The U.S. has now killed more than 60 people in its different strikes against alleged drug vessels in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean.
The latest one was announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday, who said the attack killed four men in the Eastern Pacific. He added that the target “was known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling.”
It was the 14th known strike. Most recent ones have focused on the Eastern Pacific. Hegseth said on Tuesday that another wave of attacks against four vessels killed 14 people.
“The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own. These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them,” Hegseth said on Tuesday.
Elsewhere, Hegseth said the campaign will take on cartels in the region, which he labeled as the “Al-Qaeda” of the Western Hemisphere. Speaking to U.S. troops, he said the country “fought for 20 years Islamist enemies around the world.” “I was there, there was a lot of goodness in what was achieved by our troops,” he added.
Hegseth went on to say that, however, “we have other entities in our hemisphere that have been poisoning America’s young people and Americans for far too long.” “Drug cartels, narco terrorists. They go by different names but are basically the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere. President Trump said said we’re going to untie the hands of our military and make sure they understand there’s a new dynamic,” Hegseth claimed.
Another report detailed that the Trump administration is so confident that its military campaign is so popular that it doesn’t need approval from Congress.
Concretely, a White House official told Politico that the strikes against the vessels in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific fulfill a campaign promise from Donald Trump to deal with drug cartels.
The official went on to say that lawmakers have been briefed on the strikes several times since the campaign began in September and that the administration is “working through additional requests for information from the Hill.”
However, a growing number of Republican senators are publicly demanding greater oversight of the campaign, arguing they have been left out. They include Thom Tillis, James Lankford and Mike Rounds, as well as Rand Paul.
Originally published on Latin Times
