack Are to Be Returned Home. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeRelated ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT

A Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion takes off from the Navy's USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean on Sept. 23, 2025. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Emily Hazelbaker The United States is releasing and repatriating the two survivors of a suspected drug smuggling submersible vessel that was destroyed Thursday in the Caribbean, President Donald Trump announced on Saturday. The two people are currently being held on a Navy vessel in the Caribbean after the military recovered them from the site of the airstrike.  The two will be released back to their home countries, Ecuador and Colombia, respectively, rather than remain in American custody or prosecuted by the U.S. government. The survivors are being held on one of the several Navy ships currently operating in the Caribbean, following a buildup of forces since August.  The strike on Thursday was the sixth one since the start of September against small boats in the Caribbean and the first time that any survivors were reported. At least 29 people have died, according to the numbers released by the White House.  “The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution,” Trump wrote in a post on social media. Trump and his administration have repeatedly accused the victims of the strikes of being “narco-terrorists” although so far no evidence has been presented showing the vessels were moving drugs.  Saturday afternoon, Colombian President Gustavo Petro posted on X saying that the Colombian national had returned to the country. Petro expressed relief that the person was alive and said they will be prosecuted according to the law. Two hours later he released additional statements, saying that the boat destroyed in the Sept. 16 airstrike (the third one announced by the United States) was Colombian, showed signs of damage and had an engine out of the water before it was destroyed and was inside Colombian waters. He said that the victim was identified as a fisherman, Alejandro Carranza, and accused the United States of violating Colombian sovereignty. Top Stories This Week The submersible vessel was hit on Oct. 16, with the reports of survivors coming out the next day. The New York Times reports that the two were moved to the USS Iwo Jima, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship in the region with its amphibious ready group. The decision to release the two survivors comes after they have been held in U.S. military custody for more than a day. The administration had previously told Congress it considers the United States in an armed conflict with drug cartels, which it earlier designated as foreign terrorist organizations. The Trump administration has also referred to those targeted and killed as “unlawful combatants” and if it is not clear if any people taken into custody would be kept in indefinite detention  as some have been in the Global War on Terror or tried in civilian court.  Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer focused on laws of war and counterterrorism, said that repatriating them was “likely the least worst option from the administration’s perspective.” “There is no armed conflict, so these survivors can’t be held as law of war detainees,” Finucane said. “If the U.S. government has a sufficient legal basis to prosecute them for crimes in Article III courts, it can do so.” It is not clear how they are being moved, if it will be in a ship-to-ship transfer as the American vessels are not near a home port or if the U.S. will fly them to their home countries or a third-party country. The New York Times reported that the State Department had legal custody of the survivors. The United States has accused the ships destroyed over the last two months of being linked to drug-trafficking cartels out of Venezuela, and tied to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Colombia’s government had previously said that its nationals were on a boat that was destroyed, and police from Trinidad and Tobago are investigating if two of that country’s citizens were on a ship destroyed on Oct. 14. Update: 10/18/2025; This article has been updated with comments from Colombian President Gustavo Petro.     Task & Purpose Video Each week on Tuesdays and Fridays our team will bring you analysis of military tech, tactics, and doctrine.

“The US military has carried out at least 6 strikes to date on 6 separate boats in the Caribbean, but Thursday’s was not made public by the administration – unlike the previous 5 strikes – and appeared to be the 1st time an attack had not instantly killed everyone on board.“ Did they attempt rescue?Likely murdered this week on Trump’s orders: “Chad Joseph, a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago who had been living in Venezuela in recent months, told his family he would soon be taking a short boat ride back home. He has yet to return, and now his family fears the worst.“One of the functions of these murderous attacks is testing for compliance. Trump and Hegseth are figuring out who will obey illegal orders and who is likely to object.And there you have it. These strikes are clearly not legal. Pete will push commanders aside until he finds one who won’t question these extrajudicial killings. #SOUTHCOM“The U.S. military’s elite Special Operations aviation unit appears to have flown in Caribbean waters less than 90 miles from the coast of Venezuela in recent days, according to a visual analysis by The Washington Post.“ Three B-52 bombers have also been flying off the coast. This is insane.“US forces took multiple people into custody and have detained them aboard a Navy vessel in the region, people familiar with the matter said.“ Will they be heard from again if it turns out they were fishing or ferrying passengers?“The survivors of this strike now face an unclear future and legal landscape, including questions about whether they are now considered to be prisoners of war or defendants in a criminal case.“ They are also witnesses to Trump’s murders. Let’s hope they remain safe.WHOA. The AP reports that in the latest strike on a boat alleged to be carrying drug smugglers (which has never been proven), there were actually survivors, and they've been rescued. The Pentagon has yet to formally acknowledge they have survivors in custody. apnews.com/article/vene...Trump now claims it was a “drug submarine” which is almost certainly incorrect. There are very few proper drug submarines, but there are many low profile semisubmersibles which remain 90% below the water, but cannot actually dive. Here’s an example:Trump: "We attacked a submarine. That was a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs. Just so you understand. This was not an innocent group of people. I don't know too many people that have submarines."October 17, 2025 at 2:18 PM“Sen. Kaine, a longtime proponent of Congress' powers to declare war, filed the resolution late Thursday, a move that will force the Senate to take up the legislation after a 10-day waiting period. Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., co-sponsored the plan.““The men who survived were being returned to their home countries, Colombia and Ecuador.” One day, they’re dangerous “narco-terrorists” who require summary execution. The next day, they get sent home because Trump doesn’t want to hold a legal hot potato. Trump’s entire drug war is bullshit.Trump is deluded. Venezuela has nothing to do with fentanyl — that gets added in Mexico. If snorting cocaine causes instant death, then explain Don Jr. Also, it wasn’t a submarine they hit — it was a fiberglass semisubmersible which cannot dive. Here are some examples:Trump's comments on the strike on narco sub“Relatives of a Trinidadian man who say he was killed in a U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean this week are demanding evidence to back up allegations by U.S. President Donald Trump that those who died were trafficking drugs.“President Petro accuses US of hitting Colombian fishing boat in distress and murdering Alejandro Carranza.Don’t let facts get in the way of your racist tantrum, Donald.🙄President Donald Trump accused the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, of being an “illegal drug dealer” and said the country will no longer receive US aid.🚨🚨🚨Hegseth has now struck a boat belonging to the ELN guerrillas — bringing the US into a shooting war with group that has been fighting the Colombian govt since 1964! Meanwhile, Tump cut off aid to Colombia claiming President Petro was in league with traffickers.🙄 This is insanely dangerous!!!🚨🚨🚨Hegseth’s reference to Al Qaeda is a reckless red herring and not the first time the US has tried to tie them to Colombia. After 9/11 Amb. Rand Beers insinuated the FARC was allied with Al Qaeda and had to retract it under oath. Islamic fundamentalists share little in common with Colombian Marxists!Ambrose Bierce once wrote: “War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.” Trump has NO IDEA of the complicated history of this region and its conflicts. Colombia has been in civil war for my entire life. Trump is blowing things up left and right. This is how the US lunges into quagmires!🔥🔥🔥Every day is like an Epiphany calendar of quagmires, tragedies, and debacles. What disasters will Trump bomb us into tomorrow? ¯_(ツ)_/¯Would be really great if the administration could at least limit its illegal threats to other countries in the Americas to one at a time. (Although as originally drafted, this Truth referred to Columbia rather than Colombia. Easy to be confused when you're making illegal threats against both.)

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTPresident Gustavo Petro said a U.S. strike in the Caribbean had killed a fisherman. President Trump said he would cut aid and impose new tariffs on Colombian imports.President Gustavo Petro of Colombia at the United Nations headquarters in New York City last month.Credit...Vincent Alban/The New York TimesPublished Oct. 19, 2025Updated Oct. 20, 2025, 8:02 a.m. ETPresident Gustavo Petro of Colombia accused the United States of murdering a fisherman in an attack on a boat that the American authorities claimed was carrying illicit drugs. President Trump responded on Sunday that he would slash assistance and impose new tariffs on the country.The feuding between the two leaders reflected rising tensions in the region over the huge U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean targeting Colombia’s neighbor, Venezuela. U.S. forces have killed dozens of people in recent weeks aboard vessels that the Trump administration says were ferrying drugs from Venezuela.The administration has provided no evidence to support the claims beyond descriptions of intelligence assessments and declassified videos of portions of the attacks. Legal specialists have called such killings illegal, because militaries cannot lawfully target civilians who do not pose a threat in the moment and are not directly participating in hostilities.“U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Mr. Petro wrote on social media. He said the man killed in the mid-September attack, Alejandro Carranza, was a “lifelong fisherman” whose boat had experienced damage and was adrift, probably in Colombian waters, at the time of the attack. His description of Mr. Carranza and his boat could not be immediately confirmed.Mr. Trump responded by accusing Mr. Petro of not doing enough to curb the production of illegal drugs, calling him an “illegal drug dealer” with “a fresh mouth toward America.” Mr. Trump also said that the United States would halt aid payments to Colombia, which has long ranked among the largest recipients worldwide of U.S. counternarcotics assistance. He later told reporters on Air Force One that he would announce new tariffs on Colombian goods on Monday.The two presidents have had a stormy relationship since the start of the second Trump administration.In January, just days after Mr. Trump came into office, he threatened to impose sky-high tariffs on Colombia when Mr. Petro moved to block Mr. Trump’s use of military aircraft to deport thousands of migrants to Colombia.ImageMigrants headed from Panama to Colombia in May after failing to enter the United States.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York TimesThe United States also revoked Mr. Petro’s visa during the United Nations General Assembly in September, after he called for American soldiers to disobey Mr. Trump at a pro-Palestinian rally in New York.Still, it was not immediately clear what impact Mr. Trump’s new aid cuts could have. The Trump administration already had slashed aid to Colombia earlier this year, as it did in other parts of Latin America.Colombia had been set to receive more than $400 million in aid at the start of the year, according to Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group. He said the earlier cuts had left Colombia with about one fourth of that.While Colombia and the United States still cooperate on counternarcotics efforts, overall American assistance to the country had also declined from the years of “Plan Colombia,” an early 2000s initiative that wound down a decade ago and was aimed at combating both drug cartels and armed leftist insurgencies.Beyond the effect on aid, the quarreling underscores how Colombia could face greater fallout from the U.S. military deployment in the Caribbean.Colombia is by far the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and a much larger player in the global drug trade than Venezuela, which produces negligible amounts of cocaine and plays essentially no role in the production or smuggling of fentanyl.ImageFARC rebels in Yarí, Colombia, in 2023. U.S. assistance to Colombia has declined since the years of “Plan Colombia,” an initiative that wound down a decade ago and was aimed at combating both drug cartels and armed leftist insurgencies.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York TimesSoon after Mr. Trump issued his call to halt aid to Colombia, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced yet another strike on a vessel, which Mr. Hegseth claimed was connected to a Colombian rebel group, the National Liberation Army. Without providing evidence for his claims, Mr. Hegseth said the boat, which was attacked on Friday, had been carrying narcotics.The deployment of U.S. forces is the largest in the region in decades, including about 10,000 U.S. troops and dozens of military aircraft and ships. While the Trump administration says it is a counterdrug and counterterrorism mission, officials have privately made clear that the main goal is to drive Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, from power.Our economics reporters — based in New York, London, Brussels, Berlin, Hong Kong and Seoul — are digging into every aspect of the tariffs causing global turmoil. They are joined by dozens of reporters writing about the effects on everyday people.Mr. Petro, a leftist and former member of an urban guerrilla group who became president in 2022, has repeatedly expressed support for Mr. Maduro as the crisis simmers between Washington and Caracas. The Colombian president has shown a willingness to spar with Mr. Trump, in sharp contrast to the cautious stances most other Latin American leaders have adopted with the Trump administration.In Colombia, Mr. Petro’s positioning drew varied responses. Vicky Dávila, a journalist and conservative presidential contender, expressed support for Mr. Trump on Sunday, saying on social media, “Petro and his corrupt Government have favored drug trafficking in every way possible.”But Senator Iván Cepeda, a supporter of Mr. Petro, suggested Mr. Trump should instead focus on the ample demand for illegal drugs in the United States. “We have a dignified president, one who does not kneel and who demands that the United States take responsibility for its role in the drug trafficking problem,” Mr. Cepeda said.ImageA laborer carrying bags of coca leaves, in La Paz, Colombia, in 2021.Credit...Federico Rios for The New York TimesIn social media posts over the weekend, Mr. Petro urged his attorney general to help the family of Mr. Carranza, the fisherman killed in the September attack, to file claims against the United States. Mr. Petro suggested the Carranza family bring claims in collaboration with a Trinidadian family that also says a relative was killed in another U.S. strike.Although the U.S. campaign in the Caribbean has been aimed primarily at those suspected of being Venezuelan drug runners, the strikes have killed or wounded individuals from other countries.Another Colombian, Jeison Obando Pérez, 34, was caught up in the sixth such U.S. airstrike last week, along with a citizen of Ecuador. Both survived.They were aboard a semi-submersible that was blown up Thursday, and rescued by U.S. forces and initially treated aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the Caribbean.Mr. Obando Pérez was repatriated Saturday and hospitalized in Colombia with brain trauma and breathing on a ventilator, Armando Benedetti, Colombia’s minister of the interior, said in a social media posting on Saturday night. Once he is awake, he will be “processed by the justice system for drug trafficking,” Mr. Benedetti said.The other survivor of Thursday’s attack was returned to Ecuador on Saturday and was undergoing medical evaluation.Simon Romero is a Times correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is based in Mexico City.Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 20, 2025, Section A, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Threatens Colombian President After He Accuses U.S. of Killing Fisherman. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeRelated ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTShared with you by a Times subscriberYou have access to this article thanks to someone you know. Keep exploring The Times with a free account.

This looks like an AC-130J Ghostrider's work. Two shots from the 30mm. We know AC-130 is deployed to PR. Compare here: https://twz.com/air/ac-130j-ghostrider-hammers-amphibious-warship-during-rare-appearance-at-sinking-exercise… As we have discussed before, engaging small boats is something AC-130 crews train for & is an established mission set for the type.

This looks like an AC-130J Ghostrider's work. Two shots from the 30mm. We know AC-130 is deployed to PR. Compare here: https://twz.com/air/ac-130j-ghostrider-hammers-amphibious-warship-during-rare-appearance-at-sinking-exercise… As we have discussed before, engaging small boats is something AC-130 crews train for & is an established mission set for the type.

.@SecRubio on recent U.S. operations against narco-terrorists: “We are undertaking these operations against narco terrorists. That's what they are — they are terrorists, let's be clear.”

Scoop! - President Donald Trump's administration is moving to send the two survivors of a Thursday strike in the Caribbean to a different country rather than seek long-term military detention for them, four U.S. officials told Reuters on Saturday. w/@idreesali114

AP requested comment from the Attorney General’s Office, but did not immediately receive a response.The man was repatriated by the United States over the weekend following a U.S. military attack on a submersible vessel suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean. A Colombian citizen also survived the attack and remains hospitalized after being repatriated to that country.U.S. military personnel rescued both men after destroying the submersible on Thursday. Trump said on social media that U.S. intelligence confirmed the vessel was carrying “mostly fentanyl and other illegal drugs.”There is little evidence to indicate that fentanyl is produced in the Andes, as the vast majority of it flows into the U.S. through Mexico.Trump said that two people on board were killed, and the two survivors were being repatriated to their home countries “for detention and prosecution.”The attack on the submersible was at least the sixth of its kind since September. A seventh that occurred Friday, was reported over the weekend, bringing the total deaths from the attacks to at least 32. The strikes have set off tensions in the region, particularly between Trump, Venezuela and Colombia, once one of the American government’s tightest allies in the Western Hemisphere.The Colombian government said its survivor “will be prosecuted according to the law” for alleged drug trafficking. It noted that the man was seriously wounded.

Santa Elena Province, Ecuador  —  The last time Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila’s sister heard from him was about a year ago when he told her he was heading out to fish for work, she said. Last week, she was shocked to learn that her brother was aboard an alleged drug vessel that was struck by the US military. Tufiño Chila, 41, was one of two people who survived last week’s strike in the Caribbean, which President Donald Trump said was carried out against a “drug-carrying submarine” navigating toward the United States. Two others were killed. Tufiño Chila and the other survivor were later returned by the US to their countries of origin, Trump said, describing them as “terrorists.” “No, no … He’s not. He’s not a criminal,” Tufiño Chila’s sister, who asked for her name to not be published out of fear for her safety, told CNN from a small coastal town two hours from the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil. She claims to know nothing of her brother’s alleged involvement with drug trafficking and instead portrayed him as a desperate father trying to provide for his six kids. Tufiño Chila’s wife left him and took the children, but he still sent them money, his sister said. “He’s very happy, fun,” she said of her brother. “He’s everything I loved most.” She still hasn’t heard from her brother since he was released by Ecuadorian authorities this week after returning home. Ecuador’s Attorney General’s Office said Monday that authorities have no information that Tufiño Chila committed a crime in Ecuadorian territory. But he has a criminal record in the US: Court documents show that he was arrested, convicted and jailed in 2020 for smuggling drugs off Mexico’s coast before being deported. Tufiño Chila’s sister said two other brothers were arrested months earlier, also on drug smuggling charges. Both are in custody: one is in the US, the other is in Ecuador. The family’s experience illustrates how Ecuador has become a critical route in the cocaine trade. About 70% of the world’s cocaine supply passes from Colombia and Peru through its shores, Ecuador’s president says. Drug runners often transport narcotics through a large stretch of water on the Pacific Ocean and drop them off in Mexico, where they’re subsequently smuggled into the US or Europe. The drug trafficking trade is hard to escape in Tufiño Chila’s town, according to those who live there. “Life is complicated. It’s hard,” one man tells CNN of fishermen’s financial struggles, where monthly wages can be as little as $100. Becoming a drug runner is an enticing prospect when one can make tens of thousands of dollars up front, according to another fisherman who spoke to CNN in March from Manta, an Ecuadorian city on the Pacific coast. The profession has also found itself at the crosshairs of the Trump administration. On Tuesday, the US expanded its military campaign of attacking boats it suspected of illegal drug running, hitting a vessel in the eastern Pacific. Both people on board were killed, according to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It was the eighth known strike by the US military on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel since the start of September. All seven previous strikes had targeted boats in the Caribbean Sea, just north of Venezuela. To date, at least 34 people have been killed in the US strikes – 32 of them in the Caribbean. The Trump administration says they’re about saving American lives from drug overdoses. But most US overdose deaths aren’t from cocaine. They’re from fentanyl, largely produced in Mexico and smuggled over the border by land, often by US citizens. As the US strikes continue, the ones caught in the crossfire are rarely cartel leaders, but the men who take the risk for them. They’re fishermen often seen as expendable by the gangs that hire them. Tufiño Chila’s sister showed CNN around the house where they lived before her brother went away. His room is kept like a shrine, with a lit candle to honor him and his clothes folded neatly on his bed. She hopes to speak with her brother soon. For now, she takes comfort in knowing he’s alive.

Sources at Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office told Spanish newspaper El Pais that the Colombian survivor of a US drone strike on an alleged narco-submarine was released due to a lack of evidence. The victim, Jonathan Obando, had already been released from the Kennedy Hospital in Bogota on October 28 where he was admitted because of the serious injuries allegedly sustained in the October 16 attack. When announcing the attack on October 18, US President Donald Trump said that the “narco-terrorists” who survived the attack would be taken to their native countries, Colombia and Ecuador, “for detention and prosecution.” In a response, Interior Minister Armando Benedetti said that Obando would be “processed by justice, because presumably he is a delinquent who was trafficking drugs.” The prosecution opened a preliminary investigation into Obando’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking, but was forced to drop this because “until now, they didn’t find any evidence or testimony that could indicate that this person committed a crime on national territory,” a prosecution source told El Pais. If the former suspect was involved in criminal activity, as claimed by the US Government, the prosecutors received no evidence of this. He has no criminal record, nor is his name linked to any criminal network. It is most likely that he was hired to transport the cargo to a specific location, but that he was not the mastermind behind the drug trafficking operation. This is what is known as the outsourcing of criminal activity. Prosecution source Obando’s release from detention and hospital comes weeks after the Ecuadorean prosecution released the second surviving victim of the attempted extrajudicial killing without charges because there was “no report of a crime that has been brought to the attention of this institution.” The US military has killed at least 67 people in Caribbean and Pacific waters since early September, but has yet to provide any evidence to support US Government claims that these victims were involved in drug trafficking.

#WORLD | President Donald Trump asserted that the United States attacked a “drug-trafficking” submarine in the Caribbean, which he said was “specifically built to transport large quantities of drugs.” He added, “This wasn’t a group of innocent people. I don’t know many people who own a submarine,” Trump said. The president also confirmed that Nicolás Maduro has offered “everything” to avoid a war with the United States. @itsDCastrillon http://Caracol.com.co

#MUNDO| El presidente Donald Trump aseguró que Estados Unidos atacó un submarino “narcotraficante” en el Caribe, que dijo fue “construido específicamente para transportar grandes cantidades de droga”. Agregó que “no se trataba de un grupo de personas inocentes, no conozco mucha gente que tenga un submarino”, dijo Trump. El presidente además confirmó que Nicolás Maduro ha ofrecido “todo” para evitar una guerra con Estados Unidos. @itsDCastrillon http://Caracol.com.co

We welcomed the Colombian detained in the narco submarine. We are glad he is alive and will be prosecuted according to the law.

