Alleged CIA Role in Covert Sea Strikes Suggests New Facet to Trump’s South American Anti-Drug Campaign

The “gringos” never identified themselves, but the American flag patches adorning their sleeves spoke louder than words.In Pacific Ocean waters off the coast of Ecuador, they detained men wounded in a drone attack on a fishing boat while a jet that served as air cover loitered in the air nearby.According to New York Times and Washington Post reports this week, the armed men in the sleek boat who slapped hoods and cuffs on the bleeding fishermen were from the CIA.The Washington Post reported that the agency is running a covert operation that is presumably part of the Trump administration’s very public campaign against suspected drug cartels in the eastern Pacific Ocean.The effort resurrects uncomfortable memories of decades of CIA involvement in Latin America, and comes alongside a larger, overt campaign by America’s uniformed military targeting suspected drug boats on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of South and Central America.“The implication of all this is that Trump’s militarized anti-cartel campaign in Latin America may be already way bigger than we understand,” said Will Freeman, who wrote for the New Yorker about missing Ecuadoran crewmen off the country’s coast, in a video on social media.It is not clear whether the attacks off Ecuador are in fact part of the anti-drug campaign, or whether the boats were carrying drugs. Last September, the Trump administration notified Congress the United States was in “armed conflict” with nonstate narcoterrorists whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”Mr. Freeman, a fellow for Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, claimed the strikes incorrectly targeted fishermen rather than drug couriers as the administration has claimed.“This militarized campaign — blowing up fishing boats with little impunity — this is not bending the curve in terms of international drug trafficking,” Mr. Freeman said.Both the Pentagon and the Coast Guard, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, have denied involvement in the attacks on the Ecuadorian boats. Those denials, however, do not extend to the civilian CIA.The United States Southern Command, the military theater responsible for Central and South America, last week announced a new joint task force focused on the Western Hemisphere. It’s another signal the Trump administration intends to make good on its stated goals of “a Hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations,” as laid out in the government’s National Security Strategy released in November 2025.Days into 2026, American special forces snatched Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife from their palatial compound, killing an estimated 150 members of the dictator’s security force with zero casualties to American forces. Mr. Maduro was indicted in Manhattan on drug trafficking charges and remains in American custody awaiting trial.It was the most dramatic, but not the first time the Trump administration has adopted a more muscular posture in Latin America. Beginning in September 2025, the Navy began blowing up boats that it said were carrying drugs in explosive strikes captured in gunsight videos that the Pentagon released to the public.But the new reporting indicates those strikes were not the only action the administration was taking against suspected drug traffickers. According to the New York Times, at least two boats were attacked in March by “English-speaking assailants wearing matching uniforms with American flag patches.”The men did not identify themselves.The boats had apparently been tracked by a maritime patrol plane that had flown out of a military base in El Salvador. The Times reviewed archived radio communications with air traffic control that revealed the pilots on that plane were speaking English with American accents.The men in the two boats were subsequently turned over to the Ecuadorian authorities and released. Eight men from a third boat that went missing in the same area remain unaccounted for.The CIA’s presence in Ecuador stretches back to at least 1947, Marc Becker wrote in his 2021 book “The CIA in Ecuador,” which tracks the agency’s steady growth among both consular staff and undercover personnel posing as businessmen working for “an amenable United States firm.”Operatives in Ecuador mostly gathered information on socialist and student movements, Mr. Becker wrote, but did not undertake the kind of direct action seen in an agency-organized coup against Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954 or the 1973 overthrow of Chile’s president, Salvador Allende.“The documentation the CIA left behind on its investigations of subversive movements in Ecuador reflects exaggerated fears, misplaced concerns, and bureaucratic attempts to justify the agency’s existence,” wrote Mr. Becker. “While the surveillance inadvertently provides a rich source of documentation on domestic affairs in Latin America, CIA officers interpreted those developments through a cold war lens that colored their understanding of the events they observed.”On Thursday, the Southern Command highlighted joint exercises with Panamanian forces focused on boarding, searching and seizing vessels suspected of carrying illegal cargo. The same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia and Honduras had agreed to joint military operations in their territories alongside the American military. Similar agreements were reached earlier this year with Guatemala and Ecuador.“For too long, bad people did bad things to good people,” Mr. Hegseth told troops in Panama who were participating in a jungle operations training course. “Inside the United States of America and across South and Central America. And we’re going to empower great Americans and great partners to do really good stuff and be very capable of bringing violence against drug cartels and designated terrorist organizations, because we’re dead serious about securing the homeland.”Correction: Chile is the country of which Salvador Allende was president. An earlier version misstated the name of the country.

Alleged CIA Role in Covert Sea Strikes Suggests New Facet to Trump’s South American Anti-Drug Campaign

Alleged CIA Role in Covert Sea Strikes Suggests New Facet to Trump’s South American Anti-Drug Campaign

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