Between September 2, 2025, and February 23, 2026, U.S. agencies, working alongside intelligence services, coast guards, and navies from several countries, seized 140 long tons of narcotics in joint operations across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Pacific without firing a single lethal shot. The operations, carried out with the participation of the DEA and the Joint Interagency Task Force–South under U.S. Southern Command, ended with more than 160 crew members arrested alive and handed over to the courts. During that same period, using the very same intelligence infrastructure, U.S. forces bombed 44 boats and killed at least 141 people.[1]

[1] This investigation traces, on one side, the military attacks the United States carried out against civilian vessels in the Caribbean between September 2025 and February 2026 under the name Operation Southern Spear; and on the other, the cooperative interdictions conducted during those same weeks by European and Latin American partners using intelligence coordinated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Joint Interagency Task Force–South (JIATF-S) under Southern Command.

The report is built on verifiable primary and secondary sources: official statement no. 16693 issued by Spain’s National Police in the Little Girls case; MAOC-N Lisbon communiqués on Operations White Tide and Ippalos; press conferences by the Spanish government’s deputy delegate in Tenerife; the November 13 official statement from the U.S. Embassy in Panama; the November 15 press release from the Dominican Republic’s National Drug Control Directorate; and official statements from the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, Portugal’s Polícia Judiciária, the Hellenic Police, Brazil’s Federal Police, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Those sources are supplemented by media coverage in eight languages—Spanish, French, Portuguese, English, Italian, Dutch, Greek, and German—as well as public maritime records available through the Global Fishing Watch API v3, Bloomberg SHIP, VesselFinder, and vesseltracker.

On September 2, 2025—the very day the United States launched its first lethal strike against a boat carrying eleven people off the Venezuelan coast—the Colombian Aerospace Force, its Dominican counterpart, and the U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force–South, known as JIATF-S, carried out an operation called Zeus that, despite its grandiose name, unfolded quietly: the Dominican Navy boarded a twenty-seven-foot speedboat, seized 448 kilograms of cocaine, and took the two people aboard into custody alive.

The following day, at a press conference in Mexico City, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the president’s decision to bomb the Venezuelan vessel and kill its crew.

“Instead of intercepting it,” Rubio said, “on the President’s orders, we blew it up.”

JIATF-S—the agency responsible for the surveillance and detection operations that make drug interdictions across the hemisphere possible—continued coordinating cooperative interdictions throughout those six months, even as the bombings escalated in parallel. Based in Key West, Florida, it brings together officers from multiple U.S. agencies and coordinates operations with at least fifteen countries.

Fiscal year 2025, which ended in September, had already set a record for cocaine seizures: 231 tons, more than triple the historical average, according to an official U.S. Coast Guard statement. Operation Pacific Viper, launched in August to stop go-fast boats crossing the Pacific from Ecuador and Colombia toward Central America on their way to the United States, proved especially effective between August and February: more than 200,000 pounds of cocaine—roughly 90 metric tons—were seized, and more than one hundred crew members were captured alive in just six months.

In one operation alone, on December 2, a U.S. helicopter fired at the engines of a speedboat to disable it, allowing authorities to seize exactly ten tons of cocaine and arrest all six people aboard alive.

The seizures followed a protocol refined over more than half a century of the war on illegal drugs: a suspicious shipment is detected; JIATF-S cross-checks the intelligence with DEA agents and other agencies; a U.S. Coast Guard cutter moves into position along the maritime route; a helicopter from a specialized interdiction squadron fires on the vessel’s engines to stop it; the drugs are seized, and those detained are prosecuted.

That same protocol continued operating in parallel with the violent attacks, under the same regional chain of command—Southern Command—with the same joint detection unit, JIATF-S, and with the same DEA agents providing intelligence.

Three consecutive operations carried out between October and January made the contrast unmistakable.