Recibimos al colombiano detenido en el narco submarino, nos alegra que esté vivo y será procesado de acuerdo a las leyes

This Saturday, October 18, an Ecuadorian national returned to the country after surviving the United States attack on a drug-carrying vessel in the Caribbean. The previous Thursday, two people died and two others survived, one Colombian and the other Ecuadorian. By order of US President Donald Trump, these citizens were sent to their countries of origin. According to information provided by the Ministry of the Interior to CNN, the Ecuadorian national arrived before noon this Saturday, and verifications have been carried out to resolve the individual's legal status. For now, neither the Ministry of the Interior nor the Ecuadorian Police have delved into details about the citizen's repatriation. Meanwhile, on the social media platform X, Colombian President Gustavo Petro also confirmed that the detainee was received on the submarine. "We are glad he is alive and he will be prosecuted according to the law," he stated. Based on intelligence information, Trump indicated that the vessel was loaded with fentanyl and other illegal narcotics. Since last August, the United States has intensified its deployment of ships and aircraft carriers in the Caribbean to combat drug trafficking networks that use maritime routes to traffic drugs to North America. This situation has caused tensions in relations between the United States and the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro. (I)

Este sábado, 18 de octubre, se cumplió con el retorno al país de un ecuatoriano que sobrevivió al ataque ejecutado por Estados Unidos a una embarcación que llevaba droga en el Caribe. El jueves anterior, en este evento murieron dos personas y otras dos sobrevivieron, una de origen colombiano y otro ecuatoriano.Por disposición del mandatario estadounidense, Donald Trump, estos ciudadanos fueron enviados a sus países de origen. Según datos dados por el Ministerio del Interior a CNN, el ecuatoriano arribó antes del mediodía de este sábado y se han dado verificaciones para resolver la situación legal del sujeto.Por ahora, el Ministerio del Interior ni la Policía de Ecuador han ahondado en detalles sobre la repatriación del ciudadano.En paralelo, en la red social X el presidente colombiano, Gustavo Petro, también corroboró que se recibió al detenido en el submarino. “Nos alegra que esté vivo y será procesado de acuerdo a las leyes”, indicó. Con base en información de inteligencia, Trump indicó que la embarcación estaba cargada de fentanilo y otros narcóticos ilegales. Desde agosto anterior, Estados Unidos intensificó su despliegue de buques y portaaviones en el Caribe para combatir las redes de narcotráfico que emplean rutas marítimas para el tráfico hacia Norteamérica. Esta situación ha causado tensiones en las relaciones entre EE. UU. y el Gobierno venezolano de Nicolás Maduro. (I)

Monday, October 20, 2025: People First Monday, October 20, 2025: People First COLOMBIA WORLD POLITICS TECHNOLOGY HEALTH JUDICIAL ECONOMY ENTERTAINMENT SPORTS ENVIRONMENT CARACOL GOAL COLOMBIAN SOCCER COLOMBIAN NATIONAL TEAM COLOMBIANS ABROAD CYCLING TENNIS THE INFORMANTS SEVENTH DAY THE RASTRO THE FARM OF TODAY BOGOTÁ ANTIOQUIA CARIBBEAN VALLEY EYE OF THE NIGHT THE MOST TRUE CARACOL CODE VIDEO GAMES I AM THE JOURNALIST ME LIFESTYLE facebook tiktok instagram twitter whatsapp youtube Receive our notifications with the latest from: News Sports The Minister of the Interior indicated that it is necessary to verify whether he has a criminal record and what activity he was carrying out in international waters. President Petro reiterated that a boat attacked last September was Colombian.

lunes 20 de octubre, 2025Primero la gente lunes 20 de octubre, 2025Primero la gente COLOMBIA MUNDO POLÍTICA TECNOLOGÍA SALUD JUDICIAL ECONOMÍA ENTRETENIMIENTO DEPORTES MEDIO AMBIENTE GOL CARACOL FÚTBOL COLOMBIANO SELECCIÓN COLOMBIA COLOMBIANOS EN EL EXTERIOR CICLISMO TENIS LOS INFORMANTES SÉPTIMO DÍA EL RASTRO LA FINCA DE HOY BOGOTÁ ANTIOQUIA CARIBE VALLE OJO DE LA NOCHE LO MÁS TRINADO CÓDIGO CARACOL VIDEOJUEGOS EL PERIODISTA SOY YO ESTILO DE VIDA facebook tiktok instagram twitter whatsapp youtube Reciba nuestras notificaciones con lo último de: Noticias Deportes El ministro del Interior señaló que se debe verificar si tiene antecedentes y qué actividad estaba realizando en aguas internacionales. El presidente Petro reiteró que una lancha atacada en septiembre pasado era colombiana.

Thursday, November 6, 2025 People First Thursday, November 6, 2025 People First COLOMBIA WORLD POLITICS TECHNOLOGY HEALTH JUDICIAL ECONOMY ENTERTAINMENT SPORTS ENVIRONMENT GOL CARACOL COLOMBIAN FOOTBALL COLOMBIAN NATIONAL TEAM COLOMBIANS ABROAD CYCLING TENNIS THE INFORMANTS SEVENTH DAY THE TRAIL TODAY'S FARM BOGOTA ANTIOQUIA CARIBBEAN VALLE EYE OF THE NIGHT MOST TWEETED CARACOL CODE VIDEO GAMES I'M THE JOURNALIST STYLE LIFE Facebook TikTok Instagram Twitter WhatsApp YouTube Receive our notifications with the latest on: News Sports The Interior Minister indicated that it is necessary to verify if he has a criminal record and what activity he was carrying out in international waters. President Petro reiterated that a boat attacked last September was Colombian.

jueves 06 de noviembre, 2025Primero la gente jueves 06 de noviembre, 2025Primero la gente COLOMBIA MUNDO POLÍTICA TECNOLOGÍA SALUD JUDICIAL ECONOMÍA ENTRETENIMIENTO DEPORTES MEDIO AMBIENTE GOL CARACOL FÚTBOL COLOMBIANO SELECCIÓN COLOMBIA COLOMBIANOS EN EL EXTERIOR CICLISMO TENIS LOS INFORMANTES SÉPTIMO DÍA EL RASTRO LA FINCA DE HOY BOGOTÁ ANTIOQUIA CARIBE VALLE OJO DE LA NOCHE LO MÁS TRINADO CÓDIGO CARACOL VIDEOJUEGOS EL PERIODISTA SOY YO ESTILO DE VIDA facebook tiktok instagram twitter whatsapp youtube Reciba nuestras notificaciones con lo último de: Noticias Deportes El ministro del Interior señaló que se debe verificar si tiene antecedentes y qué actividad estaba realizando en aguas internacionales. El presidente Petro reiteró que una lancha atacada en septiembre pasado era colombiana.

Donald Trump said that “three Venezuelan drug traffickers” died after an attack in the Caribbean After it was learned that there were two survivors after the bombing carried out during a military operation in the Caribbean, in which a submarine, allegedly used for drug trafficking, was destroyed, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced on Saturday, October 18, the repatriation of the wounded. According to official reports, the wounded are of Ecuadorian and Colombian nationality, who withstood the impact of the American military, while two other people who were part of the crew died. You can now follow us on Facebook and on our WhatsApp Channel. Regarding the Colombian citizen wounded in the US military operation, it was learned that he was identified as Jeison Obando Pérez, 34, who arrived seriously injured at the Catam airport in Bogotá at 4:00 p.m. Interior Minister Armando Benedetti provided details on the health status of the man injured in the bombing of a boat suspected of carrying drugs. Obando Pérez arrived in the country in critical condition, with a traumatic brain injury, sedated and on a ventilator, and was transferred to a hospital in the south of the city. Colombian immigration authorities were unable to proceed with fingerprint identification due to the repatriated man's medical condition. “Jeison Obando Pérez, thirty-four years old, is the person repatriated from the United States, but there is something very important to keep in mind. He is arriving in Colombia and will be prosecuted according to the law, because he is allegedly a criminal who was trafficking drugs. He arrived with brain trauma, sedated, drugged, breathing with a ventilator, and was attended to by the authorities, but above all, received by the Prosecutor's Office,” explained Interior Minister Armando Benedetti. According to statements made by President Gustavo Petro on his social media account, the Colombian national is already in the country: “We received the Colombian detained on the narco-submarine; we are glad he is alive and he will be prosecuted according to the law.” The head of state maintained that the national will be prosecuted according to the law - credit @petrogustavo/XPetro also pointed out that the vessel had been previously identified as Colombian, referring to events that occurred on September 16 and the death of Alejandro Carranza, a fisherman whose disappearance after the attack is still under investigation. The president stated that “US government officials have committed murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” a statement made following a report by RTVC. Interior Minister Armando Benedetti told Noticias Caracol that Obando Pérez will be prosecuted, stating: “He will be received—excuse my harsh expression—as a criminal, because so far what is known is that he was carrying a boat full of cocaine, which is a crime in our country, and even though it was in international waters, his repatriation is as a person prosecuted by the United States.” Benedetti added that an investigation will be conducted into whether the repatriated man has a criminal record, the circumstances of his rescue in international waters, and what activities he was engaged in at the time of the incident. According to a Reuters report, the survivors of the attack were rescued by helicopter and subsequently transferred to a US Navy warship. President Gustavo Petro called for an investigation into the US bombing of a boat - credit @petrogustavo/X. The former president of President Donald Trump asserted this Saturday on Truth Social: “It was a great honor for me to destroy a massive drug-laden submarine that was sailing toward the United States on a well-known drug trafficking route,” though he did not specify the vessel's point of origin. Data from the U.S. Navy indicates that since the beginning of September, six attacks have been carried out against suspected vessels, resulting in the deaths of approximately 27 alleged drug traffickers. U.S. authorities claim that these operations have succeeded in reducing the flow of drugs into their territory, although they have not yet presented evidence confirming that the victims were, in fact, drug traffickers.

Donald Trump dijo que “tres narcoterroristas de Venezuela” murieron tras un ataque en el Caribe0 seconds of 27 secondsVolume 90%Donald Trump dijo que “tres narcoterroristas de Venezuela” murieron tras un ataque en el Caribe Luego de que se conociera que hubo dos sobrevivientes tras el bombardeo perpetrado en medio de operación militar en el Caribe, en la que un submarino, presuntamente empleado para el tráfico de drogas, fue destruido, el presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, anunció el sábado 18 de octubre la repatriación de los heridos. De acuerdo con los reportes oficiales, los heridos son de nacionalidad ecuatoriana y colombiana, que resistieron al impacto del Ejército americano, mientras que otras dos personas que integraban la tripulación, murieron. Ahora puede seguirnos en Facebook y en nuestro WhatsApp ChannelEn relación con el ciudadano colombiano herido en el operativo militar estadounidense, se conoció que fue identificado como Jeison Obando Pérez, de 34 años, que llegó gravemente herido al aeropuerto de Catam, de Bogotá, a las 4:00 p. m.Ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti, entregó detalles del estado de salud del herido tras bombardeo a la lancha con supuesta droga0 seconds of 26 secondsVolume 90%Ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti, entregó detalles del estado de salud del herido tras bombardeo a la lancha con supuesta droga - crédito @AABenedetti/X Obando Pérez llegó al país en estado crítico, con trauma craneoencefálico, sedado y con respirador mecánico, y fue trasladado a un centro hospitalario en el sur de la ciudad. Migración Colombia no pudo proceder al reconocimiento dactilar debido a la condición médica del repatriado.“Jeison Obando Pérez, de treinta y cuatro años. Es la persona repatriada desde los Estados Unidos, pero hay algo muy importante que tiene que tener en cuenta. Llega a Colombia y va a ser procesado según la justicia, porque presuntamente es un delincuente que estaba traficando drogas. Llegó con traumas en el cerebro, sedado, dopado, respirando con ventilador y fue atendido por las autoridades, pero sobre todo recibido por la Fiscalía”, explicó puntualmente el ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti. De acuerdo con declaraciones del presidente Gustavo Petro difundidas a través de su cuenta de X, el connacional ya se encuentra en territorio nacional: “Recibimos al colombiano detenido en el narcosubmarino, nos alegra que esté vivo y será procesado de acuerdo a las leyes”. El jefe de Estado sostuvo que el connacional será proceso como lo dicta la ley - crédito @petrogustavo/XPetro también señaló que la embarcación había sido identificada previamente como colombiana, refiriéndose a hechos ocurridos el 16 de septiembre y a la muerte de Alejandro Carranza, un pescador cuya desaparición tras el ataque es aún motivo de investigación. El mandatario afirmó que “funcionarios del gobierno de los EEUU han cometido un asesinato y violado nuestra soberanía en aguas territoriales”, afirmación realizada tras un informe de Rtvc.El ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti, declaró a Noticias Caracol que Obando Pérez será procesado judicialmente, indicando: “será recibido –perdóneme la expresión dura– como un delincuente, porque hasta ahora lo que se sabe es que llevaba una lancha llena de cocaína, eso en nuestro país es un delito, y a pesar de que fue en aguas internacionales, la repatriación es como procesado de Estados Unidos”.Benedetti añadió que se investigará si el repatriado tiene antecedentes, las circunstancias de su rescate en aguas internacionales y cuáles eran las actividades que realizaba en el momento de los hechos.Según reportó la agencia de noticias Reuters, los sobrevivientes del ataque fueron rescatados en helicóptero y posteriormente trasladados a un buque de guerra de la Marina estadounidense (US Navy).El presidente Gustavo Petro pidió que se investigue el bombardeo de una lancha por parte de Estados Unidos - crédito @petrogustavo/XEl expresidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, aseveró este sábado en Truth Social: “Fue un gran honor para mí destruir un enorme submarino cargado de droga que navegaba hacia Estados Unidos por una conocida ruta de tránsito de narcotráfico”, aunque no detalló el punto de origen del semisumergible.Datos de la Marina estadounidense indican que desde principios de septiembre se han realizado seis ataques contra embarcaciones sospechosas, resultando en la muerte de aproximadamente 27 presuntos narcos. Las autoridades estadounidenses aseguran que estas operaciones han logrado reducir la entrada de drogas en su territorio, aunque hasta el momento no han presentado pruebas que confirmen que las víctimas eran, efectivamente, narcotraficantes.

PETRO just said that the people in this SUBMARINE were just FISHING and were poor young people. How is it possible to fish with a submarine? Could someone from Petrismo explain PETRO's theory?

PETRO acaba de decir que las personas que se encontraban en este SUBMARINO solo estaban PESCANDO y eran jóvenes pobres. Cómo es posible pescar con un submarino, algún Petrista que explique la teoría de PETRO

#tictactictac Loblan in the air. ||•• #BreakingNews New video released. “This is how a US Air Force AC-130J Ghostrider destroyed a vessel allegedly carrying several tons of cocaine in the Caribbean Sea.” Courtesy. #marcaribe #cartedelossoles #sos #EEUUTerroristState

#tictactictac Loblan en el aire. ||•• #ÚltimaHora Se publica nuevo video. “De esta manera un AC-130J Ghostrider de la Fuerza Aérea de EEUU destruyó una embarcación que presuntamente navegaba con varias toneladas de cocaína en el Mar Caribe.” Cortesía. #marcaribe #cartedelossoles #sos #EEUUTerroristState

The File That Closes the Debate: The Truth About the "Survivor" The survivor of the narco-submarine, released by Ecuador, is not a "poor fisherman." His name is Andrés Fernando Tufiño, and this is the truth that the cartel's defenders don't want you to see. In 2021, this same individual was CONVICTED in California for CONSPIRACY TO DISTRIBUTE COCAINE ON A VESSEL. He is not a novice; he is a repeat offender. A professional drug trafficker. The Ecuadorian judicial system released him, demonstrating that "due process" in our region is a revolving door for criminals. The U.S. operation did not target an innocent person; it neutralized a convicted terrorist who returned to his old ways. Here I am submitting the U.S. court document (case 3:20-cr-02838). Case closed. Thanks to @latablablog

El Expediente que Cierra el Debate: La Verdad sobre el "Sobreviviente". El sobreviviente del narco-submarino , liberado por Ecuador, no es un "pobre pescador". Su nombre es Andrés Fernando Tufiño, y esta es la verdad que los defensores del cartel no quieren que veas. En 2021, este mismo individuo fue CONDENADO en California por CONSPIRACIÓN PARA DISTRIBUIR COCAÍNA EN UNA EMBARCACIÓN. No es un novato, es un reincidente. Un profesional del narcotráfico. El sistema judicial de Ecuador lo liberó, demostrando que el "debido proceso" en nuestra región es una puerta giratoria para criminales. La operación de EE.UU. no atacó a un inocente; neutralizó a un terrorista convicto que volvió a las andadas. Aquí dejo constancia del documento de la corte de EE.UU. (caso 3:20-cr-02838). Caso cerrado. Gracias a @latablablog

Ecuador has released Andrés Fernando Tufiño, one of the two survivors of the U.S. attack on a narco-submarine in the Caribbean Sea on October 16, an Ecuadorian government official confirmed Monday, as reported by the Associated Press (AP). Tufiño, who survived the attack along with a Colombian man, was captured by the U.S. Navy and later deported to Ecuador. According to the official, who asked not to be identified, the Ecuadorian Attorney General's Office did not find sufficient evidence to pursue legal action against him. U.S. President Donald Trump announced a new attack in the Caribbean Sea on Saturday on his social media account, Truth. This is the sixth extrajudicial operation launched by the U.S. against vessels from South America. "We attacked a submarine. It was specially designed for the mass transportation of drugs. Just so you understand. It wasn't a group of innocent people. I don't know how many people have submarines," he told reporters at the time. The bombing left two survivors, the first since these attacks began last August. The men were captured and identified as Andrés Fernando Tufiño, an Ecuadorian national, and Jeison Obando Pérez, a Colombian national. Trump announced that both would be repatriated to their respective countries, where they would be taken into custody and prosecuted. According to a government document obtained by the Associated Press, “there is no evidence or indication that would lead the prosecuting or judicial authorities to be certain” that Tufiño committed a crime in Ecuadorian territory. Therefore, after being discharged from the hospital, he was released. The man is originally from the province of Esmeraldas, which borders Colombia, where fishing is the most widespread economic activity, but which has been affected by drug trafficking. Although Tufiño has no criminal record, his immigration record is quite peculiar: it shows more arrivals than departures. He has been in Mexico at least four times since 2018—the year he first left Ecuador—and was deported from the United States last year. Although the Ecuadorian cannot be tried under his country's laws, President Daniel Noboa reaffirmed on Monday in a post addressed to Trump that “Ecuador remains steadfast in the global fight against drug trafficking and illegal mining.” “Our commitment is clear: to fight side by side, defending freedom and prosperity throughout our region,” he stated in the message, written in English. The Ecuadorian government has not yet commented on Tufiño's case. Meanwhile, the Colombian Pérez remains under observation after arriving in his country. Interior Minister Armando Benedetti stated that the man “arrived with brain trauma, sedated, drugged, on a ventilator, and was attended to by the authorities.” Benedetti asserted in a video shared on social media that Pérez “will be prosecuted according to the law, because he is allegedly a criminal who was trafficking drugs.” The precedent set by Tufiño casts doubt on this. In September, the U.S. government launched an operation of extrajudicial attacks in international waters of the Caribbean against vessels it accuses of transporting drugs from Venezuela to the United States. The military has killed, without trial, more than 30 people whom the Trump administration accuses of belonging to criminal gangs such as the Tren de Aragua, included by the State Department on its list of “designated terrorist organizations,” or the Cartel of the Suns.

Ecuador ha liberado a Andrés Fernando Tufiño, uno de los dos sobrevivientes del ataque de Estados Unidos a un narcosubmarino en el mar Caribe el pasado 16 de octubre, según ha confirmado este lunes una funcionaria del Gobierno ecuatoriano citada por la agencia Associated Press (AP). El hombre, que se salvó del bombardeo junto con un colombiano, fue capturado por la Marina estadounidense y luego fue deportado a Ecuador. De acuerdo con la funcionaria, que ha pedido no ser identificada, la Fiscalía de ese país no encontró pruebas suficientes para emprender acciones legales en su contra.El presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, informó el sábado en su red social, Truth, de un nuevo ataque en el mar Caribe. Es la sexta operación extrajudicial que lanza EE UU contra embarcaciones procedentes de Sudamérica. “Hemos atacado un submarino. Estaba diseñado especialmente para el transporte masivo de drogas. Es solo para que lo entiendan. No era un grupo de personas inocentes. No sé cuánta gente tiene submarinos”, dijo entonces a la prensa. El bombardeo dejó dos sobrevivientes, los primeros desde el inicio de estos asaltos el pasado agosto. Los hombres fueron capturados y fueron identificados como Andrés Fernando Tufiño, de nacionalidad ecuatoriana; y Jeison Obando Pérez, colombiano. Trump anunció que ambos serían repatriados a sus respectivos países, en donde serían conducidos a su “detención y procesamiento”.Según un documento gubernamental al que ha tenido acceso AP, “no existen elementos de convicción ni indicios que puedan llevar a la autoridad fiscal o judicial a tener la certeza” de que Tufiño cometió un delito en territorio ecuatoriano, por lo que, tras haber sido dado de alta médica, fue liberado.El hombre es originario de la provincia de Esmeraldas, fronteriza con Colombia, en donde la pesca es la actividad económica más extendida, pero que se ha visto alcanzada por el narcotráfico. Aunque Tufiño no tiene antecedentes penales, su expediente migratorio es bastante peculiar: registra más arribos que salidas; ha estado al menos cuatro veces en México desde 2018 —año en el que salió por primera vez de Ecuador—; y el año pasado ya había sido deportado desde Estados Unidos.A pesar de que el ecuatoriano no podrá ser juzgado por las leyes de su país, el presidente Daniel Noboa ha reafirmado este lunes en una publicación de X dirigida a Trump que “Ecuador se mantiene firme en la lucha mundial contra el narcotráfico y la minería ilegal”. “Nuestro compromiso es claro: luchar codo a codo, defendiendo la libertad y la prosperidad en toda nuestra región”, ha señalado en el mensaje, escrito en inglés. El Gobierno del país andino no se ha pronunciado aún sobre el caso de Tufiño.Mientras, el colombiano Pérez sigue bajo observación tras haber llegado a su país. El ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti, señaló que el hombre “llegó con traumas en el cerebro, sedado, dopado, respirando con ventilador, y fue atendido por las autoridades”. Benedetti aseguró en un video compartido en las redes sociales que Pérez “va a ser procesado según la justicia, porque presuntamente es un delincuente que estaba traficando droga”. El precedente de Tufiño deja esto ahora en el aire. El Gobierno estadounidense inició en septiembre una operación de ataques extrajudiciales en aguas internacionales del Caribe contra embarcaciones a las que acusa de transportar drogas desde Venezuela con rumbo a las costas de Estados Unidos. Los militares han matado, sin juicio, a más de 30 personas a los que la Administración de Trump acusa de pertenecer a bandas criminales como el Tren de Aragua, incluida por el Departamento de Estado en su lista de “organizaciones terroristas designadas”, o el Cartel de los Soles.

Ecuador releases Andrés Fernando Tufiño, one of the two survivors of the US attack on a narco-submarine in the Caribbean, after the Prosecutor's Office found insufficient evidence to prosecute him following his deportation.

Ecuador libera a Andrés Fernando Tufiño, uno de los dos sobrevivientes del ataque de EE. UU. a un narcosubmarino en el Caribe, al no encontrar la Fiscalía pruebas suficientes para procesarlo tras su deportación.

The legal future of Jeison Obando Pérez, the 34-year-old Colombian repatriated by the United States after surviving Washington's attack on a suspected narco-submarine on October 16 in the Caribbean Sea, is uncertain. Pérez was deported to Colombia with "brain trauma, sedated, drugged, and on a ventilator," according to Interior Minister Armando Benedetti, who also stated that Pérez will be "prosecuted according to the law, because he is allegedly a criminal who was trafficking drugs." However, the Colombian justice system's ability to act in his case is limited: there is no evidence that he committed a crime in the country. "There is an open investigation, but it will not reach a judicial conclusion unless he incriminates himself," says a high-ranking official from the Attorney General's anti-narcotics division. In short, the agency can only prosecute him if he voluntarily decides to speak to the authorities about his case. An indictment is even less likely, since the investigation opened by the Public Prosecutor's Office indicates that the attack occurred in international waters, meaning it is an incident beyond its jurisdiction. Obando Pérez was detained by Washington authorities after the bombing of a vessel in the Caribbean Sea on October 16, as confirmed by US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. According to the White House, the attacked vessel was a semi-submersible carrying "fentanyl and other illegal narcotics." Four people were on board. Two died, and Obando Pérez and an Ecuadorian citizen survived. Despite the fact that the attacks on nine vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean were extrajudicial, according to humanitarian organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Trump indicated, upon repatriating the survivors, that both would be taken for “detention and prosecution” in their respective countries. The high-ranking official from the Attorney General's Office, who spoke on condition of anonymity while revealing confidential information, confirmed that Obando Pérez has no criminal record in Colombia and that the Attorney General's Office did not participate in the operation to return him to the country. The Colombian Migration Agency and the Ministry of the Interior were in charge. The official also stated that, although the investigative body opened an inquiry on its own initiative, the repatriated man has not been mentioned in any legal proceedings in Colombia nor has he been formally linked to drug trafficking investigations in the past. Obando Pérez is hospitalized at Kennedy Hospital, in southwestern Bogotá. A medical report obtained by this newspaper details that he was admitted with “a fracture at the base of the skull and orbit, as well as intracerebral injuries,” but “without evidence of serious injury.” At the beginning of the week, according to the document, he was already showing “improvement” and was taken off the ventilator. “He remains under observation and multidisciplinary medical care,” the medical report states. Sources from the Ministry of the Interior maintain that there has been no contact with his family. The possibility of Obando leaving the hospital as a free man gains traction given the precedent of Andrés Fernando Tufiño. He is the other survivor of the narco-submarine, who was sent to Ecuador, his country of origin. There, upon arrival, he was also treated in a hospital. And, although his arrest was planned upon his discharge, prosecutors refused to proceed with his capture and released him this Monday. A government document accessed by the Associated Press indicated that “there are no elements of conviction or indications that could lead the prosecuting or judicial authority to be certain” that Tufiño committed a crime in Ecuadorian territory. In short, the Ecuadorian agency had no evidence against Tufiño, a situation similar to that of Obando Pérez in Colombia. Washington tightens the noose around Colombia. US attacks are increasingly focused on Colombia, the world's largest cocaine producer. Initially, Trump's military campaign seemed to have Venezuela in its sights. According to experts, it was a prelude to a possible ground incursion to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, or at least a way to push for government change from within. The Colombian Navy maintains, however, that the majority of submarines or speedboats carrying drugs have no connection to Venezuela, as drug traffickers use the Pacific route more than the Caribbean one. Of the nine bombings carried out by Washington in the last two months, at least four have some link to Colombia. In addition to the alleged narco-submarine on which Obando Pérez was sailing, President Gustavo Petro maintains that a Colombian was killed in another attack on September 15. The president echoed a report from RTVC, the public media network, which identified the deceased as Alejandro Carranza Medina, a native of Santa Marta, a Caribbean city. His family, who reported him missing, maintain that he had no connection to drug trafficking. Petro suspects that the bombing may have occurred in Colombian waters. The United States has not confirmed the coordinates of any of its operations. Another boat allegedly linked to Colombia was the one Washington attacked on October 17 in the Caribbean. Secretary Hegseth said it was “affiliated” with the National Liberation Army (ELN), the guerrilla group with which Petro has repeatedly attempted to negotiate peace. Three people died in the bombing. The armed group denied that the vessel belonged to them. Finally, one of the two attacks this Wednesday, the first in the Pacific in this military campaign, took place “off the Colombian coast,” Hegseth indicated. The White House has not confirmed whether the vessel departed from Colombia or if there were Colombians on board.

El futuro judicial de Jeison Obando Pérez, el colombiano de 34 años que fue repatriado por Estados Unidos tras haber sobrevivido al ataque de Washington a un supuesto narcosubmarino el pasado 16 de octubre en el mar Caribe, está en entredicho. Pérez fue deportado a Colombia con “traumas en el cerebro, sedado, dopado y respirando con ventilador”, según ha indicado el ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti, quien también aseguró que Pérez será “procesado según la justicia, porque presuntamente es un delincuente que estaba traficando droga”. Sin embargo, la capacidad de maniobra de la justicia colombiana en su caso es limitada: no hay pruebas de que haya cometido un delito en el país.“Hay una indagación abierta, pero no tendrá un final judicial, a menos que él mismo se autoincrimine”, señala un alto funcionario de la dirección antinarcóticos de la Fiscalía General. El organismo, en suma, solo puede judicializarlo si este decide, voluntariamente, hablar ante la justicia sobre su caso. Una imputación es aún menos probable, pues la indagación que abrió el Ministerio Público apunta a que el ataque ocurrió en aguas internacionales, es decir, que es un incidente fuera de su alcance.Obando Pérez fue detenido por las autoridades de Washington tras el bombardeo de una nave en el mar Caribe el 16 de octubre, según confirmaron el presidente de EE UU, Donald Trump, y su secretario de Guerra, Pete Hegseth. De acuerdo con la Casa Blanca, la embarcación atacada era un semisumergible que cargaba “fentanilo y otros narcóticos ilegales”. En ella se transportaban cuatro personas. Dos murieron y Obando Pérez y un ciudadano ecuatoriano sobrevivieron. Pese a que los ataques a nueve embarcaciones en el Caribe y el océano Pacífico son extrajudiciales, según organizaciones humanitarias como Human Rights Watch, Trump indicó, al momento de repatriar a los sobrevivientes, que ambos serían conducidos a su “detención y procesamiento” en sus respectivos países.El alto funcionario de la Fiscalía, que habló en condición de anonimato al revelar información confidencial, confirma que Obando Pérez no tiene antecedentes penales en Colombia y que la entidad no participó en la operación de regreso al país. Los encargados fueron la agencia Migración Colombia y el Ministerio del Interior. También asegura que, aunque el ente investigador abrió una indagación de oficio, el repatriado no ha sido mencionado en ningún proceso judicial en Colombia ni ha estado formalmente vinculado a investigaciones por narcotráfico en el pasado.Obando Pérez está internado en el Hospital de Kennedy, en el suroccidente de Bogotá. Un informe médico al que tuvo acceso este diario detalla que fue ingresado con “una fractura en la base del cráneo y órbita, así como lesiones intracerebrales”, pero “sin evidencias de gravedad”. A inicios de semana, según el documento, ya presentaba “mejoras” y le fue retirada la asistencia respiratoria. “Permanece bajo observación y cuidado médico multidisciplinario”, señala el parte clínico. Fuentes del Ministerio del Interior sostienen que no ha habido contactos con sus familiares.El escenario de que Obando salga de la hospitalización como un hombre libre gana fuerza con el antecedente de Andrés Fernando Tufiño. Es el otro sobreviviente del narcosubmarino, que fue enviado a Ecuador, su país de origen. Allí, recién llegado, también fue atendido en un hospital. Y, aunque estaba prevista su detención al momento de su alta médica, los fiscales se negaron proceder con su captura y lo dejaron este lunes en libertad. Un documento gubernamental al que tuvo acceso la agencia Associated Press indicaba que “no existen elementos de convicción ni indicios que puedan llevar a la autoridad fiscal o judicial a tener la certeza” de que Tufiño cometió un delito en territorio ecuatoriano. En resumen, el organismo ecuatoriano no tenía pruebas contra Tufiño, una situación similar a la de Obando Pérez en Colombia.Washington estrecha el cerco sobre ColombiaLos ataques estadounidenses cada vez tienen el radar más cerca de Colombia, el mayor productor de cocaína del mundo. En un principio, la campaña militar de Trump parecía tener a Venezuela en la mira. Era, según expertos, un preludio a una posible incursión terrestre para derrocar a Nicolás Maduro, o por lo menos una forma de impulsar un cambio de Gobierno desde dentro. La Armada Nacional sostiene, sin embargo, que la mayor cantidad de submarinos o lanchas con cargamentos de drogas no tienen nexos con Venezuela, pues los narcos usan más la ruta del Pacífico que la del Caribe.De los nueve bombardeos que ha registrado Washington en los últimos dos meses, al menos cuatro tienen algún vínculo con Colombia. Además del supuesto narcosubmarino en el que navegaba Obando Pérez, el presidente Gustavo Petro defiende que en otro ataque, del 15 de septiembre, un colombiano murió. El mandatario se hizo eco de una información de RTVC, la cadena de medios públicos, que identificó al fallecido como Alejandro Carranza Medina, natural de Santa Marta, una ciudad del Caribe. Sus familiares, que lo reportaron como desaparecido, argumentan que no tenía ningún vínculo con el narcotráfico. Petro sospecha que ese bombardeo pudo ocurrir en aguas colombianas. Estados Unidos no ha confirmado las coordenadas de ninguna de sus operaciones.Otra lancha supuestamente vinculada a Colombia fue la que Washington atacó el 17 de octubre en el Caribe. El secretario Hegseth dijo que estaba “afiliada” al Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), la guerrilla con la que Petro ha intentado en varias ocasiones pactar la paz. En el bombardeo murieron tres personas. El grupo armado negó que la nave fuera suya. Finalmente, uno de los dos ataques de este miércoles, los primeros en el Pacífico en esta campaña militar, tuvo lugar “frente a las costas colombianas”, indicó Hegseth. La Casa Blanca no ha confirmado si la embarcación partió de Colombia o si había colombianos en ella.

👉FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE AND RECEIVE OUR NEWS. Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila, alias “Fresco Solo,” was one of the survivors, along with a Colombian citizen, of a recent US attack on a semi-submersible vessel in the Caribbean Sea. The Ecuadorian managed to escape death after a Pentagon missile struck the vessel he was on, which, according to the US government, was carrying drugs. Two other crew members were not so lucky. After spending a few hours in US custody, he was deported to his country of origin. The Ecuadorian Prosecutor's Office told the press that the repatriated national was released because he did not commit a crime in the country. Tufiño was convicted in 2020 in a United States federal court for maritime drug trafficking and deported to Ecuador after serving a five-year prison sentence. The case file, to which NTN24 had access, shows that Tufiño Chila was convicted in a criminal case. The court file details that, on September 6, 2020, Tufiño Chila, identified as the captain of the vessel GFV 1, was intercepted in the Pacific Ocean with a ton of cocaine hidden inside the boat, just east of the French island of Clipperton. Regarding this, Nathaly Logroño García, a criminal lawyer; David Sánchez, a national security analyst, and Carolina Mella, an Ecuadorian journalist, spoke on NTN24's Ángulo program. According to Nathaly Logroño, "there is a tacit acceptance of the criminal offense." However, the lack of local evidence prevented the initiation of legal proceedings. For his part, David Sánchez emphasized the importance of correcting these legal gaps in Ecuadorian legislation. "This case should be considered an opportunity to improve legal processes regarding international crimes," Sánchez noted. Despite these challenges, Carolina Mella, a journalist who contributes to international media outlets, highlighted the initial silence of Ecuadorian authorities regarding this scandal.

👉SÍGUENOS EN GOOGLE Y RECIBE NUESTRAS NOTICIASAndrés Fernando Tufiño Chila, alias “Fresco Solo”, fue uno de los sobrevivientes junto a un ciudadano colombiano, a un reciente ataque de Estados Unidos contra un semisumergible en aguas del Caribe.El ecuatoriano logró escapar de la muerte tras el impacto de un misil del Pentágono sobre la embarcación en la que navegaba y que, según el gobierno de Estados Unidos, estaba cargada de drogas. Otros dos tripulantes no corrieron su suerte.Tras pasar unas horas bajo custodia de las tropas estadounidenses, fue deportado a su país de origen. La Fiscalía de Ecuador indicó a la prensa que el connacional repatriado fue dejado en libertad debido a que no cometió un delito en el país.Tufiño fue condenado en 2020 en una corte federal de los Estados Unidos por narcotráfico marítimo y deportado a Ecuador luego de cumplir una sentencia de cinco años en prisión.En el expediente al que tuvo acceso NTN24 queda evidenciado que Tufiño Chila fue condenado en una causa penal.El archivo judicial detalla que, el 6 de septiembre de 2020, Tufiño Chila, identificado como el capitán de la embarcación gfv 1, fue interceptado en el océano Pacífico con una tonelada de cocaína oculta en el interior de la lancha, justo cuando estaba al este de la isla francesa Clipperton.Al respecto, Nathaly Logroño García, abogada penalista; David Sánchez, analista en temas de seguridad nacional, y Carolina Mella, periodista ecuatoriana, hablaron en Ángulo de NTN24.Según explicó Nathaly Logroño, "existe una aceptación táctica de la infracción penal". Sin embargo, la falta de pruebas locales impidió iniciar un proceso judicial.Por su parte, David Sánchez enfatizó la importancia de corregir estos vacíos legales en la legislación ecuatoriana."Este caso debe ser considerado como una oportunidad para mejorar los procesos legales frente a delitos internacionales," señaló Sánchez.A pesar de estos desafíos, Carolina Mella, periodista colaboradora de medios internacionales, destacó el silencio inicial de las autoridades ecuatorianas ante este escándalo.

#Tablazo New information about the Ecuadorian survivor of the narco-submarine attacked by the U.S.: Andrés Fernando Tufiño was sentenced in California in 2021 to 5 years in prison for cocaine trafficking on a vessel.

#Tablazo Nuevo dato sobre el sobreviviente ecuatoriano del narcosubmarino atacado por EE.UU.: Andrés Fernando Tufiño fue condenado en California en 2021 a 5 años de prisión por tráfico de cocaína en una embarcación.

The sentence was to be served until December 2026, but Tufiño reappeared in Ecuador in 2025 after surviving the military operation in the Caribbean.

La sentencia debía cumplirse hasta diciembre de 2026, pero Tufiño reapareció en Ecuador en 2025 tras sobrevivir al operativo militar en el Caribe.

The question is unavoidable: how did he manage to be released before serving his full sentence and without completing the five years of probation that the court also imposed? See the full article at the link

La pregunta es inevitable: ¿cómo logró quedar en libertad antes de cumplir la totalidad de la condena y sin pasar por los 5 años de libertad vigilada que también le impuso la corte? En el enlace nota completa

The Colombian man was identified as 34-year-old Jeison Obando Pérez. Interior Minister Armando Benedetti indicated that the man “is allegedly a criminal who was trafficking drugs.” Pérez arrived in the country in critical condition and was admitted to Kennedy Hospital in southern Bogotá. “He arrived with brain trauma, sedated, drugged, on a ventilator, and received treatment,” Benedetti explained. According to the most recent medical report, which EL PAÍS has obtained, he “presents with a fracture at the base of the skull and orbit, as well as intracerebral injuries, without evidence of severity.” Even so, this Monday, “he showed improvement and was taken off respiratory assistance. He remains under observation and multidisciplinary medical care,” the report states. Meanwhile, the Ecuadorian man was identified as Andrés Fernando Tufiño. He was released because the Ecuadorian Attorney General's Office found no evidence to charge him with any crime, according to a statement from the Andean government quoted by the Associated Press. The agency had access to a government document which states that "there are no elements of conviction or indications that can lead the fiscal or judicial authority to be certain" that Tufiño has committed a crime.

El colombiano fue identificado como Jeison Obando Pérez, de 34 años. El ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti, indicó que el hombre “presuntamente es un delincuente que estaba traficando droga”. Pérez llegó al país en estado crítico y fue internado en el Hospital de Kennedy, en el sur de Bogotá. “Llegó con traumas en el cerebro, sedado, dopado, respirando con ventilador, y fue atendido”, explicó Benedetti. Según el parte médico más reciente, al que ha tenido acceso EL PAÍS, “presenta fractura en la base del cráneo y órbita, así como lesiones intracerebrales, sin evidencias de gravedad”. Aun así, este lunes, “presentó mejoras y se le retiró asistencia respiratoria. Permanece bajo observación y cuidado médico multidisciplinario”, señala el informe. Por su parte, el ecuatoriano fue identificado como Andrés Fernando Tufiño. El hombre fue liberado, pues la Fiscalía de ese país no encontró pruebas para acusarlo de algún delito, según confirmó una funcionaria del Gobierno andino citada por Associated Press. La agencia tuvo acceso a un documento gubernamental en el que apunta que “no existen elementos de convicción ni indicios que puedan llevar a la autoridad fiscal o judicial a tener la certeza” de que Tufiño haya cometido un delito.

Jonathan Obando Pérez, one of the two survivors of the US attack on a suspected narco-submarine in the Caribbean Sea on October 16, is free, as confirmed exclusively by EL PAÍS. He was discharged from the hospital on Tuesday, October 28, and left the Kennedy Hospital in Bogotá—where he had been hospitalized—on his own, according to medical sources. The Attorney General's Office has only opened a preliminary inquiry against him and does not plan to turn it into a formal investigation, as it lacks evidence to suggest that Obando Pérez committed any crime in Colombia. When Obando Pérez was repatriated by the United States after the bombing, Interior Minister Armando Benedetti stated that he would be "prosecuted according to the law, because he is allegedly a criminal who was trafficking drugs." The man, whom Benedetti had called Jeison (the Prosecutor's Office file identifies him as Jonathan), arrived with brain trauma, sedated, drugged, and on a ventilator after surviving one of Washington's extrajudicial attacks against vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Donald Trump himself had indicated that he would be taken to Colombia for his "detention and prosecution." A source from the Colombian Public Prosecutor's Office told this newspaper that investigators "have not found, so far, any evidence or testimony that could indicate that this person committed a crime on national territory." Since the vessel he was traveling on was destroyed, and given that the attack occurred in international waters, proving that the man is "a criminal," as Washington claims, is unlikely. "He is not obligated to testify, because there is no order requiring him to do so," added the official from the agency's anti-narcotics division. The limited investigation being carried out by the Prosecutor's Office suggests that, if the United States' version is true, Obando Pérez was just a low-level employee. “He has no criminal record, nor is his name associated with any criminal network. Most likely, he was hired to transport the cargo to a specific location, but he wasn't a drug kingpin. This is what's called outsourcing criminal activity,” the source consulted reported. Expectations about Obando Pérez's future grew at the end of October, when Andrés Fernando Tufiño, the other survivor of the October 16 attack, was released in Ecuador. The Ecuadorian Attorney General's Office released him after his medical discharge on October 20 because they also found no evidence that he was a criminal. A government document, which the Associated Press accessed, detailed that “there are no elements of conviction or indications that could lead the prosecuting or judicial authority to be certain” that Tufiño had committed a crime in Ecuadorian territory. The US network CNN found that, although he had no criminal record in Ecuador, he did have one in the United States: he had been arrested and convicted in 2020 for drug trafficking, a crime for which he was deported. Colombian authorities initially expected more time before Obando Pérez was discharged. A week after his repatriation, a confidential medical report indicated that the man had been admitted with “a fracture at the base of the skull and orbit, as well as intracerebral injuries,” although he was showing “improvement” and had been taken off respiratory support. His recovery accelerated, and he was discharged privately and without any publicity last Tuesday from Kennedy Hospital, part of Bogotá's public healthcare system. “He pulled through and was on his own,” a medical source indicated. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, asserted last week that the bombings ordered by Trump “violate international law” because they constitute “extrajudicial executions,” a claim supported since September, when the first vessel was attacked in the Caribbean, by human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Washington’s military campaign in international waters, which has now spread to the Pacific Ocean, has killed at least 64 people. Obando Pérez, Tufiño, and another person whose identity is unknown and who survived an attack in the Pacific, are the only survivors. The decision to send the Colombian and the Ecuadorian back to their respective countries is not arbitrary. Legal experts told Reuters that, in this way, Washington would not "have to deal with thorny legal issues related to the military detention of suspected drug traffickers" because their alleged crimes "do not clearly fit the laws of war."

Jonathan Obando Pérez, uno de los dos sobrevivientes del ataque de Estados Unidos contra un supuesto narcosubmarino en el mar Caribe el pasado 16 de octubre, está en libertad, según ha confirmado EL PAÍS en exclusiva. El hombre fue dado de alta de su hospitalización el pasado martes 28 y salió del Hospital de Kennedy de Bogotá —donde estaba internado— por sus propios medios, según fuentes médicas. La Fiscalía solo ha abierto una indagación preliminar en su contra, pero no prevé convertirla en una investigación formal, pues no tiene elementos para señalar que Obando Pérez haya cometido algún delito en Colombia.Cuando Obando Pérez fue repatriado por Estados Unidos tras el bombardeo, el ministro del Interior, Armando Benedetti, afirmó que sería “procesado según la justicia, porque presuntamente es un delincuente que estaba traficando droga”. El hombre, al que Benedetti había llamado Jeison (el expediente de la Fiscalía lo identifica como Jonathan), llegó con traumas cerebrales, sedado, dopado y respirando con ventilador tras sobrevivir a uno de los ataques extrajudiciales de Washington contra embarcaciones en el Caribe y el Pacífico. El mismo Donald Trump había indicado que sería llevado a Colombia para su “detención y procesamiento”. Una fuente del Ministerio Público colombiano señala a este diario que los investigadores “no encuentran, hasta el momento, material probatorio ni testimonial que pueda indicar que esta persona cometió un delito en territorio nacional”. Al haber sido destruida la embarcación en la que viajaba, y dado que el ataque ocurrió en aguas internacionales, demostrar que el hombre es “un criminal”, como dice Washington, es improbable. “No está obligado a declarar, porque no hay ninguna orden que lo determine”, añade el funcionario de la dirección de antinarcóticos del organismo.La limitada investigación que adelanta la Fiscalía apunta a que, de ser cierta la versión de Estados Unidos, Obando Pérez era solo un trabajador de último orden. “No tiene antecedentes penales, ni tampoco su nombre hace parte de ninguna red criminal. Lo más probable es que hubiera sido contratado para llevar la carga a determinado punto, pero no que él fuera un cerebro del narco. Es lo que se llama una tercerización de la actividad delictiva”, informa la fuente consultada.La expectativa sobre el futuro de Obando Pérez crecía a finales de octubre, cuando en Ecuador fue liberado Andrés Fernando Tufiño, el otro sobreviviente del ataque del día 16. La Fiscalía de ese país lo dejó en libertad tras el alta médica el día 20 porque tampoco encontró pruebas de que fuera un criminal. Un documento gubernamental, al que tuvo acceso la agencia Associated Press, detallaba que “no existen elementos de convicción ni indicios que puedan llevar a la autoridad fiscal o judicial a tener la certeza” de que Tufiño había cometido un delito en territorio ecuatoriano. La cadena estadounidense CNN encontró que, aunque no tenía un expediente criminal en Ecuador, sí lo tenía en Estados Unidos: había sido arrestado y condenado en 2020 por contrabando de drogas, delito por el que fue deportado.Las autoridades colombianas contaban, en principio, con más tiempo antes de que Obando Pérez fuera dado de alta. Una semana después de su repatriación, un informe médico reservado indicaba que el hombre había sido ingresado con “una fractura en la base del cráneo y órbita, así como lesiones intracerebrales” aunque presentaba “mejoras” y le había sido retirada la asistencia respiratoria. Su recuperación se aceleró y fue dado de alta, de forma privada y sin difusión alguna, el pasado martes por el Hospital de Kennedy, de la red pública de Bogotá. “Salió bien y por sus propios medios”, indica una fuente médica.El jefe de derechos humanos de la ONU, Volker Türk, aseguró la semana pasada que los bombardeos ordenados por Trump “violan el derecho internacional” pues se tratan de “ejecuciones extrajudiciales”, una denuncia que han apoyado desde septiembre, cuando se atacó a la primera embarcación en el Caribe, organizaciones de derechos humanos como Human Rights Watch y Amnistía Internacional. La campaña militar de Washington en aguas internacionales, que ya se extendió al océano Pacífico, ha matado a al menos 64 personas. Obando Pérez, Tufiño y otra persona de la que se desconocen sus datos y que sobrevivió a un ataque en el Pacífico, han sido los únicos sobrevivientes.La decisión de haber enviado al colombiano y al ecuatoriano a sus respectivos países no es arbitraria. Expertos jurídicos señalaban a la agencia Reuters que, así, Washington no “tendría que lidiar con espinosas cuestiones legales relacionadas con la detención militar de presuntos narcotraficantes” pues sus supuestos delitos “no encajan con claridad en las leyes de la guerra”.

The Pentagon used a secret aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane in its first attack on a boat that the Trump administration said was smuggling drugs, killing 11 people last September, according to officials briefed on the matter. The aircraft also carried its munitions inside the fuselage, rather than visibly under its wings, they said. The nonmilitary appearance is significant, according to legal specialists, because the administration has argued its lethal boat attacks are lawful — not murders — because President Trump “determined” the United States is in an armed conflict with drug cartels. But the laws of armed conflict prohibit combatants from feigning civilian status to fool adversaries into dropping their guard, then attacking and killing them. That is a war crime called “perfidy.” Retired Maj. Gen. Steven J. Lepper, a former deputy judge advocate general for the United States Air Force, said that if the aircraft had been painted in a way that disguised its military nature and got close enough for the people on the boat to see it — tricking them into failing to realize they should take evasive action or surrender to survive — that was a war crime under armed-conflict standards. “Shielding your identity is an element of perfidy,” he said. “If the aircraft flying above is not identifiable as a combatant aircraft, it should not be engaged in combatant activity.” The aircraft swooped in low enough for the people aboard the boat to see it, according to officials who have seen or been briefed on surveillance video from the attack. The boat had turned back toward Venezuela, apparently after seeing the plane, before the first strike. Two survivors of the initial attack later appeared to wave at the aircraft after clambering aboard an overturned piece of the hull, before the military killed them in a follow-up strike that also sank the wreckage. It is not clear whether the initial survivors knew that the explosion on their vessel had been caused by a missile attack. The military has since switched to using recognizably military aircraft for boat strikes, including MQ-9 Reaper drones, although it is not clear whether those aircraft got low enough to be seen. In a boat attack in October, two survivors of an initial strike swam away from the wreckage and so avoided being killed by a follow-up strike on the remnants of their vessel. The military rescued them and returned them to their home countries, Colombia and Ecuador. U.S. military manuals about the law of war discuss perfidy at length, saying it includes when a combatant feigns civilian status so the adversary “neglects to take precautions which are otherwise necessary.” A U.S. Navy handbook says lawful combatants at sea use offensive force “within the bounds of military honor, particularly without resort to perfidy,” and stresses that commanders have a “duty” to “distinguish their own forces from the civilian population.” Questions about perfidy have arisen in closed-door briefings of Congress by military leaders, according to people familiar with the matter, but have not been publicly discussed because the aircraft is classified. The public debate has focused on a follow-up strike that killed the two initial survivors, despite a war-law prohibition on targeting the shipwrecked. The press office for the U.S. Special Operations Command, whose leader, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ran the operation on Sept. 2, declined to comment on the nature of the aircraft used in the attack. But the Pentagon insisted in a statement that its arsenal has undergone legal review for compliance with the laws of armed conflict. “The U.S. military utilizes a wide array of standard and nonstandard aircraft depending on mission requirements,” Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, said in response to questions from The New York Times. “Prior to the fielding and employment of each aircraft, they go through a rigorous procurement process to ensure compliance with domestic law, department policies and regulations, and applicable international standards, including the law of armed conflict.” A White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, issued a statement that did not specifically engage with the perfidy issues but defended the strike as having been directed by Mr. Trump to go after “narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities.” She added: “The strike was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict.” It is not clear what the aircraft was. While multiple officials confirmed that it was not painted in a classic military style, they declined to specify exactly what it looked like. Editors’ Picks How a Travel Writer Became Timothée Chalamet’s Ping-Pong Nemesis ‘The Man and I Both Immediately Lost Our Composure’ Why Doesn’t My Boss Respect Sick Days? Amateur plane-spotting enthusiasts posted pictures on Reddit in early September of what appeared to be one of the military’s modified 737s, painted white with a blue stripe and with no military markings, at the St. Croix airport in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Regardless of the specific aircraft at issue, three people familiar with the matter acknowledged that it was not painted in the usual military gray and lacked military markings. But they said its transponder was transmitting a military tail number, meaning broadcasting or “squawking” its military identity via radio signals. Several law-of-war experts said that would not make the use of such an aircraft lawful in these circumstances since the people on the boat probably lacked equipment to pick up the signal. Among the legal specialists who said the use of a military transponder signal would not solve a perfidy problem was Todd Huntley, a retired Navy captain who formerly deployed with the Joint Special Operations Command as a judge advocate general, or JAG, and directed the Navy’s national security law division. Captain Huntley said he could think of legitimate uses for such an aircraft that would make it lawful to have in the arsenal for other contexts, including a hostage rescue scenario in which munitions might be needed for self-defense but were not intended for launching offensive attacks. The Trump administration kept planning for the boat attacks operation closely held, excluding many military lawyers and operational experts who would normally be involved. Moreover, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has sought to undercut the role of military lawyers as an internal check, including by firing the top service JAGs in February. The U.S. military operates several aircraft that are built on civilian airframes — including modified Boeing 737s and Cessna turboprops — and can launch munitions from internal weapons bays without visible external armaments. Such aircraft are usually painted gray and have military markings, but military and plane-spotting websites show that a few are painted white and have minimal markings. The U.S. military has killed at least 123 people in 35 attacks on boats, including the Sept. 2 strike. A broad range of specialists in laws governing the use of force have said the orders by Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth to attack the boats have been illegal and the killings have been murders. The military is not allowed to target civilians who pose no imminent threat, even if they are suspected of crimes. The administration has argued that the strikes are lawful and the people on the boats are “combatants” because Mr. Trump decided the situation was a so-called noninternational armed conflict — meaning a war against a nonstate actor — between the United States and a secret list of 24 criminal gangs and drug cartels he has deemed terrorists. The legitimacy of that claim is widely disputed. Still, it has put attention on ways particular attacks might have violated the laws of war. Like General Lepper and Captain Huntley, Geoffrey Corn, a retired lieutenant colonel JAG officer who was the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said he does not believe that the Sept. 2 attack took place in an armed conflict. He is now a law professor at Texas Tech University. But he noted that the United States considers perfidy to be a crime in noninternational armed conflicts: It charged a Guantánamo detainee before a military commission with that offense over Al Qaeda’s 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in which militants in a small boat floated a hidden bomb up to the side of the warship while waving in a friendly manner. Professor Corn said an assessment of whether the Sept. 2 attack counted as perfidy would turn on whether the military was trying to make the people on the boat think the aircraft was civilian to “get the jump” on them. “The critical question is whether there is a credible alternative reason for using an unmarked aircraft to conduct the attack other than exploiting apparent civilian status to gain some tactical advantage,” he said.

QUITO, Ecuador — The police arrived at the airport prepared to arrest a drug trafficker — a mariner whose crewmates the U.S. military had just killed. Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila was one of only two people known to have survived a U.S. strike on a vessel that the Trump administration alleged was smuggling drugs from South America. President Donald Trump had described the Ecuadorian and a fellow survivor of the Oct. 16 strike in the Atlantic Ocean as “terrorists” who would be returned to their countries of origin “for detention and prosecution.” In Ecuador — a government closely aligned with Trump on counternarcotics enforcement — the administration had a willing partner, eager to learn, several officials here said, what the alleged trafficker could tell them about his employers. Tufiño, then 41, stepped off the U.S. military plane at the Quito airport on the morning of Oct. 18 in shackles, cut and bruised from the attack but walking on his own, according to Col. Carlos Ortega, then the director of anti-narcotics for Ecuador’s national police. He was already a known trafficker: He had pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to cocaine distribution conspiracy in 2021 and served more than three years in a U.S. prison before he was deported home to Ecuador last year. Now the U.S. military had picked him up amid the wreckage of a semisubmersible vessel — a “narco sub.” In his gang-controlled hometown, Tufiño was known as Fresco Solo, neighbors said, a skilled navigator they alleged was recruited by criminals to smuggle drugs north. But in transferring him to Ecuadorian custody, three officials here said, U.S. forces didn’t provide any evidence that could be used to detain him — no seized drugs, no phone or GPS records, no videos, none of the intelligence that led them to target his vessel. On landing in Quito, U.S. officials told the Ecuadorians that the transfer was a “humanitarian” repatriation, Ortega said. Within hours, Tufiño was let go. U.S. forces have killed at least 105 people in 29 strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean since the beginning of September, officials say, in a campaign that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth say is aimed at stopping an existential threat: “narco-terrorists” flooding the United States with lethal drugs. Others, including legal analysts and lawmakers from both parties have described the attacks as extrajudicial killings, which are illegal under U.S. and international law. A Washington Post investigation into the Oct. 16 strike reveals a gap between the administration’s tough-on-trafficking rhetoric and its actions on the high seas. Trump has declared a “non-international armed conflict” on drug cartels. The White House and the Pentagon have likened traffickers to members of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State — terrorists who wield drugs as weapons to kill Americans. But in destroying rather than collecting evidence, and turning the two survivors over to foreign governments rather than prosecuting them, they set alleged enemies free, cutting short a process that U.S. law enforcement has used to investigate smuggling operations and confront the criminals behind them. “If these people were drug traffickers and deserving of death,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), a member of the House intelligence and foreign affairs committees, “how is it that you would pick them up and just let them go?” This report on the only strike known publicly to have left survivors is based on interviews with government and security officials in Ecuador, Colombia and the U.S., Ecuadorian intelligence and immigration records, a visit to Tufiño’s hometown and interviews with several people familiar with his alleged role in the drug trade. Several officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive details of an ongoing campaign. Repeated attempts by The Post to reach Tufiño by telephone, email and social media were unsuccessful. Ecuadorian officials say they don’t know where he is. Jeremy Warren, the San Diego lawyer who represented Tufiño in his 2020 case, has also lost contact with him, he said. He told The Post that Tufiño was an “unsophisticated” fisherman who lived simply. He was one of many skilled mariners who were recruited — sometimes lured by money, sometimes forced — to take jobs running drugs, Warren said. For decades, U.S. law enforcement agencies have successfully interdicted drug traffickers in the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, seizing multiton shipments of cocaine in operations that have helped prosecutors indict, extradite and imprison some of the most powerful cartel leaders in Latin America. In January and February, the Panama Express Strike Force — which brings together the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI and federal prosecutors in Florida — seized more than 44,500 pounds of cocaine, worth more than half a billion dollars, and detained 34 suspected traffickers in investigations linked to the most powerful Mexican cartels, officials said. Still, the cocaine trade has continued to flourish, breaking records annually to meet rising global demand for the drug. Europe has supplanted the U.S. as the primary destination for the South American product. The decision to launch a military campaign against mostly small vessels off South and Central America has been consequential. U.S. military forces do not regularly collect evidence of crimes committed by civilians like drug traffickers, according to former military lawyers and current and former DEA officials. The Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, is the primary agency for intercepting maritime drug traffickers. But instead of attempting to stop and detain suspected traffickers, the administration is launching lethal strikes. Keeping survivors out of the U.S. justice system, critics say, helps the administration sidestep judicial scrutiny of its approach. “They are trying to avoid having to defend their policies and standards in court,” said one DEA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. “Once they had custody of these people, it was clear … they were going to try to get rid of them expeditiously,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser on counterterrorism and military force. Revealing evidence in court, he said, would have been “politically disadvantageous.” Keeping the case out of court also protects the policy’s architects from discovery and the people who execute it from being called in. “The military is not going to let their guys testify,” a former DEA agent said. “They don’t want to go down that road. It’s better to let the guy go than expose sources and methods.” The Pentagon declined to answer further questions about the strike or Tufiño’s rescue and repatriation. “We have consistently said that our intelligence did indeed confirm these boats were trafficking narcotics destined for America,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote in a statement to The Post. “That same intelligence also confirms that the individuals involved in these drug operations are/were narco-terrorists, and we stand by that assessment.” Ahead of the Oct. 16 strike, U.S. personnel tracking Tufiño’s vessel assessed that it was headed for Europe, not the U.S., two U.S. officials told The Post. Some of the U.S. strikes have targeted go-fast boats; others have targeted fishing vessels. But the Oct. 16 attack is the only strike known publicly to have targeted a semisubmersible. Such vessels, which can speed through the ocean just under the water’s surface, are relatively uncommon — but they’re prized by cartels because they can carry large shipments of drugs, and their low profiles make them harder to detect than ordinary boats. Trump has describe the semisubmersible as “a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs,” though it doesn’t fully submerge. A senior Ecuadorian police official said it was clear that “the only thing [Tufiño] could be doing is taking drugs.” “Someone on the high seas” in such a vessel, he said, “isn’t just out there to go for a ride for fun.” But to charge a trafficking suspect picked up by a foreign government, Ecuadorian prosecutors require a sample of the drugs. And any such evidence, if it existed, is now at the bottom of the ocean. A change in protocol For the administration’s campaign against boats off South and Central America, the Oct. 16 strike was a turning point. The first strike of the campaign, on Sept. 2, targeted a go-fast boat with 11 people on board in the waters off Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. (Trump said that vessel was carrying transporting illegal narcotics to the U.S.; U.S. and foreign officials said the route on which it was attacked is used to smuggle cocaine and marijuana to Europe and Africa.) Hegseth gave his approval to kill the passengers, sink the boat and destroy the drugs, according to three people familiar with the operation. As two survivors clung to the wreckage, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the strike commander, determined they were still viable targets and, after consulting with a military lawyer, ordered a second strike, killing them, The Post reported last month. Subsequently, commanders prioritized rescuing strike survivors, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. It is unclear who directed the change, when or why. The Oct. 16 strike was the sixth reported by the administration. Despite assessing that the semisubmersible was bound for Europe, according to two officials, U.S. forces dropped in for the kill. An AC-130J Ghostrider, a manned Special Operations attack aircraft, struck the vessel twice in an opening salvo, overhead video posted by Trump shows, sending plumes of smoke into the air. The crew inside scrambled to escape through the hatch, according to a U.S. official familiar with the operation. Tufiño and another man dropped into the water, leaving two others most likely inside the vessel, the official said. Tufiño and the other survivor, subsequently identified by the Colombian attorney general’s office as Colombian Jonatan Obando Paredes, held onto to some debris in the choppy waves, according to a second U.S. official, who reviewed surveillance video of the operation. “We watched these guys just bob in the water,” the second official said. A follow-up strike sank the vessel, and commanders determined the mission was over, according to a person familiar with the attack. U.S. forces rescued the survivors and took them back to the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima, officials said. Hegseth said that the Oct. 16 strike was “a different circumstance” than the Sept. 2 double strike. “We didn’t change our protocol, it was just a different circumstance,” he told the Reagan National Defense Forum in Washington this month. “A couple guys jumped off and swam, from what I understand, a ways away. When we struck the submarine a second time, it sunk, and then you had two people that you had to go get, and we had the ability to go get them. We gave them back to their host countries.” U.S. officials asked Ecuador and Colombia to prepare to receive repatriated nationals, officials from both countries said. A U.S. military flight departed from the Dominican Republic and took Tufiño to Quito and Obando to Bogotá. Obando had suffered a brain injury, Colombian officials said. He was in an induced coma and attached to a ventilator. He was hospitalized for five days in Colombia, the officials said, and released. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has condemned the U.S. boat strikes, saying that they kill mostly poor and young couriers without affecting the cartel leaders who are getting rich on the trade. But Colombia remains the most important U.S. ally in South America, and the countries’ security forces continue to work closely to combat drug trafficking. Still, when the U.S. transferred Obando, a Colombian official said, “They hadn’t handed over any information, no elements to prosecute him.” The investigation is now closed, according to the Colombian attorney general’s office. Tufiño refused to provide any information to Ecuadorian investigators, according to Ortega, the former director of anti-narcotics for Ecuador’s national police. He left no number with the authorities. A prosecutor asked police to track down contact information for the man, according to the attorney general’s office, but no progress has been made to reach him. Some members of Congress have expressed frustration at the paucity of information provided by the administration about the strikes. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has called the strikes “illegal” and “outrageous.” Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (New York), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, questioned the decision not to prosecute the survivors in U.S. courts “as we would expect if these individuals were, in fact, dangerous drug traffickers bound for the United States.” “No arrests. No interrogation. No intelligence collection,” he said on the House floor. “That decision raises serious questions about the administration’s own assessment of threat, necessity, and purpose.” The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The journey of Fresco Solo In a handwritten message from prison in April 2023, Tufiño warned his “friends” about the “American Dream.” “The only thing I want you to know,” he wrote, “is that I’ll be waiting for you here with a cell, a broom, and a mop.” Tufiño in 2020 had been the master of a go-fast boat carrying more than a ton of cocaine to a rendezvous with another vessel when it was intercepted by the Coast Guard, investigators said. He was arrested, pleaded guilty to cocaine distribution conspiracy and was sentenced to five years. In that investigation, authorities recovered GPS units with coordinates, satellite phones, cellphones and the markings on the cocaine, according to Warren, Tufiño’s former attorney. “All of that is a treasure trove of intelligence information.” In a sentencing memo, Warren told the court that Tufiño had been recruited for “a king’s ransom” — $6,000 — to pilot a small boat with a small crew moving cocaine on the high seas. At the time, once-tranquil Ecuador was emerging as a major transit country for cocaine. With increasingly powerful gangs teaming up with Mexican cartels and Albanian mafias to compete for control of trafficking routes, it’s now one of the most violent countries in the region. In the port town of Anconcito, residents said, fishermen began to buy 75-inch televisions, SUVs and rounds of drinks for at the bar for everyone. Anconcito is Tufiño’s hometown. Neighbors, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals, said he’s known locally as a fisherman who has smuggled drugs. The main employer here for skilled mariners, they say, is the Los Choneros gang, a longtime local liaison to the Sinaloa cartel. In Anconcito, residents said, a kind of revolving door has become familiar: Fishermen are recruited to smuggle drugs; are arrested and taken to the U.S.; are tried, convicted, imprisoned and later deported, soon to return to the trade. Few outsiders visit Anconcito. Los Choneros have for years controlled the port and others along this coastline, provincial police commander Jorge Hadathy says, extorting and threatening residents and increasingly killing fishermen in targeted attacks. Other gangs, such as Los Lobos and Los Lagartos, have stepped in to compete. None of them appear to have been deterred by the recent U.S. boat strikes, Ecuadorian intelligence authorities say. Authorities here have seized more than 171 tons of cocaine at sea this year, up from about 129 tons in 2024. One Ecuadorian official intelligence told The Post he expected that Tufiño would return to the trade. “What do you think he could do?” he asked. “That’s the easiest money.He already knows the route, he has the contacts.”

QUITO, Ecuador — The police arrived at the airport prepared to arrest a drug trafficker — a mariner whose crewmates the U.S. military had just killed. Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila was one of only two people known to have survived a U.S. strike on a vessel that the Trump administration alleged was smuggling drugs from South America. President Donald Trump had described the Ecuadorian and a fellow survivor of the Oct. 16 strike in the Atlantic Ocean as “terrorists” who would be returned to their countries of origin “for detention and prosecution.” In Ecuador — a government closely aligned with Trump on counternarcotics enforcement — the administration had a willing partner, eager to learn, several officials here said, what the alleged trafficker could tell them about his employers. Tufiño, then 41, stepped off the U.S. military plane at the Quito airport on the morning of Oct. 18 in shackles, cut and bruised from the attack but walking on his own, according to Col. Carlos Ortega, then the director of anti-narcotics for Ecuador’s national police. He was already a known trafficker: He had pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to cocaine distribution conspiracy in 2021 and served more than three years in a U.S. prison before he was deported home to Ecuador last year. Now the U.S. military had picked him up amid the wreckage of a semisubmersible vessel — a “narco sub.” In his gang-controlled hometown, Tufiño was known as Fresco Solo, neighbors said, a skilled navigator they alleged was recruited by criminals to smuggle drugs north. But in transferring him to Ecuadorian custody, three officials here said, U.S. forces didn’t provide any evidence that could be used to detain him — no seized drugs, no phone or GPS records, no videos, none of the intelligence that led them to target his vessel. On landing in Quito, U.S. officials told the Ecuadorians that the transfer was a “humanitarian” repatriation, Ortega said. Within hours, Tufiño was let go. U.S. forces have killed at least 105 people in 29 strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean since the beginning of September, officials say, in a campaign that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth say is aimed at stopping an existential threat: “narco-terrorists” flooding the United States with lethal drugs. Others, including legal analysts and lawmakers from both parties have described the attacks as extrajudicial killings, which are illegal under U.S. and international law. A Washington Post investigation into the Oct. 16 strike reveals a gap between the administration’s tough-on-trafficking rhetoric and its actions on the high seas. Trump has declared a “non-international armed conflict” on drug cartels. The White House and the Pentagon have likened traffickers to members of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State — terrorists who wield drugs as weapons to kill Americans. But in destroying rather than collecting evidence, and turning the two survivors over to foreign governments rather than prosecuting them, they set alleged enemies free, cutting short a process that U.S. law enforcement has used to investigate smuggling operations and confront the criminals behind them. “If these people were drug traffickers and deserving of death,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), a member of the House intelligence and foreign affairs committees, “how is it that you would pick them up and just let them go?” This report on the only strike known publicly to have left survivors is based on interviews with government and security officials in Ecuador, Colombia and the U.S., Ecuadorian intelligence and immigration records, a visit to Tufiño’s hometown and interviews with several people familiar with his alleged role in the drug trade. Several officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive details of an ongoing campaign. Repeated attempts by The Post to reach Tufiño by telephone, email and social media were unsuccessful. Ecuadorian officials say they don’t know where he is. Jeremy Warren, the San Diego lawyer who represented Tufiño in his 2020 case, has also lost contact with him, he said. He told The Post that Tufiño was an “unsophisticated” fisherman who lived simply. He was one of many skilled mariners who were recruited — sometimes lured by money, sometimes forced — to take jobs running drugs, Warren said. For decades, U.S. law enforcement agencies have successfully interdicted drug traffickers in the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, seizing multiton shipments of cocaine in operations that have helped prosecutors indict, extradite and imprison some of the most powerful cartel leaders in Latin America. In January and February, the Panama Express Strike Force — which brings together the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI and federal prosecutors in Florida — seized more than 44,500 pounds of cocaine, worth more than half a billion dollars, and detained 34 suspected traffickers in investigations linked to the most powerful Mexican cartels, officials said. Still, the cocaine trade has continued to flourish, breaking records annually to meet rising global demand for the drug. Europe has supplanted the U.S. as the primary destination for the South American product. The decision to launch a military campaign against mostly small vessels off South and Central America has been consequential. U.S. military forces do not regularly collect evidence of crimes committed by civilians like drug traffickers, according to former military lawyers and current and former DEA officials. The Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, is the primary agency for intercepting maritime drug traffickers. But instead of attempting to stop and detain suspected traffickers, the administration is launching lethal strikes. Keeping survivors out of the U.S. justice system, critics say, helps the administration sidestep judicial scrutiny of its approach. “They are trying to avoid having to defend their policies and standards in court,” said one DEA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details. “Once they had custody of these people, it was clear … they were going to try to get rid of them expeditiously,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser on counterterrorism and military force. Revealing evidence in court, he said, would have been “politically disadvantageous.” Keeping the case out of court also protects the policy’s architects from discovery and the people who execute it from being called in. “The military is not going to let their guys testify,” a former DEA agent said. “They don’t want to go down that road. It’s better to let the guy go than expose sources and methods.” The Pentagon declined to answer further questions about the strike or Tufiño’s rescue and repatriation. “We have consistently said that our intelligence did indeed confirm these boats were trafficking narcotics destined for America,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell wrote in a statement to The Post. “That same intelligence also confirms that the individuals involved in these drug operations are/were narco-terrorists, and we stand by that assessment.” Ahead of the Oct. 16 strike, U.S. personnel tracking Tufiño’s vessel assessed that it was headed for Europe, not the U.S., two U.S. officials told The Post. Some of the U.S. strikes have targeted go-fast boats; others have targeted fishing vessels. But the Oct. 16 attack is the only strike known publicly to have targeted a semisubmersible. Such vessels, which can speed through the ocean just under the water’s surface, are relatively uncommon — but they’re prized by cartels because they can carry large shipments of drugs, and their low profiles make them harder to detect than ordinary boats. Trump has describe the semisubmersible as “a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs,” though it doesn’t fully submerge. A senior Ecuadorian police official said it was clear that “the only thing [Tufiño] could be doing is taking drugs.” “Someone on the high seas” in such a vessel, he said, “isn’t just out there to go for a ride for fun.” But to charge a trafficking suspect picked up by a foreign government, Ecuadorian prosecutors require a sample of the drugs. And any such evidence, if it existed, is now at the bottom of the ocean. A change in protocol For the administration’s campaign against boats off South and Central America, the Oct. 16 strike was a turning point. The first strike of the campaign, on Sept. 2, targeted a go-fast boat with 11 people on board in the waters off Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. (Trump said that vessel was carrying transporting illegal narcotics to the U.S.; U.S. and foreign officials said the route on which it was attacked is used to smuggle cocaine and marijuana to Europe and Africa.) Hegseth gave his approval to kill the passengers, sink the boat and destroy the drugs, according to three people familiar with the operation. As two survivors clung to the wreckage, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the strike commander, determined they were still viable targets and, after consulting with a military lawyer, ordered a second strike, killing them, The Post reported last month. Subsequently, commanders prioritized rescuing strike survivors, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. It is unclear who directed the change, when or why. The Oct. 16 strike was the sixth reported by the administration. Despite assessing that the semisubmersible was bound for Europe, according to two officials, U.S. forces dropped in for the kill. An AC-130J Ghostrider, a manned Special Operations attack aircraft, struck the vessel twice in an opening salvo, overhead video posted by Trump shows, sending plumes of smoke into the air. The crew inside scrambled to escape through the hatch, according to a U.S. official familiar with the operation. Tufiño and another man dropped into the water, leaving two others most likely inside the vessel, the official said. Tufiño and the other survivor, subsequently identified by the Colombian attorney general’s office as Colombian Jonatan Obando Paredes, held onto to some debris in the choppy waves, according to a second U.S. official, who reviewed surveillance video of the operation. “We watched these guys just bob in the water,” the second official said. A follow-up strike sank the vessel, and commanders determined the mission was over, according to a person familiar with the attack. U.S. forces rescued the survivors and took them back to the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima, officials said. Hegseth said that the Oct. 16 strike was “a different circumstance” than the Sept. 2 double strike. “We didn’t change our protocol, it was just a different circumstance,” he told the Reagan National Defense Forum in Washington this month. “A couple guys jumped off and swam, from what I understand, a ways away. When we struck the submarine a second time, it sunk, and then you had two people that you had to go get, and we had the ability to go get them. We gave them back to their host countries.” U.S. officials asked Ecuador and Colombia to prepare to receive repatriated nationals, officials from both countries said. A U.S. military flight departed from the Dominican Republic and took Tufiño to Quito and Obando to Bogotá. Obando had suffered a brain injury, Colombian officials said. He was in an induced coma and attached to a ventilator. He was hospitalized for five days in Colombia, the officials said, and released. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has condemned the U.S. boat strikes, saying that they kill mostly poor and young couriers without affecting the cartel leaders who are getting rich on the trade. But Colombia remains the most important U.S. ally in South America, and the countries’ security forces continue to work closely to combat drug trafficking. Still, when the U.S. transferred Obando, a Colombian official said, “They hadn’t handed over any information, no elements to prosecute him.” The investigation is now closed, according to the Colombian attorney general’s office. Tufiño refused to provide any information to Ecuadorian investigators, according to Ortega, the former director of anti-narcotics for Ecuador’s national police. He left no number with the authorities. A prosecutor asked police to track down contact information for the man, according to the attorney general’s office, but no progress has been made to reach him. Some members of Congress have expressed frustration at the paucity of information provided by the administration about the strikes. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has called the strikes “illegal” and “outrageous.” Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (New York), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, questioned the decision not to prosecute the survivors in U.S. courts “as we would expect if these individuals were, in fact, dangerous drug traffickers bound for the United States.” “No arrests. No interrogation. No intelligence collection,” he said on the House floor. “That decision raises serious questions about the administration’s own assessment of threat, necessity, and purpose.” The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The journey of Fresco Solo In a handwritten message from prison in April 2023, Tufiño warned his “friends” about the “American Dream.” “The only thing I want you to know,” he wrote, “is that I’ll be waiting for you here with a cell, a broom, and a mop.” Tufiño in 2020 had been the master of a go-fast boat carrying more than a ton of cocaine to a rendezvous with another vessel when it was intercepted by the Coast Guard, investigators said. He was arrested, pleaded guilty to cocaine distribution conspiracy and was sentenced to five years. In that investigation, authorities recovered GPS units with coordinates, satellite phones, cellphones and the markings on the cocaine, according to Warren, Tufiño’s former attorney. “All of that is a treasure trove of intelligence information.” In a sentencing memo, Warren told the court that Tufiño had been recruited for “a king’s ransom” — $6,000 — to pilot a small boat with a small crew moving cocaine on the high seas. At the time, once-tranquil Ecuador was emerging as a major transit country for cocaine. With increasingly powerful gangs teaming up with Mexican cartels and Albanian mafias to compete for control of trafficking routes, it’s now one of the most violent countries in the region. In the port town of Anconcito, residents said, fishermen began to buy 75-inch televisions, SUVs and rounds of drinks for at the bar for everyone. Anconcito is Tufiño’s hometown. Neighbors, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals, said he’s known locally as a fisherman who has smuggled drugs. The main employer here for skilled mariners, they say, is the Los Choneros gang, a longtime local liaison to the Sinaloa cartel. In Anconcito, residents said, a kind of revolving door has become familiar: Fishermen are recruited to smuggle drugs; are arrested and taken to the U.S.; are tried, convicted, imprisoned and later deported, soon to return to the trade. Few outsiders visit Anconcito. Los Choneros have for years controlled the port and others along this coastline, provincial police commander Jorge Hadathy says, extorting and threatening residents and increasingly killing fishermen in targeted attacks. Other gangs, such as Los Lobos and Los Lagartos, have stepped in to compete. None of them appear to have been deterred by the recent U.S. boat strikes, Ecuadorian intelligence authorities say. Authorities here have seized more than 171 tons of cocaine at sea this year, up from about 129 tons in 2024. One Ecuadorian official intelligence told The Post he expected that Tufiño would return to the trade. “What do you think he could do?” he asked. “That’s the easiest money. He already knows the route, he has the contacts.”

One of the two survivors of Trump’s Caribbean bombings: ‘Dad, I would have been better off dead’ María Martín · March 7, 2026 · elpais.com Jonathan Obando, a Colombian citizen, survived one of the 41 deadly attacks conducted by Washington against alleged drug-trafficking boats. His father tells his son’s story for the first time Rosendo Obando, father of Jonatan Obando, in Tumaco, on February 24. Santiago Mesa Rosendo Obando rarely answers the phone, because he usually doesn’t get reception. But the night he answered his former daughter-in-law’s call, he was in for a shock. “Your son was bombed over there. Go look for him in Bogotá.” “Over there” was the Caribbean, thousands of miles from home. From his village — built out of wooden planks on a mangrove swamp in southwestern Colombia — Obando wondered what had happened. The last time he’d heard from his son, a month-and-a-half earlier, he’d been fishing in Panama. He had no idea what his former daughter-in-law was talking about. His 33-year-old son waited in an induced coma, intubated, at the airport in the Colombian capital. Swollen, with bloodshot eyes, he had just survived something that — until recently — was unthinkable for a poor fisherman on the Pacific coast: a bomb, dropped by Donald Trump. Jonathan Obando — known to everyone as “Chiquitín” — is one of only two known survivors of the 41 deadly attacks that Washington has carried out since September 2, 2025, in a non-transparent campaign against drug trafficking. Authorities have confirmed more than 150 deaths in total, with no arrests or prosecutions in any of these cases. The other survivor was Ecuadorian citizen Andrés Fernando Tufiño, who had a history of drug trafficking. He had completed his sentence in the United States and was released as soon as he set foot in Ecuador. Any potential evidence against him was destroyed in the bombing. Obando and Tufiño were victims of the attack on October 16, 2025. After blowing up several boats, this was the first bombing of a semi-submersible vessel that — according to the United States — was transporting all kinds of drugs, including fentanyl. Images from that day show a submarine speeding along and three missiles being fired at it. Until that moment, none of these attacks had left any survivors. There were others afterward, but they disappeared at sea, drowned, or reached land without anyone rescuing them. According to the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), there’s no record of them reaching any shore alive. The sea holds the secret of what happened to them. Tufiño quickly vanished, while his sister — through the media — tried to dispel his image as a criminal. She said that Tufiño was a fisherman, which was true. Obando’s story, however, hadn’t been told out of fear. It is his father who shares it for the first time with EL PAÍS. That hot October night when he received the call, Rosendo Obando — whom everyone calls “El Profe” (“the prof”) because he runs a small school an hour-and-a-half by boat from his home — grabbed his backpack and said goodbye to Margarita, his wife. He then went down to the wooden pier and got on a small boat. Starting out from the tiny fishing village where he lives, he made his way through a swampy sea, in search of the youngest (and quietest) of his four children. The journey to the nearest city on the mainland — two hours and 20 minutes total, with a 200-horsepower engine — reminds the inhabitants of these remote territories just how far removed they are from everything, and how forgotten they are by everyone. Once in Tumaco — a port city, the so-called “Pearl of the Pacific” — he boarded the plane that would take him to Bogotá, where, many years ago, he had worked as a police officer. When he saw his son, he was horrified. “They left him there, practically dead, at the airport. He couldn’t even speak,” he recalls. Later, they took him to the hospital. It was reported that he had suffered a brain injury, but his father doesn’t know the exact diagnosis. He only remembers how swollen his son was, how red his eyes were, the bruises he had. “They kept him in a hallway without doing anything until I told them, ‘Get to work on him, I’ll take out a loan to pay for it.’ He was going to die.” Margarita, the young man’s mother, called her husband constantly. She wanted to know what was going on. But he didn’t know much. “I thought there was [rule of] law here, or in the United States, that someone would explain to me what was happening,” El Profe remembers. “I demanded an explanation as to why they hadn’t given him proper first aid, because he’s a human being. Even if he had been transporting cocaine, he’s a human being. They should have caught him alive and tried him,” he says, without raising his voice. El Profe spent eight days in the hospital room watching his son regain consciousness. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and prosecutors would pass through. Trump — who called the survivors “terrorists” — promised that they would be prosecuted in their own countries. But Obando had no criminal record, nor was there any evidence against him. Trump’s strategy against narcoterrorism is paradoxical: he justifies the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug traffickers, but those who survive go free, because there’s no evidence to charge them with. The evidence is destroyed before it can be collected. “They are trying to avoid having to defend their policies and standards in court,” a DEA official told The Washington Post. Bringing them to trial might reveal the inconsistencies in the official White House narrative — the one that prevails — in several of these episodes that are almost never scrutinized. It would expose potential errors and perhaps call into question the effectiveness of eliminating the weakest link in the trafficking chain. Pescadores en el océano Pacífico, el 24 de febrero de 2026. Pescadores en el océano Pacífico, el 24 de febrero de 2026. From his hospital bed, Chiquitín began to speak. The ringing in his ears — caused by the explosions — barely allowed him to think. The first thing he did was deny that he had been on the submarine. According to what he told his father, there were several fishing boats around the vessel. The bombs, he said, threw them all into the air. “The sea was filled with blood and body parts,” he told him. He and Tufiño (it’s unclear whether they knew each other beforehand) climbed into an inflatable raft, waiting to be rescued. Another Ecuadorian man was with them and died after helping them get aboard. The Americans subsequently took the two men aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima and gave them basic first aid. From there, they went to the Dominican Republic to board a military planeback to their respective home countries. In the images released by U.S. authorities, no other boats are visible near the submarine, although the framing is closed. “The Colombian’s version can’t be completely ruled out, because the boats might be out of the picture,” says Adam Isacson, an analyst at WOLA, who compiles the known details of each of these episodes. “[The Trump administration] is a government that lies and keeps secrets.” El Profe avoids speculating about the extreme coincidence that all those boats — including his son’s — were right in the vicinity of a semi-submersible right at the moment of the strike. He believes what his son told him from his hospital bed. And, at the same time, he acknowledges that the line separating fishermen from crime can become blurred. Many — in addition to getting their catch of the day — act as lookouts, which is very different from being a trafficker or a narco-terrorist. Varios pescadores faenan en el océano Pacífico, el 24 de febrero de 2026. Varios pescadores faenan en el océano Pacífico, el 24 de febrero de 2026. The fishermen of the Pacific and the Caribbean regions of Colombia are thousands of extra eyes on a sea that’s too vast for criminal organizations to fully grasp. Since they need to protect their drug routes, the traffickers hire them as lookouts. They’re the first to spot a rival’s plane, a patrol boat, or another vessel approaching. Reporting what they see provides them with an almost indispensable source of extra income when compared to salaries of barely 1.5 million Colombian pesos a month (about $400). In places like this — without potable water and with frequent power outages — the guerrillas fill the gaps left by the state. Dissident groups from the now-defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) maintain a presence in the area and control illegal economies, such as drug trafficking. Violence fell when they got involved in the peace negotiations with the government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, but in several of these villages built on stilts, the guerillas still dictate who comes and goes. They’re the ones who scrutinize visitors upon arrival and decide, with a simple gesture, whether they can stay. They’re the ones who, just a few years ago, sowed armed terror in the mangroves. Many of the region’s fishermen end up collaborating with the traffickers out of economic necessity. Some may be striving to build a better house, while others may simply be pressured into cooperating. “It was really hard for me, because I had to fight for my [livelihood] from a young age,” says Santiago, who got involved with one of these armed groups at the age of 14. “I grew up with my aunt in a house where, if we had breakfast, we didn’t have lunch. And, if we had lunch, we didn’t have dinner,” he recalls, speaking on the condition of anonymity. For years, he worked helping to produce cocaine and building the boats that send drugs north. In five months, he could earn 100 million Colombian pesos (about $26,500). “My life changed a lot despite being tainted by drug trafficking,” he says. Santiago left this line of work when he was kidnapped, accused of being a traitor, anddug a grave in front of him. Today, he makes a living running errands for others. “At least [some] have been able to return,” says Flor Vásquez, a community leader devoted to her neighbors. “There are many women here who have spent years gazing at the horizon, waiting for their sons or husbands to come back.” “The sea is a grave without a headstone or a name. If it could speak, how many mothers could mourn their children?” she wonders. Flor Vásquez, lideresa del Pacífico colombiano, posa para un retrato en el océano Pacífico, el 24 de febrero de 2026. Flor Vásquez, lideresa del Pacífico colombiano, posa para un retrato en el océano Pacífico, el 24 de febrero de 2026. Chiquitín returned home after more than a week in the hospital. He went back to eating fried fish and working on the fiberglass boats that sustain all these communities that are connected to the Pacific Ocean. In the many small villages throughout the area, everyone has heard his story. “Trump sent a bomb after him,” they say. He reappeared wearing earpieces, because the impact of the explosions had ruptured his eardrums. He told everyone about it until, one day, he said to his father: “Dad, I can’t stand this anymore. I’d have been better off dead.” The constant ringing was driving him crazy. Chiquitín left home again some time ago, without saying where he was going. He hasn’t been heard from since December. His parents think he went to Ecuador to fish. His mother, Margarita — worried sick — has moved heaven and earth asking about him, even friends and distant relatives. What tortures her is imagining him back at sea. And that he may have run out of luck. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

“The passing of the popular Pichirilo, a great sports talent from Valdés, has been reported. Our condolences to his family,” posted @elshowderuben, a Facebook page for the program of the same name on Radio Güiria Internacional in Venezuela, on October 15, 2025. Their post received 483 reactions, mostly crying emojis or expressions of grief. “Pichirilo, you have no idea how much your news hurts, I will never forget you,” wrote a friend. “Rest in peace, Eduardo, popular Pichirilo,” “Rest in peace, my friend Pichirilo, excellent athlete. Great talent in front of the goal,” others commented. The day before, on October 14, a missile fired by the U.S. military had destroyed a boat off the Venezuelan coast near Güiria, a town in the municipality of Valdés, Sucre state, and a departure point for Trinidad and Tobago. According to the official US government video, the vessel was stationary when it was attacked. It was the fifth US attack on ships in the Caribbean. With the six people killed there, the death toll reached 27. US President Donald Trump stated on his social media that his Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, had given the order to strike on a known drug trafficking route in international waters, and that US intelligence “confirmed that the boat was trafficking narcotics” and was associated with narco-terrorist networks. The radio host of @showderuben told reporters from this journalistic alliance that he published the news about Pichirilo because he knew he was well-known in Güiria. “This is a small town and everyone knows each other here,” he explained, although he denied knowing anything about the circumstances of his death. Reporters from Rebel Alliance Investigates (ARI)—a coalition of the Venezuelan independent media outlets Runrunes, Tal Cual, and El Pitazo—allied with this investigation, confirmed in Güiria that Pichirilo's name was Eduardo Jaime, and that he was a beloved futsal player in that coastal town on the Venezuelan Caribbean coast. A family member later confirmed to this alliance by phone that Eduardo Jaime was on the boat that was shot down on October 14. From September 2015 until April 26 of this year, in what was called Operation Southern Spear, U.S. military forces destroyed 58 vessels with missile strikes and caused the deaths of 172 people like Eduardo Jaime—according to confirmation from the U.S. Southern Command in response to questions sent by this journalistic team via email. Since then, and until May 5, when this story was finalized, the U.S. government has publicly announced that it carried out two more attacks that killed five more people. US authorities also counted a total of 12 other missing persons, presumed dead. However, this journalistic alliance verified with sources in Costa Rica that of three presumed survivors of a March bombing at sea off the coast of that country, two died before reaching land. Thus, the death toll reached 179 as of May 5. In its written response, the US Southern Command stated that “every action taken during Operation Southern Spear is deliberate, legal, and precise, directed squarely against narco-terrorists and their facilitators. We have full confidence in the operations and intelligence professionals who inform our missions.” (See the full response here) However, days after the attack in which Pichirilo was killed that same October, Trump administration officials acknowledged in reports to members of Congress and their staff that they did not know the identity or background of the people they killed, as revealed by The Intercept. “It’s a double tragedy, not only because of the illegal killings, but also because the victims are erased, rendered anonymous,” said John Walsh of WOLA, a Washington-based human rights organization in Latin America, in a telephone interview with CLIP. Agreeing with Walsh and many others, including human rights experts, members of Congress, former U.S. government officials, and civil society organizations, who have questioned the legality of killing these men on the mere suspicion that they might be transporting drugs, a transnational journalistic alliance has been working since last December to identify these dead men, convinced that by revealing their faces and stories, their humanity will emerge. The alliance, coordinated by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), brings together media outlets from the ARI region of Venezuela; 360, Casa Macondo, and Verdad Abierta of Colombia; and Guardian of Trinidad and Tobago. And freelance journalists in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Mexico, with technical and financial support from Airwars, today release the first findings of the investigation, "Bombed, Without the Right to Defense." This collaborative investigation has been a painstaking task, weaving together the loose threads of many tragedies. To this end, we have visited hamlets and coastal towns in La Guajira and Nariño, Colombia, and Sucre, Venezuela; interviewed family members, friends, and acquaintances of victims, as well as local authorities and reporters in five countries; tracked and verified hundreds of social media posts; identified dozens of publications from recognized media outlets in multiple countries and languages; made dozens of information requests to authorities; contacted prosecutors' offices, hospitals, morgues, and embassies; and verified public and judicial records. With all this information, we built a database that, we hope, will contribute to raising awareness that these men were human beings who deserved to be tried if they were suspected of committing any crime. Most sources are anonymous because everyone is afraid to speak. Some relatives of victims in Venezuela and Santa Marta, Colombia, according to sources consulted by this alliance, say they have received threats. Others don't want to say anything because they fear reprisals from their governments or, worse, from the drug lords who rule where they live. Government agencies have been tight-lipped, and officials who respond only do so off the record because they don't want to cause problems for their countries with the United States. Adding the names of the people other media outlets and organizations have managed to identify, along with the new fatalities identified by this journalistic alliance, we have been able to obtain the full names of 16 of those killed in these attacks. We identified the nationality of two more, and the nickname of another. We have information about the identities of two other people whose remains washed ashore on a beach in northern Colombia days after an attack, but we don't know for sure if they were killed in a bombing. We have the full name of another possible victim. We have identified three wounded survivors. It's like looking for needles in a haystack of 179 people killed between September 2nd and May 5th, and the count continues… Each explosion shatters the ship and its crew—whether traffickers, passengers, or fishermen—into a thousand pieces. Their identities are blown to bits across vast oceans. This cross-border journalistic collaboration also found that the destructive wave doesn't stop there. As the on-the-ground reporting will show, Operation Southern Spear has further unraveled the fabric of communities already broken and broken by organized crime and the absence of the state, and has terrorized fishermen and travelers to the point of paralyzing the economy of a town in Nariño. We also verified that it disrupted at least 18 commercial flights in the Colombian Caribbean. Furthermore, we documented how it has fragmented international cooperation in the fight against illegal drugs, because other democracies fear being involved in actions that disregard international agreements governing the sea and international human rights law. The shockwave of the bombing reverberates with the fear among officials and prosecutors of revealing details of the rescues or their coordinates, as the neighbor to the North could retaliate with new tariffs or personal attacks on the government. Often, they don't even respond to those asking about their dead. The Bombed On the same boat as 'Pichirilo,' the soccer player, were Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadians, whose relatives are now suing the U.S. government for their extrajudicial killings. The world learned of Chad and Samaroo because their families filed a legal complaint last January in a federal court in Massachusetts, seeking compensation for damages related to their deaths. According to the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, a member of this alliance, last December, in the village where Joseph was born—he was 26 years old at the time of the October 14 bombing—everyone had known him since childhood as a fisherman. He had left his hometown of Matelot, a fishing village on the Trinidadian coast, to live with an aunt in Las Cuevas, a community with lifelong ties to Venezuela. “It was Joseph’s family, being among the first to identify him among more than 100 people who have lost their lives in the attacks, who shone a human light on the people who have died as a result of the United States’ attacks in the Caribbean Sea. The human stories prompted members of Congress to begin putting pressure on the Trump administration, demanding transparency about these attacks and attempting to question and stop them,” wrote the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, two months after his presumed death. That same publication interviewed Lenore Burnley, Chad’s mother, who said that “since hearing the news, her life has been characterized by the contradictory storm of having a faint hope and the stark reality of Joseph’s sudden death, without a body to bury.” And when The Guardian asked her why she thought Joseph had risked going out, she replied: “I know the law of the sea; I’ve known it since I was young. If it’s a ship, or something like that, you’re supposed to stop it, you see? The law isn’t about killing people. Wherever you are, you shouldn’t kill people like that. This is the first time in my life, and I’m 51 years old. I’ve never heard of anything like this.” The local newspaper reported that, according to Chad Joseph’s partner, he had called her to say he was returning home from Venezuela. Sallycar Korasingh, Rishi Samaroo’s sister, said he was a hard-working man who had paid his debt to society and was just trying to get back on his feet and earn a decent living in Venezuela by raising cows and goats to help support his family, the ACLU said in a statement. “If the U.S. government believed Rishi had done something wrong, they should have arrested, charged, and detained him, not killed him. They must be held accountable,” said Korasingh. Representing Joseph’s mother and Samaroo’s sister in their case before the U.S. courts are the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School. The lawyers filed the suit under admiralty law, which allows individuals to seek compensation for damages from those responsible for wrongful death, as defined by the Death at Sea Act (DOHSA), recognized by the United States. They also invoked the Alien Torts Statute, which allows foreigners to sue in the United States for extrajudicial killings, prohibited under international human rights law. “The deaths of Joseph and Samaroo were clearly extrajudicial killings,” Steven Watt, one of the ACLU lawyers, explained to this journalistic alliance. They cannot be justified with arguments like those put forward by the Trump administration, that being in a war on drugs justifies the use of violent attacks, he said. Watt also said that his legal team, in a separate request based on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), requested the legal memorandum produced by the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, which outlines the official legal rationale for these attacks, because the government has not made it public to date. The relatives of the Trinidadians maintain that neither of them was carrying drugs, that they were ordinary citizens returning to their homes in Las Cuevas, Trinidad, after working in Venezuela. According to local sources who spoke to ARI, the Venezuelan media coalition allied with this investigation, a man named Dushak Milovcic had traveled on the same boat attacked on October 14. An AP report stated that Milovcic, 24, “started as a lookout for smugglers,” had been at the Venezuelan National Guard Academy, and, according to sources who spoke to the AP reporter, was now involved with drug traffickers. The boat attacked on October 14 was not the only one suspected of carrying illegal drugs due to the high number of passengers. Several news outlets and observers also expressed doubts about the first boat bombed on September 2, 2025, which had 11 passengers on board. According to some people interviewed on the ground, who are familiar with the movement of the boats and spoke with allies of this investigation in La Guajira, Colombia, and Sucre, it is common for the same boats that carry drugs on their way to Venezuela to bring passengers back. The “captains,” as those who pilot these boats are called, sign up for any job that comes up. Reported by: Vera Ferrari “To all the narco-terrorists who threaten our homeland: if you want to stay alive, stop trafficking drugs. If you continue trafficking lethal drugs, we will kill you,” threatened Pete Hegseth, U.S. Secretary of War, on November 7, the day after a deadly attack on a speedboat with three occupants in the Caribbean, off the coast of Colombia. With statements like these, anyone would imagine that multiple Pablo Escobars and Chapo Guzmans had just been killed. Reporters from this alliance found a very different reality. The remains of two people, presumably killed on November 6, appeared in Puerto López, Uribia, in La Guajira, Colombia. Various sources in La Guajira said the two men came from Pedernales, Dominican Republic, a province bordering Haiti in the Enriquillo region, where 72% of households live in poverty. A Dominican reporter confirmed to this alliance that dozens of young people leave from there to make a living in Colombia or elsewhere, and many are recruited to smuggle cocaine from the Colombian Caribbean coast back to the island in small boats. Since no one came to claim the bodies that washed ashore on the Colombian beach, because they had no relatives there, the Wayuu indigenous community living in that region buried them, as reported at the time by The New York Times. A month later, forensic technicians from the Colombian Institute of Legal Medicine arrived and exhumed them. According to the Colombian news outlet 360-grados.co, a partner in this journalistic collaboration, this occurred between December 12 and 13, and as of this writing, the bodies remain refrigerated at the Forensic Medicine Institute in Barranquilla. Sources from the Colombian Attorney General's Office indicated that one of the bodies exhumed in La Guajira likely did not come from the attacked boats, given its state of decomposition. Local sources stated that they knew that the remains of another Dominican man who died on the boat on November 6 were not found in Colombia. The body had been dragged beyond Castilletes, some 20 kilometers inland into Venezuelan territory, where it is believed that members of the Wayuu community buried it. We were unable to confirm this version. (See “The victims of the Southern Command who were buried in La Guajira”). These young Dominicans are not very different from those in Uribia, in the Colombian region of La Guajira, where they went to look for work. Uribia is the poorest municipality in Colombia: 92% of its residents lack education, healthcare, and basic public services. This makes it easy to recruit them to transport cocaine, and they are paid for it, according to a boatman interviewed by the news outlet 360. “Most of the people here aren't owners; most of the owners of the merchandise are always from outside, we could even say internationally: they buy the merchandise here [in Colombia] and then wait for it at its destination,” the boatman explained to this journalistic alliance. Dozens of Dominicans have fallen into this trap of hope for a better life, and many have disappeared. Now the uncertainty is even worse for their relatives because they don't know if they were killed by U.S. missiles. This is what a Dominican woman, who spoke with this alliance but prefers not to give her name, fears. She hasn't heard from her brother Francisco—who worked various jobs in the tourism sector and had agreed to transport a shipment of drugs—since he called her from a boat about to set sail for home. It was mid-November, and he was using a satellite phone. It was a short conversation. He asked about his parents and told her he was coming back. He never returned. The bombings have also led many victims not to report disappearances. The reason? According to Dominican journalist Manuel González Feliz, it's a mixture of fear and shame among family members. As in Pedernales or La Guajira, Colombia, for many communities on the Colombian Pacific coast, transporting cocaine is not a criminal choice, but a survival strategy. The isolation of this region of jungles and mangroves, which stretches 1,300 kilometers from north to south of the country, contributes to its poverty. In Tumaco, Colombia's second-largest Pacific port and the departure point for many transporters, 84% of the population lives in multidimensional poverty. Drug trafficking groups exploit this situation by offering jobs in laboratories, shipyards, and as transporters. “It's the only source of employment that keeps these communities going. I know it's illegal, but it's what we have,” explains Duván Caicedo, a community leader in the small village of Pital de Costa, nestled between a river and the jungle on Colombia's Pacific coast. The 1,200 inhabitants of the hamlet live without potable water or a health clinic, a two-hour boat ride from Tumaco and the nearest hospital. A cocaine processing lab is the only source of work. In Sucre, the Venezuelan state where Güiria is located, 90% of the population lacks food security. According to ARI, almost no one is exclusively involved in cocaine trafficking. These boats are the lifeblood of the people on that coast: they bring and take away food, fish, and medicine. They carry workers from Venezuela to Trinidad and back, fishermen going out to bring in the day's catch, migrants fleeing authoritarianism, and also traffickers. (See story "All the 'turns' in Güiria"). When they carry drugs, there are usually two or at most three people on board: a driver and two assistants. This investigation reveals that the victims of the US bombings who came from Güiria worked as fishermen, motorcycle taxi drivers, bus drivers, and some of them had risked making a trip with cocaine because they couldn't support their families. Thus, Juan Carlos Fuentes, 43, a lifelong driver, and Luis Ramón Amundaraín, a 36-year-old fisherman and motorcycle taxi driver, had been in Trinidad and Tobago since September 28, 2025. Juan Carlos, his wife says, was desperate for money. A Yutong bus he used for his livelihood was damaged, and he couldn't afford to repair it. He called her from Trinidad the day before the October 3 bombing in which he presumably died and told her he was about to leave; that he wasn't carrying drugs. Ramón, his partner says, "went to look for more income" because the earnings from fishing and motorcycle taxis were no longer enough for his family of seven. She told ARI reporters that her husband was a fisherman. "They say he's a narco-terrorist," she said, but she maintains that if he were, they would have assets, and they don't even own a house. His family believes he died with Juan Carlos on October 3. What the women say makes sense, because their husbands were coming from Trinidad and Tobago to Venezuela, and the drugs flow in the opposite direction. Another man, Eduard Hidalgo, 46, had been a skilled fisherman and had left for the United States at the end of 2014. He was deported a year later. A friend maintains that although he had transported various goods for the criminal bosses in the area, he didn't want to make any more trips, "but they forced him." She believes he died in the bombing of a boat on February 23. (See story "The gringos exploited them": How three Venezuelans ended up on the boats attacked by the United States) Fear and hunger It's not just the families of the dead who mourn them today. The shockwaves are also impacting the communities. For example, for several days, fishermen in the rural area of Buenaventura, Colombia's main Pacific port, suspended their work for fear of not returning home, although they gradually resumed fishing later. The municipality of Olaya Herrera, in Nariño, was the most affected. A person working in the region's humanitarian sector, who asked to remain anonymous, told this alliance that many people there depend on the money collected by truckers after completing a trip. "When they return, money comes into the community, commerce picks up, and everyone benefits," they said. With the fear of making trips transporting drugs, money stopped coming into the families. "We are experiencing a very difficult situation," says Father Luis Carrillo. "It started to be felt in November, but it became critical in February." In coordination with the Mayor's office, the priest requested assistance from the Food Bank in Bogotá, and in March, 700 food baskets arrived by boat from Buenaventura and were distributed in the town of Bocas de Satinga and the surrounding rural area. “Obviously, that doesn’t alleviate even one percent of the needs,” says the parish priest. Who is investigating? Authorities in no country, from the United States to Colombia or Mexico, reveal how much drug was lost, how many of those killed in bombings were transporting it, or their names. They haven’t even reported how they gathered the intelligence that led them to identify these victims as military targets. This journalistic alliance sent a questionnaire with these and other questions to the United States Southern Command. They responded that “for reasons of operational security and the protection of forces, we do not discuss intelligence or details about our operational processes and planning.” His spokesperson also said that “the threat that narco-terrorists and cartels pose to human life cannot be ignored. They have escalated their violence to unprecedented levels, going beyond mere criminal conduct by committing unspeakable acts of terror. It is not only their criminal rivals who are in their sights; they are waging war against law-abiding citizens, entire communities, and government institutions, carrying out atrocious acts to impose their will and satisfy their insatiable thirst for illicit income.” Sources at the Dominican Republic embassy in Colombia confirmed to this news team that the only information received regarding the possible deaths of two of their citizens came from a speech by Colombian President Gustavo Petro; however, no official steps have been taken to identify them. They described the matter as “politically sensitive.” In Ecuador, the Navy's Coast Guard Service has not released any details about the search and rescue operations for possible survivors that—according to the U.S.—began after a bombing in the Pacific on February 9, 2026, as confirmed by a reporter supporting this investigation in that country. In the Costa Rican Pacific, authorities recovered two bodies and one survivor. The two deceased were Ecuadorian. Reporters from this alliance were able to confirm with security sources in Ecuador that one of them, Pedro Ramón Holguín Holguín, owned a fish retail business in Manta, a coastal city that is now a center of drug trafficking activity in the country. They also established that the Ecuadorian embassy in Costa Rica assisted with the identification of the remains, but their bodies are still in a morgue in San José, the Costa Rican capital. Casa Macondo, an ally of this investigation in Colombia, sent information requests to various authorities. DIMAR, the Colombian maritime authority, asserted that no one had reported any bombings in its territorial waters. Last November, the Foreign Ministry convened a meeting with the Ministry of Defense, the Navy, and the National Intelligence Directorate. The result was that all entities stated they had no official information beyond what had been reported in the media. The written conclusion, signed by the Director of Territorial Sovereignty, Javier Pava Sánchez, was that “our sovereignty has not been violated.” Thirteen days after that meeting, the Colombian ambassador to the OAS addressed the Permanent Council to denounce these same attacks as violations of international law. On December 23, Colombia reiterated this denunciation at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. The President of Colombia himself, Gustavo Petro, publicly stated that he had visited the home of Alejandro Andrés Carranza, a fisherman whose house was bombed on September 15, in Santa Marta, and had seen that he was living in poverty. He denounced these attacks as extrajudicial executions. Furthermore, he facilitated a meeting between a US lawyer and Carranza's family so they could consider filing a lawsuit for damages, according to the lawyer in question, Daniel Kovalik, who spoke to reporters from this alliance. Kovalik ultimately filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS, arguing that Carranza's death was an extrajudicial execution and that the United States therefore violated the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. The verbal attacks between Presidents Trump and Petro, which had been escalating for some time, became heated after these statements. Finally, President Petro met with Trump at the White House, and the accusations subsided. Sources at the Colombian Foreign Ministry now claim that the issue is so sensitive that they neither mention it nor provide any information about it. One of Casa Macondo's requests for information did bear fruit and revealed an effect of these bombings that had gone unnoticed: that coinciding with the aerial attacks on the suspected boats, the number of disruptions to commercial flights in Colombia increased in 2025. Using information from Aerocivil (the Colombian civil aviation authority), Casa Macondo determined that between January and July 2025, between four and five incidents involving the GPS systems of commercial aircraft were reported monthly, a level within the expected range for any airspace. But from August onward, coinciding with the eve of the bombing campaign, the reports increased fivefold. For the year, it recorded a total of 251 reports of GPS failures and classified them as unrelated to its systems. It closed the case without investigating the cause. Aerocivil reported that during 18 commercial flights over the northern Caribbean, pilots experienced GPS malfunctions while crossing AMBAS—the name given to an air navigation coordinate system over the Caribbean Sea, north of Colombia, where routes connecting Bogotá and Medellín with Miami, New York, Santo Domingo, and Curaçao converge. The signal was lost for between eight minutes and an hour—while the aircraft were flying at altitudes between 30,000 and 40,000 feet (approximately nine to twelve kilometers)—and was restored upon leaving Colombian airspace. The GPS always shut down in the same location and always reconnected once the aircraft had moved away. In one of the cases reported by Aerocivil, a pilot's GPS failed, and then, due to another malfunction, the transponder—the device that tells ground radar where the aircraft is—stopped transmitting. In the cockpit, the anti-collision system alarms activated, as if the ground were close, when in reality the aircraft was thousands of feet in the air. The pilot, who spoke with this news alliance on condition of anonymity, said he was frightened because it had never happened to him before, but that airplanes have at least three redundant navigation systems, and there is always a backup when one fails. "There was no danger to the passengers," he said. By providing these records, the aviation authority acknowledged that these incidents constitute a "disruption to civil air navigation" and officially classified them under its "hazard identification" protocol for airspace safety. (See Story: Commercial planes flew with interference coinciding with US bombings of the boats) Attacks that undermine the fight against drug trafficking Missile strikes may be more spectacular and violent than the quiet, regular interception and seizure that President Trump had been denigrating as useless, but no less effective for that. Thus, while Trump celebrated his first bombing on September 2nd of the boat with 11 crew members, as an attack against terrorists from the Tren de Aragua gang “identified with certainty” and claimed that it was carrying “massive quantities of drugs,” the Vice President asserted that it was the best and highest use of the armed forces. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, echoing these statements the following day, asserted that intercepting drug-carrying boats had not worked. “Instead of intercepting them, we blew them up, following the President’s order. And it’s going to happen again,” he said. What the US government officials failed to mention is that on that same September 2nd, Operation Zeus took place, which, however, did not involve lightning from the sky like the bombing that killed the 11 crew members. In Operation Zeus, the Colombian Aerospace Force had detected a suspicious vessel in the same Caribbean waters and shared the coordinates with the Dominican Air Force. The latter, in coordination with the US Joint Interagency Task Force-South (JIATF-S) at Naval Air Station Key West in Florida, dispatched naval units to intercept it. They boarded the vessel, arrested its two crew members, and seized 448 kilograms of cocaine, turned over evidence to a criminal case, and there were no fatalities. It wasn't the only one. A CLIP investigation tracked regular counternarcotics interdictions in the Caribbean and Pacific conducted by U.S. entities in cooperation with European and Latin American countries between September 2025 and February 2026. The investigation relied on information from law enforcement and press reports in various languages and countries, and consulted public records available through Global Fishing Watch's API v3 and Vesseltracker. It found that, thanks to this international cooperation, at least 140 tons of cocaine were seized and 160 crew members were arrested and subsequently brought to justice without a single shot being fired. The investigation also revealed that, coinciding with the operation targeting speedboats, the Tasmanian-flagged tugboat Little Girls, the Greek fishing vessel Ourania A, and the older Turkish-owned vessel United S all passed through the Atlantic loaded with drugs. None of these vessels were destroyed by missiles. They waited until the vessels reached a safe location to immobilize them, seize the drugs they were carrying, and arrest their crews. Furthermore, the operation against the Ourania A led to the arrest of a known Greek drug trafficker. Regular anti-narcotics operations and lethal attacks were carried out in the same waters, during the same weeks, with intelligence coordination that in several cases passed through the same institutional nodes: the MAOC-N in Lisbon, the Joint Interagency Task Force-South (JITF-S) in Key West, and the DEA. (See story: For large shipments, justice; for small ones, bombs). Who makes the decisions? Who ordered which vessel to blow up and which to let pass and then detain civilly? That's what we asked Southern Command. He did not answer the question, but instead sent the following comment: “Operation Southern Spear is being conducted under the orders of our Commander-in-Chief to defend U.S. homeland, protect regional partners, and maintain law and order by preventing narco-terrorists, cartels, and their network of accomplices from gaining a foothold in the Western Hemisphere through an overwhelming presence. The objective of the operation is to detect, disrupt, and dismantle the networks of cartels and other transnational organizations that the President of the United States, by executive order, has designated as terrorist organizations.” Legal experts have already raised concerns about the meaning of the term “narco-terrorist,” but Brian Finucane, senior advisor to the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group and a former lawyer in the Office of the General Counsel at the U.S. Department of State, told this alliance that the U.S. military’s comments in response to this report take those concerns a step further. “The law of war permits violence that would otherwise be prohibited, but only during a genuine armed conflict—a threshold the Trump administration has failed to reach, as it hasn’t even identified who the United States is supposed to be fighting,” he said. “Beyond that fundamental problem, the administration’s suggestion that vaguely defined ‘facilitators’ can be targeted raises further concerns that it is violating the rules of its own flawed legal paradigm.” While international cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking proceeded normally and without fatalities during the six months from September to February, the multiple attacks carried out by the U.S. government left 140 dead, with no publicly reported cocaine seizures and destroying the forensic evidence that could lead to identifying the major drug traffickers who control the routes. In fact, the Colombian Attorney General's Office only opened a preliminary inquiry against survivor Jonathan Obando Pérez, according to El País América, "but does not foresee turning it into a formal investigation, as it lacks evidence to indicate that Obando Pérez committed any crime in Colombia." Therefore, after leaving the hospital, he was released. A source cited by AP from the Ecuadorian Attorney General's Office also stated that it "did not find sufficient evidence to initiate legal action" against Andrés Fernando Tufiño, a survivor of an attack in the Caribbean on October 16. Due to potential violations of human rights and the law of the sea, authorities in the United Kingdom and Canada said they would not share intelligence with their counterparts in the United States, as reported by Time. British sources told the magazine last November that "British officials believe that the US military strikes that have killed 76 people violate international law" and, therefore, suspended cooperation on these types of attacks in October. And Canadian sources said that their government “does not want its intelligence to help locate ships as targets for deadly strikes.” Last January, the Dutch Defense Minister said in Aruba that interdiction operations would continue in his country's territorial waters, but they would not use their naval station ship for operations related to the United States' Operation Southern Spear (the bombing operation). “No European country, including France, will send operational intelligence to the Americans in the current situation if it could be used as a basis for a military attack on a ship,” Dimitro Zoulas, head of the French police's anti-drug service, told Radio Caraibes (RCI). And Euractiv confirmed with a French security source that “it is 100 percent clear that the Europeans are not giving the United States any intelligence that could lead to a strike (against the ships).” The Colombian government had announced something similar, but a high-ranking diplomatic official who spoke with CLIP and asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, said that Colombia continues to share its intelligence with its U.S. counterpart as usual, but did not specify for which operations. In response to these criticisms, the Southern Command sent to this journalistic alliance, stating: “U.S. forces operate under rules of engagement that are consistent with international maritime law against activities that pose a direct threat to U.S. security and the lives of U.S. citizens. As a military organization entrusted with the defense of our homeland, we are fully committed to missions that directly support the health and safety of the American people.” Last April, a coalition of 125 civil society organizations from around the world (including Airwars, which provided expert information to this journalistic alliance, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, among others) issued an urgent public appeal for countries to “immediately stop or refrain from supporting extrajudicial killings by the United States in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.” “We must remember that all these individuals have names, families, and lives that will never be the same,” said Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, at a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the OAS (IACHR) on April 13. That organization, in addition to representing the two Trinidadian victims before a U.S. federal court, asked the IACHR to declare that missile strikes on vessels violate international law and proposed the creation of a special group to investigate the implications these strikes have had in the hemisphere. Why do they do it, then? It's difficult to understand why the Trump administration insists on continuing the bombings, despite their failure to stem the flow of drugs. Even Admiral Nathan Moore, commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's Atlantic Area, a proponent of using all methods, including bombings, acknowledged that they haven't seen any noticeable difference in the flow of cocaine. Moore stated, after 21 bombings in November 2025, that neither the traffickers' routes, nor the pace, nor the purity of the drug have changed. It's likely they succeeded in getting traffickers to stop using some routes, especially those used by go-fast boats—according to an analysis by InSight Crime, a media outlet specializing in organized crime—but the operation didn't "prevent traffickers from moving cocaine by other means," such as increasing their use of the Amazon route. Nor is it difficult for major drug traffickers to replace the dead with other men drawn into their networks by desperation, poverty, and unemployment, as these are plentiful along Latin American coasts. Attacking the weakest link in the multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business is nothing new. Our countries have been doing it without solving the problem for over 50 years. This new strategy of blowing up boats and killing unknown suspects takes this policy to the extreme. Missiles have caused tremendous suffering and plunge poor families and communities into even greater hardship, unable to defend themselves against the majestic U.S. military power or its omnipresent rhetoric. Furthermore, as discussed here, it alienates international cooperation and leaves the United States more isolated in the face of crime. Why then persist on such a risky and fruitless path for more than eight months? “The Trump administration believes in the show of force for reasons that have very little to do with effective interdiction,” says Walsh of WOLA. “They want to impress citizens, making them believe that they are finally putting an end to the terrible problem of drug trafficking, something other governments failed to do. The profound cruelty and callousness with which they order these systematic and intentional killings allows them to project the threatening nature of nameless ‘narco-terrorists.’ In this way, they shock many Americans while numbing the notion that the U.S. officials responsible for these killings must be held accountable.” The figure of President Trump and his top War and State officials, accompanying their bombings with explosive videos and triumphant social media posts, orchestrates a spectacle of disproportionate power against humble men, mostly poor, and in any case, only suspected of transporting drugs. As a Venezuelan woman, the wife of a man killed in a bombing, said, “Donald Trump didn’t stop to think; he’s killing a father and doesn’t know why this man got on that boat.” Do you have more information about this story? Write to us at investigaciones@elclip.org

“Reportan el fallecimiento del popular Pichirilo, gran talento deportivo Valdeciano. Nuestras palabras de condolencias a sus familiares”, publicó el 15 de octubre de 2025 @elshowderuben, una página de Facebook del programa del mismo nombre en la Emisora Radio Güiria Internacional de Venezuela. Su comentario tuvo 483 reacciones de emojis llorando, o de personas lamentando su muerte.  “Pichirilo no sabes cómo me duele tu noticia, nunca te voy a olvidar”, escribió una amiga. “Descansa en paz, Eduardo popular pichirilo”, “que en paz descanses pana pichirilo excelente deportista. Gran talento frente al arco.”, dijeron otros.  El día anterior, el 14 de octubre, un misil disparado por militares estadounidenses había volado una lancha fuera de la costa venezolana, frente a Güiria, un pueblo en el municipio de Valdés, del estado Sucre y  punto de salida hacia Trinidad y Tobago. Según se vio en el video oficial del gobierno estadounidense, la embarcación estaba quieta cuando la atacaron. Era el quinto golpe que propinaba Estados Unidos a barcos en el Caribe. Con las seis personas que cayeron ahí, completaban ya 27 muertos.   El presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump  aseguró en su red social que su secretario de Guerra, Pete Hegseth, había dado la orden de asestar ese golpe en una ruta conocida de tráfico de drogas, en aguas internacionales, y que inteligencia de su país “confirmó que la lancha traficaba narcóticos” y estaba asociada a redes de narcoterroristas. El locutor radial del @showderuben le dijo a reporteros de esta alianza periodística que él publicó la noticia de Pichirilo porque sabía que era muy conocido en Güiria. “Este es un pueblo pequeño y aquí todo el mundo se conoce”, explicó, aunque negó saber nada acerca de las circunstancias en las que murió.  Reporteros de Alianza Rebelde Investiga (ARI) –una coalición de los medios independientes venezolanos Runrunes, Tal Cual y El Pitazo –, aliados a esta investigación, confirmaron en Güiria que el nombre de Pichirilo era Eduardo Jaime, y que era un jugador de fútbol de sala, querido en ese pueblo costero del Caribe venezolano. Una familiar le confirmó luego por teléfono a esta alianza que Eduardo Jaime venía en la lancha volada el 14 de octubre.  Desde septiembre de 2025 y hasta el 26 de abril pasado, en la llamada Operación Lanza del Sur (Southern Spear), las fuerzas militares de Estados Unidos llevaban 58 embarcaciones destruidas a golpes de misil y habían causado la muerte a 172 personas como Eduardo Jaime –según confirmó el Comando Sur de los Estados Unidos en respuesta por correo a las preguntas que envió este equipo periodístico.  Desde entonces, y hasta el 5 de mayo, cuando se cerró esta historia, el gobierno de ese país ha anunciado públicamente que realizó otros dos ataques donde mataron otras cinco personas.  Las autoridades estadounidenses además contabilizaron en total a otros 12 desaparecidos, que se presumen muertos. No obstante, esta alianza periodística verificó con fuentes en Costa Rica, que de tres presumidos sobrevivientes, luego de un bombardeo en marzo en el mar frente a ese país, dos fallecieron antes de llegar a tierra. Así, la cuenta de los muertos llega 179 hasta el 5 de mayo.  En su respuesta escrita, el Comando Sur de ese país dijo que “cada acción tomada durante la Operación Southern Spear (Lanza del Sur) es deliberada, legal y precisa, dirigida directamente contra los narcoterroristas y sus facilitadores. Tenemos plena confianza en los profesionales de operaciones e inteligencia que informan nuestras misiones”. (Ver toda la respuesta aquí) No obstante, días después del ataque en que murió Pichirilo, en ese mismo octubre, funcionarios del gobierno de Trump reconocieron en reportes a congresistas y sus asistentes que no sabían la identidad ni la historia de las personas que matan, según reveló The Intercept. “Es una tragedia doble no sólo por los asesinatos ilegales, sino que las víctimas son borradas, convertidas en anónimas”, dijo, en entrevista telefónica con el CLIP, John Walsh, de WOLA, una organización de defensa de los derechos humanos en Latinoamérica basada en Washington.  Coincidiendo con Walsh y muchos otros, entre expertos en derechos humanos, congresistas, ex funcionarios del gobierno estadounidense y organizaciones civiles, que han cuestionado la legalidad de matar a estos hombres por la sola sospecha de que podían estar transportando drogas, desde diciembre pasado, una alianza periodística transnacional se dio a la tarea de ponerles nombre a estos muertos, convencidos de que  al conocer sus rostros e historias, emergerá su humanidad.  La alianza, coordinada por el Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística, CLIP, que reúne a los medios de la región ARI de Venezuela; 360, Casa Macondo y Verdad Abierta de Colombia; Guardian de Trinidad Tobago; y periodistas freelance en República Dominicana, Ecuador, Costa Rica y México con el apoyo técnico y financiero de Airwars, hoy lanza los primeros hallazgos de la investigación Bombardeados, sin derecho a la defensa.  Esta investigación colaborativa ha sido una labor de filigrana, tejiendo hilos sueltos de muchas tragedias. Para ello, hemos visitado caseríos y pueblos costeros en La Guajira y Nariño, en Colombia y en Sucre, Venezuela; entrevistado a familiares, amigos y conocidos de víctimas, autoridades y reporteros locales en cinco países; rastreado y verificado cientos de posteos en redes sociales; identificado decenas de publicaciones de medios reconocidos en múltiples países e idiomas; realizado decenas de peticiones de información a autoridades; contactado fiscalías, hospitales, morgues y embajadas; y hemos verificado registros públicos y judiciales. Con toda esa información, construimos una base de datos que, esperamos, contribuya al elevar la consciencia de que estos hombres eran seres humanos, que merecían haber sido juzgados si eran sospechosos de cometer algún delito.  La mayoría de las fuentes son anónimas porque todo el mundo teme hablar. Algunos familiares de víctimas en Venezuela y en Santa Marta (Colombia), según confirmaron fuentes consultadas a esta alianza,  dicen haber recibido amenazas. Otros no quieren contar nada porque temen represalias de sus gobiernos o, peor, de los señores del narco que mandan en donde viven. Las entidades han resultado herméticas y los funcionarios que responden, sólo lo hacen off the record porque no quieren meter en líos a sus países con Estados Unidos. Sumando las personas que otros medios y organizaciones han conseguido nombrar y las nuevas víctimas mortales identificadas por esta alianza periodística, hemos podido conseguir los nombres y apellidos de 16 de los muertos en estos ataques. De dos más, identificamos su nacionalidad; y de otro, su apodo. De otras dos personas, cuyos restos fueron a dar a la playa al norte colombiano días después de un ataque, tenemos datos de quiénes eran, pero no sabemos con certeza si cayeron en un bombardeo. De otra posible víctima tenemos su nombre completo. Identificamos a tres sobrevivientes heridos. Es buscar agujas en un pajar de 179 ejecutados, desde el 2 de septiembre hasta el 5 de mayo, y seguimos contando… Cada explosión destroza al barco y a sus tripulantes, fuesen traficantes, pasajeros o pescadores, en mil pedazos. Sus identidades volaron al viento sobre océanos inmensos.  Esta colaboración periodística transfronteriza también encontró que la ola destructiva no para ahí. Como lo retratará la reportería en terreno, la Operación Southern Spear ha deshilachado además el tejido de comunidades, de por sí rotas y doblegadas por el crimen organizado y la ausencia de Estado, y ha aterrorizado a pescadores y viajantes, al punto que paró la economía de un pueblo nariñense. También verificamos que en el Caribe colombiano perturbó al menos 18 vuelos comerciales. Más allá, documentamos cómo ha fragmentado la cooperación internacional de combate a las drogas ilegales, porque otras democracias temen estar involucrados en acciones que desconozcan acuerdos internacionales que rigen el mar y el derecho internacional sobre los derechos humanos. Reverbera con la onda explosiva el temor entre funcionarios y fiscalías de revelar detalles de los rescates o sus coordenadas, pues el vecino del Norte puede revirar con nuevos aranceles o ataques personales a los gobernantes. Muchas veces, ni siquiera les responden a quienes están preguntando por sus muertos.  Los bombardeados En el mismo bote de ‘Pichirilo’, el jugador de fútbol, viajaban Chad Joseph y Rishi Samaroo, dos trinitenses, cuyas parientes ahora reclaman al gobierno estadounidense por sus ejecuciones extrajudiciales. De Chad y Samaroo se enteró el mundo porque sus familias presentaron una queja legal en enero pasado ante una corte federal de Massachusetts, Estados Unidos, buscando ser indemnizadas por daños y perjuicios por sus muertes.  Según reportó el Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, miembro de esta alianza, en diciembre pasado, en el pueblo donde nació Joseph –quien tenía 26 años al momento del  bombardeo del 14 de octubre – todos lo conocían desde niño como pescador. Se había ido desde su natal Matelot, un pueblo pesquero en la costa trinitense, a vivir a donde una tía en Las Cuevas, una comunidad con lazos de toda la vida con Venezuela.  “Fue la familia de Joseph, al ser una de las primeras en identificarlo entre más de 100 personas que han perdido su vida en los ataques, la que arrojó una luz humana sobre las personas que han muerto como resultado de los ataques de los Estados Unidos en el mar Caribe. Las historias humanas hicieron que congresistas comenzaran a ponerle presión al gobierno de Trump al pedir transparencia sobre estos ataques y al intentar cuestionarlos y detenerlos”, escribió el Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, al cumplirse dos meses de su presunta muerte.  Ese mismo medio entrevistó a Lenore Burnley, madre de Chad, quien dijo que “desde que supo la noticia, su vida se ha caracterizado por la tormenta contradictoria de tener una vaga esperanza y la cruda realidad de la súbita muerte de Joseph, sin que haya un cuerpo para enterrar”.  Y cuando Guardian le preguntó por qué creía que Joseph se había arriesgado a salir, ella respondió: “sé de la ley del mar; la conozco desde que era joven. Si es un barco, o una cosa así, se supone que tienes que detenerlo, ¿ves? La ley no consiste en matar a personas. Donde sea que estés, no debes matar a personas así. Esta es la primera vez en mi vida, y tengo 51 años. Nunca he escuchado de algo así”. Dijo el citado diario local que, según la la pareja de Chad Joseph, él la había llamado para decirle que iba de regreso a casa desde Venezuela.  Sallycar Korasingh, la hermana de Rishi Samaroo, había contado que él era un hombre trabajador que había pagado su deuda con la sociedad y solo intentaba recuperarse y ganarse la vida dignamente en Venezuela criando vacas y cabras para ayudar a mantener a su familia, según informó ACLU en un comunicado . “Si el gobierno de Estados Unidos creía que Rishi había hecho algo malo, debería haberlo arrestado, acusado y detenido, no asesinado. Deben rendir cuentas”, dijo Korasingh. Representan a la madre de Joseph y a la hermana de Samaroo en su caso ante la justicia estadounidense, la Asociación Americana de Derechos Civiles (más conocida como ACLU, por su sigla en inglés) , el Centro para los Derechos Constitucionales y el profesor Jonathan Hafetz, de la Escuela de Derecho Setton Hall.   Los abogados lo presentaron bajo la ley de demandas del almirantazgo, que les permite a personas reclamar compensación por daños a quien haya cometido una muerte por negligencia (wrongful death, en inglés), según el Acta de Muerte en Altamar (DOHSA), reconocida por Estados Unidos. Así mismo, invocaron el viejo Estatuto de Reclamación de Agravios Contra Extranjeros (Alien Torts Statute) que permite a los extranjeros reclamar en Estados Unidos por ejecuciones extrajudiciales, prohibidos en las leyes internacionales de Derechos Humanos.  “Las muertes de Joseph y Samaroo fueron claramente ejecuciones extrajudiciales”, explicó a esta alianza periodística Steven Watt, uno de los abogados de ACLU. No se pueden justificar con argumentos como los esgrimidos por el gobierno Trump, de que estar en guerra contra las drogas les justifica el uso de los ataques violentos, dijo.  Watt dijo además que su equipo legal, en una demanda independiente de ésta, basada en el Acta de Libertad de Información (FOIA por su sigla en inglés), pidió el memorando legal producido por la Oficina de Consejería Legal de del Departamento de Justicia, que expone la racionalidad jurídica oficial de estos ataques, porque el gobierno no la ha hecho público hasta ahora.  Las parientes de los trinitenses aseguran que ninguno de los dos llevaba drogas, que eran ciudadanos corrientes que estaban regresando a sus casas en Las Cuevas, en Trinidad, después de trabajar en Venezuela.   Según dijeron fuentes locales a ARI, la coalición periodística de medios venezolanos aliada de esta investigación, un hombre llamado Dushak Milovcic habría viajado en ese mismo barco atacado el 14 de octubre. Un reporte de la AP, informó que Milovcic, de 24 años, “comenzó como vigía para contrabandistas”, había estado en la Academia de la Guardia Nacional de Venezuela y, según dijeron fuentes a la reportera de esa agencia, ahora estaba involucrado con los transportadores de droga.  El del 14 de octubre no fue el único barco del que se sospecha no llevaba drogas ilegales por el alto número de pasajeros que transportaba. Varios medios de prensa y observadores también expresaron su duda frente al primer barco bombardeado el 2 de septiembre de 2025, en el que iban 11 pasajeros. Según algunos entrevistados en terreno, que conocen el movimiento de las lanchas y hablaron con aliados de esta investigación en La Guajira colombiana y en Sucre, es frecuente que las mismas embarcaciones que de ida llevan droga, de vuelta traigan pasajeros. Los “capitanes”, como se les dice a quienes pilotean esos barcos, se apuntan a cualquier trabajo que salga.  Realización: Vera Ferrari “A todos los narcoterroristas que amenazan nuestra patria: si quieren seguir vivos, paren de traficar drogas. Si siguen traficando drogas letales, los vamos a matar”, amenazó  Pete Hegseth, secretario de Guerra de Estados Unidos el 7 de noviembre, al otro día de un golpe mortal a una lancha con tres ocupantes en el Caribe, frente a las costas colombianas.  Por calificativos como estos, cualquiera imagina que acaban de matar a múltiples Pablos Escobares y Chapos Guzmanes.  Los reporteros de esta alianza encontraron una realidad muy distinta.  Restos de dos personas, presumiblemente caídos ese 6 de noviembre, aparecieron en Puerto López, Uribia, en La Guajira colombiana. Distintas fuentes guajiras dijeron que eran dos hombres provenientes de Pedernales, República Dominicana, una provincia fronteriza con Haití, en la región de Enriquillo, con 72% de los hogares en pobreza. Un reportero dominicano le confirmó a esta alianza que desde allí salen decenas de jóvenes a rebuscarse la vida en Colombia o en otros lados, y muchos son enganchados para traer cocaína desde las costas colombianas en el Caribe de vuelta a la isla, en viajes en lancha.  Como nadie venía a reclamar los cadáveres que llegaron a la playa colombiana, porque allí no tenían parientes, la comunidad indígena wayúu que habita en esa región los enterró, según reportó en su momento The New York Times. Un mes después, llegaron los técnicos forenses del Instituto de Medicina Legal colombiano y los exhumaron.  Según verificó el medio colombiano 360-grados.co, aliado de esta colaboración periodística, eso ocurrió entre el 12 y 13 de diciembre y, hasta el cierre de esta edición, permanecen refrigerados en Medicina Legal de Barranquilla. Fuentes de la Fiscalía colombiana indicaron que uno de los cadáveres desenterrados en La Guajira probablemente no provenía de las embarcaciones atacadas, dado su estado de descomposición.  Fuentes locales afirmaron saber que los restos del cuerpo de otro dominicano caído en la embarcación del 6 de noviembre no se encontraron en Colombia. El cuerpo había sido arrastrado más allá de Castilletes, unos 20 kilómetros tierra adentro en territorio venezolano, donde se cree que miembros de la comunidad wayúu lo enterraron. No pudimos confirmar esta versión.  (Ver “Las víctimas del Comando Sur a las que les echaron tierra en La Guajira”).  Esos jóvenes dominicanos no son muy distintos a los de Uribia, en La Guajira colombiana, la región a donde fueron a buscar trabajo. Este último es el municipio más pobre de Colombia: el 92% no tiene educación, ni salud, ni servicios públicos. Por ello es fácil engancharlos para acarrear cocaína y les pagan, según declaró un lanchero con el que habló el medio 360.   “La mayoría de la gente acá no son dueños, la mayoría de los dueños de la mercancía siempre son de afuera, podemos decir hasta internacionalmente: que compran la mercancía acá [en Colombia] y ellos mismos la esperan en su destino“, explicó el lanchero a esta alianza periodística.  Por ese agujero de la esperanza de hacerse una vida mejor han caído decenas de dominicanos y muchos han desaparecido. Ahora la incertidumbre es peor para sus parientes porque no saben si fueron volados por los misiles estadounidenses. Es lo que teme una mujer dominicana, con quien habló esta alianza, pero que prefiere no dar su nombre. Ella no sabe nada de su hermano Francisco –quien hacía diversos oficios en el sector turístico y había aceptado llevar una carga de drogas– desde que la llamó desde una lancha a punto de zarpar rumbo a casa. Fue a mediados de noviembre pasado y estaba usando un teléfono satelital. Fue una charla corta. Él preguntó por sus padres y le anunció su regreso. Nunca volvió.  Los bombardeos además han llevado a muchas víctimas a no denunciar las desapariciones. ¿La razón? Según el periodista dominicano Manuel González Feliz, es una mezcla de miedo y vergüenza entre los familiares.  Como en Pedernales o en La Guajira colombiana, para muchas comunidades de la costa Pacífica colombiana, el trabajo de transportar cocaína no es una elección criminal, sino una estrategia de supervivencia. El aislamiento de esta región de selvas y manglares que se extiende 1.300 kilómetros de norte a sur del país influye en que sea tan pobre. En Tumaco, el segundo puerto colombiano sobre el Pacífico, de donde salen muchos de los transportadores, un 84% de sus habitantes vive en la pobreza multidimensional. Y los grupos de narcotráfico se aprovechan ofreciendo trabajo en laboratorios, astilleros de embarcaciones y como transportistas. “Es la única fuente de empleo que mueve estas comunidades. Sé que es ilegal, pero es lo que hay”, explica Duván Caicedo, líder comunitario del pequeño poblado de Pital de Costa, situado entre un río y la selva en el Pacífico colombiano. Los 1.200 habitantes del caserío viven sin agua potable y sin puesto de salud, a dos horas en lancha desde Tumaco y desde el hospital más cercano. Un laboratorio de procesamiento de cocaína es la única fuente de trabajo. En Sucre, el estado de Venezuela donde queda Güiria, el 90 % de la gente no tiene segura su alimentación.  Según reporteó ARI, casi nadie se dedica exclusivamente a hacer viajes que lleven cocaína. Esas lanchas mueven la vida cotidiana de la gente en esa costa: traen y llevan comida, pescado, medicinas. En ellas viajan trabajadores de Venezuela a Trinidad y de regreso, o pescadores que salen a traer la pesca del día, migrantes que huyen del autoritarismo y también traficantes. (Ver historia Todas las”vueltas” en Güiria). Cuando cargan drogas, generalmente van dos o máximo tres personas, un conductor y dos ayudantes. Esta investigación revela que las víctimas de los bombardeos estadounidenses provenientes de Güiria se dedicaban a la pesca, a conducir mototaxi, a manejar bus, y  algunos de ellos se habían arriesgado a hacer un viaje con cocaína porque no podían sostener a sus familias. Así, Juan Carlos Fuentes, 43 años, chofer de “toda la vida”, y Luis Ramón Amundaraín, pescador y mototaxista, 36 años, estaban en Trinidad y Tobago desde el 28 de septiembre de 2025. Juan Carlos, dice su esposa, estaba desesperado por falta de dinero. Se le dañó un bus Yutong del que vivía y no lo pudo reparar.  Él la llamó desde Trinidad la víspera del bombardeo del 3 de octubre en que presumiblemente cayó y le dijo que estaba por salir; que no llevaba droga.  Ramón, dice su compañera, “se fue para buscar más ingresos” porque la ganancia de la pesca y los traslados en moto habían dejado de ser suficientes para su familia de siete. Ella contó a los reporteros de ARI que su esposo se dedicaba a la pesca. “Dicen que él es un narcoterrorista”, dijo, pero asegura que si lo fuera tendrían bienes, y ni siquiera tienen casa propia. Su familia cree que él murió con Juan Carlos el 3 de octubre.   Tiene sentido lo que dicen las mujeres, porque sus maridos venían de Trinidad y Tobago hacia Venezuela y las drogas fluyen en sentido contrario. Otro más, Eduard Hidalgo, de 46 años, había sido ducho pescador y se había ido a finales de 2024 a Estados Unidos. Lo deportaron un año después. Sostiene una amiga que si bien había transportado diversas mercancías para los jefes criminales de la zona, no quería hacer más viajes, “pero lo obligaron”.  Ella cree que cayó en el bombardeo de una lancha el 23 de febrero pasado.  (Ver historia “Los explotaron los gringos”: Cómo tres venezolanos terminaron en las lanchas atacadas por Estados Unidos) Miedo y hambre No sólo las familias de los muertos hoy los lloran.  La ondas expansivas también impactan a las comunidades. Por ejemplo, durante algunos días, pescadores de la zona rural de Buenaventura, el principal puerto colombiano sobre el Pacífico, suspendieron sus faenas por el temor de no regresar a sus hogares, aunque luego las retomaron paulatinamente.  El municipio de Olaya Herrera, en Nariño, salió más afectado. Una persona que trabaja en el sector humanitario de la región y pidió anonimato, le dijo a esta alianza que allí muchos viven del dinero que recogen los transportistas al completar un viaje. “Cuando regresan, entra plata a la comunidad, el comercio se mueve y todos se benefician”, dijo. Con el miedo a hacer viajes transportando drogas no volvió a ingresar dinero a las familias.  “Estamos viviendo una situación muy pesada”, dice el párroco Luis Carrillo. “Se empezó a sentir desde noviembre, pero se volvió crítica en febrero”. En coordinación con la Alcaldía, el sacerdote solicitó ayuda al Banco de Alimentos en Bogotá y en marzo llegaron en barco desde Buenaventura 700 canastas con alimentos que se repartieron en la cabecera municipal de Bocas de Satinga y la zona rural. “Obviamente eso no mitiga ni el uno por ciento de las necesidades”, dice el párroco. ¿Quién investiga? Las autoridades de ningún país, desde Estados Unidos hasta Colombia o México, revelan cuánta droga se hundió, ni cuantos de los caídos en bombardeos la transportaban, ni sus nombres. Ni siquiera han informado cómo recogieron la información de inteligencia que los llevó a señalar a esas víctimas como objetivo militar.   Esta alianza periodística envió un cuestionario con estas y otras preguntas al Comando Sur de los Estados Unidos. Este respondió que “por razones de seguridad operativa y protección de las fuerzas, no discutimos inteligencia ni detalles sobre nuestros procesos y planificación operativos”. También dijo su vocero que “no se puede ignorar la amenaza que los narcoterroristas y los cárteles representan para la vida humana. Han intensificado su violencia hasta niveles sin precedentes, yendo más allá de la mera conducta criminal al cometer actos de terror indescriptibles. No son solo sus rivales criminales quienes están en su mira; están librando una guerra contra ciudadanos respetuosos de la ley, comunidades enteras e instituciones gubernamentales, llevando a cabo actos atroces para imponer su voluntad y satisfacer su insaciable ansia de ingresos ilícitos”. Fuentes de la embajada de República Dominicana en Colombia confirmaron a este equipo periodístico que la única información recibida sobre la posible muerte de dos de sus connacionales proviene de una alocución del presidente colombiano Gustavo Petro; sin embargo, no se han iniciado gestiones oficiales para su identificación. Calificaron el asunto como “políticamente sensible”. En Ecuador, el Servicio de Guardacostas de la Armada no ha revelado ningún detalle sobre las operaciones de rescate de posibles sobrevivientes que —según dijo EE. UU— inició tras un bombardeo en el Pacífico el 9 de febrero de 2026, según confirmó un reportero que apoya esta investigación en ese país. En el Pacífico costarricense, las autoridades rescataron dos muertos y un sobreviviente. Los dos fallecidos eran ecuatorianos. Reporteros de esta alianza pudieron confirmar con fuentes de seguridad en Ecuador que uno de ellos, Pedro Ramón Holguín Holguín, tenía un negocio minorista de venta de pescado en Manta, una ciudad costera que es hoy centro de la actividad narcotraficante en el país.  Lograron establecer, además, que la embajada de Ecuador en Costa Rica ayudó con la identificación de los restos, pero sus cuerpos, a la fecha, siguen en una morgue en San José, la capital costarricense.  Casa Macondo, un aliado de esta investigación en Colombia, envió peticiones de información a diversas autoridades. La DIMAR, la autoridad marítima colombiana, aseguró que nadie le reportó que hubo bombardeos en sus aguas territoriales. La Cancillería convocó en noviembre pasado a  una reunión con el Ministerio de Defensa, la Armada y la Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia. El resultado fue que todas las entidades dijeron no tener información oficial más allá de los medios de comunicación. La conclusión escrita, firmada por el Director de Soberanía Territorial Javier Pava Sánchez, fue que “nuestra soberanía no ha sido vulnerada”. Trece días después de esa reunión, el embajador colombiano ante la OEA intervino en el Consejo Permanente para denunciar esos mismos ataques como violaciones al derecho internacional. El 23 de diciembre, Colombia repitió la denuncia en una reunión de emergencia del Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU.  El mismo presidente de Colombia, Gustavo Petro, dijo públicamente que había visitado la casa de un pescador bombardeado el 15 de septiembre, Alejandro Andrés Carranza, en Santa Marta, y había visto que vivía en la pobreza. Denunció estos ataques como ejecuciones extrajudiciales. Además, facilitó una reunión de un abogado estadounidense con los familiares de Carranza para que estos consideraran demandar por daños sufridos, según contó el abogado en cuestión, Daniel Kovalik, a reporteros de esta alianza. Finalmente, Kovalik presentó una denuncia ante la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos de la OEA, argumentando que la de Carranza fue una ejecución extrajudicial y que por ello Estados Unidos violó la Declaración Americana de los Derechos y Deberes del Hombre.  Los ataques verbales entre los presidentes Trump y Petro, que venían escalando de tiempo atrás, se tornaron álgidos luego de esta declaraciones.  Finalmente, el presidente Petro se reunió con Trump en la Casa Blanca, y las denuncias se acallaron. Fuentes de Cancillería colombiana ahora aseguran que el tema es tan sensible que no lo mencionan, ni dan información al respecto.  Uno de los pedidos de información de Casa Macondo sí fructificó y reveló un efecto de estos bombardeos que había pasado desapercibido: que coincidiendo con los ataques desde el cielo a los botes bajo sospecha, subió el número de disrupciones a  vuelos comerciales en Colombia en 2025. Con información de la Aerocivil (la autoridad colombiana de aviación civil), Casa Macondo estableció que entre enero y julio de 2025 se habían reportado mensualmente entre cuatro y cinco incidentes involucrando a los GPS de los aviones comerciales, un nivel dentro de los rangos esperados para cualquier espacio aéreo. Pero desde agosto, coincidiendo con la víspera del inicio de la campaña de bombardeos, los reportes se multiplicaron por cinco. En el año contabilizó un total de 251 reportes de fallas de GPS y las clasificó como ajenas a sus sistemas. Cerró el expediente sin investigar qué las causaba.  Aerocivil informó que durante 18 vuelos comerciales que volaban en el Caribe norte, los pilotos dieron cuenta de fallas en los GPS de los aviones, al cruzar AMBAS –como se le llama a una coordenada de navegación aérea sobre el mar Caribe, al norte de Colombia, donde convergen las rutas que conectan Bogotá y Medellín con Miami, Nueva York, Santo Domingo y Curazao. La señal permanecía perdida entre ocho minutos y una hora —mientras los aviones cruzaban a alturas de entre 30.000 y 40.000 pies, es decir, entre nueve y doce kilómetros de altura—, y se recuperaba al salir del espacio aéreo colombiano. El GPS siempre se apagó en el mismo lugar. Siempre se volvió a encender cuando el avión se alejó. En uno de los casos reportados por Aerocivil,  a un piloto le fallaron los GPS y luego por otra falla, el transponder —el dispositivo que le dice al radar en tierra dónde está el avión— dejó de transmitir y en la cabina, se encendieron las alarmas del sistema antichoque, como si el suelo estuviera cerca, cuando en realidad iba a miles de pies de altura.  El piloto de la aeronave, que habló con esta alianza periodística pidiendo reserva del nombre, aseguró que se asustó porque nunca le había pasado, pero que los aviones tienen al menos tres sistemas redundantes de navegación, y siempre hay alternativa cuando uno se apaga. “No hubo peligro para los pasajeros”, dijo.  Al suministrar estos registros, la autoridad aérea reconoció que estos episodios constituyen una “afectación a la navegación aérea civil” y los clasificó oficialmente bajo su protocolo de “identificación de peligros” para la seguridad del espacio aéreo. (Ver Historia Aviones comerciales volaron con interferencias coincidentes con los bombardeos de EE.UU a las lanchas) Ataques que socavan la lucha contra el narco Los golpes de misil pueden ser más espectaculares y violentos que la silenciosa interceptación e incautación regular que el presidente Trump venía denigrando como inútil, pero no por ello, más eficaz. Así, mientras Trump celebraba su primer bombazo del 2 de septiembre a la lancha con 11 tripulantes, como un ataque contra terroristas del Tren de Aragua “identificados con certeza” y aseguraba que llevaba “cantidades masivas de drogas”, el vicepresidente aseguró que era el mejor uso y más elevado uso de sus fuerza armadas. El secretario de Estado Marco Rubio, haciendo eco de esta declaraciones el día siguiente, aseguró que interceptar a las lanchas que llevan drogas no había funcionado. “En lugar de interceptarlas, las volamos, siguiendo la orden del Presidente. Y va a pasar de nuevo”, dijo.   Lo que no contaron los dirigentes del gobierno estadounidense es que ese mismo 2 de septiembre ocurrió la Operación Zeus, que sin embargo, no lanzó rayos desde el cielo, como la del bombazo a los 11 tripulantes. En esta Operación Zeus, la Fuerza Aeroespacial Colombiana había detectado una embarcación sospechosa en las mismas aguas del Caribe, y compartió las coordenadas con la Fuerza Aérea dominicana.  Esta última, con la coordinación de la  Fuerza de Tarea Conjunta Interinstitucional del Sur de Estados Unidos (JIATF-S por su sigla en inglés), en la Base Naval Aérea de Key West en Florida, envió a unidades de su armada a interceptarla. Abordaron la embarcación, apresaron a sus dos tripulantes e incautaron 448 kilos de cocaína, entregaron evidencia a un proceso penal y no hubo un solo muerto.  No fue la única. Una investigación del CLIP siguió las interdicciones regulares de lucha antinarcóticos en el Caribe y en el Pacífico que realizaron entidades estadounidenses en cooperación con países europeos y latinoamericanos, entre septiembre de 2025 y febrero de 2026, basándose en informaciones de las fuerzas del orden y de prensa en varios idiomas y países, y consultó con los registros públicos disponibles en la API v3 de Global Fishing Watch y Vesseltracker. Encontró que gracias a esta cooperación internacional, pudieron decomisar, sin disparar un solo tiro mortal, al menos 140 toneladas de cocaína y detener a 160 tripulantes que luego fueron entregados a la justicia. Este rastreo estableció que, coincidiendo con la operación de bombardeos a lanchas, el remolcador Little Girls con bandera de Tasmania, el pesquero griego Ourania A y, el viejo buque de propiedad turca United S, pasaron por el Atlántico cargados de drogas. Ninguno fue volado con misiles. Esperaron a que llegaran a un lugar seguro para inmovilizarlos, incautar la droga que llevaban y detener a sus tripulantes. Es más, la operación contra el Ourania A llevó al arresto de un conocido narco griego.  Las operaciones antinarcóticos regulares y los ataques letales se ejecutaron en las mismas aguas, en las mismas semanas, con coordinación de inteligencia que en varios casos pasaba por los mismos nodos institucionales: el MAOC-N de Lisboa, la Fuerza de Tarea Conjunta Interagencial Sur (JITF-S) de Key West y la DEA. (Ver historia Para los grandes cargamentos, justicia; para los pequeños, bombas). ¿Quién toma las decisiones? ¿Quién ordenó a cuál embarcación volar y a cuál dejar pasar para luego detenerlo civilizadamente? Eso le preguntamos al Comando Sur.  No respondió la pregunta, sino que envió el siguiente comentario: “La Operación Southern Spear se lleva a cabo bajo las órdenes de nuestro Comandante en Jefe para defender el territorio nacional de los Estados Unidos, proteger a los socios regionales y mantener la ley y el orden, impidiendo que los narcoterroristas, los cárteles y su red de cómplices se afiancen en el Hemisferio Occidental mediante una presencia abrumadora. El objetivo de la operación es detectar, desarticular y desmantelar las redes de los cárteles y otras organizaciones transnacionales que el presidente de los Estados Unidos, mediante una orden ejecutiva, ha designado como organizaciones terroristas”. Expertos jurídicos ya han planteado sus inquietudes sobre el significado del término “narco-terrorista”, pero Brian Finucane, asesor principal del Programa de Estados Unidos del International Crisis Group y exabogado de la Oficina del Asesor Jurídico del Departamento de Estado de EE. UU., declaró a esta alianza que los comentarios del ejército estadounidense en respuesta a este reportaje llevan esas inquietudes un paso más allá. “El derecho de la guerra permite la violencia que de otro modo estaría prohibida, pero solo durante un conflicto armado genuino —un umbral que la administración Trump no ha logrado alcanzar, ya que ni siquiera ha identificado contra quién se supone que Estados Unidos está luchando”, dijo. “Más allá de ese problema fundamental, la sugerencia de la administración de que los ‘facilitadores’, vagamente definidos, pueden ser blanco de ataques, suscita aún más inquietudes de que esté violando las reglas de su propio paradigma legal falso”. Mientras la cooperación internacional para la lucha anti-narcóticos se desarrollaba con normalidad y sin dejar muertos en estos seis meses de septiembre a febrero, los múltiples ataques que realizó el gobierno estadounidense dejaron 140 muertos, sin una cantidad de cocaína públicamente incautada y pulverizando las pruebas judiciales que podrían llevar a encontrar a los grandes narcos dueños de las rutas.  De hecho, la Fiscalía de Colombia solo abrió una indagación preliminar en contra del sobreviviente Jonathan Obando Pérez,  según El País América, “pero no prevé convertirla en una investigación formal, pues no tiene elementos para señalar que Obando Pérez haya cometido algún delito en Colombia”. Por eso luego de salir del hospital, quedó en libertad. Una fuente citada por AP de la Fiscalía ecuatoriana también aseguró que “no encontró pruebas suficientes para emprender acciones legales” en contra de Andrés Fernando Tufiño, sobreviviente de un ataque en el Caribe el 16 de octubre.  Por las posibles violaciones a los derechos humanos y al derecho del mar, las autoridades de Reino Unido y Canadá dijeron que no compartirían inteligencia con sus pares de Estados Unidos, según reportó Time. Las fuentes británicas le dijeron en noviembre pasado a esas revista que “los oficiales británicos creen que los golpes militares de Estados Unidos que han matado 76 personas violan la ley internacional” y por ello, suspendieron la cooperación para este tipo de ataques desde octubre. Y fuentes canadienses dijeron que su gobierno “no quiere que su inteligencia ayude a localizar como objetivos a barcos para dar golpes mortales”.  En enero pasado, el ministro de Defensa holandés dijo en Aruba que continuarán las labores de interdicción en la aguas territoriales de su país pero no usarán su barco-estación naval para operaciones relacionadas con la operación Southern Spear (la de los bombardeos) de los Estados Unidos.  “Ningún país europeo, incluida Francia, enviará inteligencia operacional a los americanos en la situación actual si esta se puede usar como base para un ataque militar a un barco”, dijo Dimitro Zoulas, jefe del servicio antidrogas de la policía francesa a Radio Caraibes (RCI). Y Euractiv confirmó con una fuente francesa de seguridad que “es 100 por ciento claro que los europeos no les están dando ninguna inteligencia a Estados Unidos que puede llevar a un golpe (contra los barcos)”.  El gobierno de Colombia había anunciado algo similar, pero un alto funcionario diplomático que habló con CLIP y pidió no revelar su nombre por la sensibilidad del tema, dijo que hoy éste sigue compartiendo normalmente su inteligencia con su par de Estados Unidos, pero no precisó para cuáles operaciones.   A estas críticas, en la respuesta enviada a esta alianza periodística, el Comando Sur respondió: “las fuerzas estadounidenses operan bajo reglas de combate que son consistentes con el derecho marítimo internacional contra actividades que representan una amenaza directa para la seguridad de EE. UU. y la vida de los ciudadanos estadounidenses. Como organización militar a la que se le ha confiado la defensa de nuestra patria, estamos plenamente comprometidos con misiones que apoyan directamente la salud y la seguridad del pueblo estadounidense”. En abril pasado, una coalición de 125 organizaciones civiles de todo el mundo (incluida Airwars, que apoyó con información experta a esta alianza periodística, Human Rights Watch y Amnistía Internacional, entre otras), hizo una petición pública urgente para que los países “inmediatamente dejen o se abstengan de apoyar las ejecuciones extrajudiciales de Estados Unidos en el mar Caribe y el océano Pacífico”. “Debemos recordar que todos estos individuos tienen nombres, familias y vidas que nunca serán iguales”, dijo Jamil Dakwar, director del Programa de Derechos Humanos de ACLU en una audiencia ante la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos de la OEA (CIDH), el pasado 13 de abril.  Esa organización, además de representar a las dos víctimas trinitenses ante una corte federal estadounidense, pidió a la CIDH declarar que los golpes de misil a las embarcaciones violan el derecho internacional y propuso la creación de un grupo especial que investigue las implicaciones que estos han tenido en el hemisferio.  ¿Por qué lo hacen, entonces? Es difícil entender por qué el gobierno Trump se empeña en continuar los bombardeos, a pesar de que no frenan el flujo de drogas.  Incluso, el almirante Nathan Moore, comandante del Guardacostas de Área Atlántica de Estados Unidos, defensor de usar todos los métodos, incluidos los bombardeos, reconoció que no han visto ninguna diferencia notable en el flujo de cocaína. Moore dijo,  después de 21 bombardeos en noviembre de 2025, que no han cambiado ni las rutas de los traficantes, ni el ritmo, ni la pureza de la droga.   Es probable que hayan conseguido que los traficantes dejen de usar algunas rutas, sobre todo aquellas por donde se mueven las lanchas go-fast –de acuerdo con un análisis de InSight Crime, un medio especializado en el crimen organizado—pero la operación no “evitó que los traficantes movieran la cocaína por otros medios”, como apelar más a la ruta por la Amazonía.  Tampoco es difícil para los grandes narcos reemplazar a los muertos por otros hombres empujados a sus redes por la desesperación, la pobreza y el desempleo, pues éstos abundan en las costas latinoamericanas. Atacar al eslabón más débil del multimillonario negocio del narcotráfico no es nuevo. Lo vienen haciendo nuestros países sin resolver el problema desde hace más de 50 años. Esta nueva estrategia de explotar lanchas y matar sospechosos desconocidos lleva esta política al extremo. Los misiles han causado un tremendo dolor y hunden en peores carencias a familias y pueblos pobres que no se pueden defender del majestuoso poder militar estadounidense, ni de su omnipresente retórica.  Además, como se contó aquí, aliena la cooperación internacional y deja más solitario a Estados Unidos frente al crimen.  ¿Por qué entonces persistir en un camino tan riesgoso y estéril por más de ocho meses? “En el gobierno Trump creen en el espectáculo de fuerza por razones que tienen muy poco que ver con interdicción efectiva”, dice Walsh de WOLA. “Quieren impresionar a los ciudadanos, haciéndoles creer que ellos sí que le están poniendo fin al problema terrible del narcotráfico, lo que otros gobiernos no lograron. La profunda crueldad y despreocupación con que ordenan estos asesinatos sistemáticos e intencionales les permite proyectar la naturaleza amenazante de ‘narcoterroristas’ sin nombre. De esta manera asombran a muchos estadounidenses, mientras anestesian la noción de que los funcionarios de Estados Unidos responsables de estos asesinatos deben rendir cuentas ”. La figura del presidente Trump y sus más altos funcionarios de Guerra y Estado, acompañando sus bombardeos con videos explosivos y  triunfales comentarios en redes sociales, orquestan un espectáculo de poder desproporcionado frente a hombres humildes, en su mayoría pobres, y en todo caso, sólo sospechosos de estar transportando drogas.  Como dijo una venezolana esposa de un hombre caído en un bombardeo, “Donald Trump no se puso a pensar; está matando a un padre de familia y no sabe por qué este hombre se montó en ese bote”. ¿Tienes más información sobre esta historia? Escríbenos a investigaciones@elclip.org