Bound for a Galician Port

As early as October 8, the DEA had warned Spain’s National Police that a vessel would depart from Panama bound for Vigo and would attempt to bring cocaine into the Galician port. On October 22, a Spanish National Police special operations unit, deployed aboard a Spanish Navy patrol vessel, intercepted the Little Girls, seized 3,900 kilograms of cocaine hidden inside the hull, and arrested all nine crew members alive. In its official statement, the National Police identified the DEA as the source of the original alert. The intelligence had been shared through the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre—Narcotics (MAOC-N) in Lisbon, an organization created by eight European countries to combat drug trafficking.

The Little Girls, a fifty-year-old tugboat registered to a Panamanian shell company, had changed names six times and sailed under the Tanzania flag. According to data from Global Fishing Watch, the vessel left Cristóbal, Panama, on August 12 and, three days later, altered course toward Capurganá, in Colombia’s Gulf of Urabá, an area controlled by the Gulf Clan. It spent five days moving at reduced speed, following a pattern typical of ship-to-ship transfers. It then returned to Panama and remained docked for six weeks at Pier 3—long enough to build the hidden compartment inside the hull where the cocaine would later be concealed.

On September 30, it departed for Vigo—not like a ship trying to disappear. Its AIS transmissions continued openly broadcasting “Vigo” as its destination and reporting a steady speed of twelve knots.

At 4:09 p.m. Caribbean time on October 5, it passed through coordinates 13.82° north, 66.79° west—roughly 200 kilometers south of the spot where, two days earlier, a U.S. missile had reportedly killed four people aboard a small boat.

Then, on October 14, while the Little Girls continued crossing the Atlantic along that same Caribbean corridor, another U.S. military missile killed six more boat pilots in those waters. Two days later, another explosion killed two more. Twelve dead in two weeks.

At the same time, the Pentagon allowed the aging, heavy Little Girls to sail through untouched while bombing small boats across the Caribbean.

The French Navy, operating in the Caribbean waters, also carried out several successful seizures during those same months, often close to the very areas where U.S. forces were bombing boats. In five operations, French authorities seized just over 14 tons of cocaine, and in at least one of them the DEA provided intelligence. The same sea, the same months, the same intelligence: zero deaths.

One of those international operations yielded more than a drug seizure alone. On December 14, 2025, the French Navy intercepted the Greek fishing vessel Ourania A on the high seas and, through heavy weather, towed it for three days to the port of Fort-de-France in Martinique.

The operation not only resulted in the seizure of 4,200 kilograms of cocaine and the arrest of five crew members alive—four Greeks and a Bulgarian carrying a Ukrainian passport—but also led Greece’s Organized Crime Directorate to arrest five additional people on Greek soil that very same day, including the vessel’s owner, Alexandros Angelopoulos, known in the Greek press as “the Greek Pablo Escobar.” According to an official statement from Lisbon’s MAOC-N, the intelligence had been shared by Greek authorities with the U.S. DEA.

Since the late 1990s, according to the newspaper Politic, the DEA office in Belgium had been warning its counterpart in Athens about a thirty-six-year-old Greek businessman living in Antwerp who used tugboats to transfer cocaine from cargo ships inside the Belgian port. That businessman was Angelopoulos. The investigation opened at the time eventually led, in July 2004, to the interception of the fishing vessel Africa 1 off the coast of Senegal carrying 5.4 tons of cocaine. Angelopoulos was sentenced to life in prison in 2005, but was released in 2015 under a law that allowed his sentence to be commuted. Months later, he was arrested again after prosecutors appealed the ruling, before ultimately securing his final release in 2022. In October 2024, the DEA resumed surveillance.

Tracking the movements of the fishing vessel, Global Fishing Watch records show that the Ourania A departed from Nea Michaniona, in northern Greece, on November 13, 2025. From that point onward, it sailed for thirty-one days with its transponder switched off, until the moment it was boarded. The cocaine had been loaded offshore near the Venezuelan coast in a ship-to-ship transfer, without the vessel ever entering a port. The French Navy intercepted it near Martinique, fewer than three hundred nautical miles from where the first lethal strike against a small boat is believed to have taken place on September 2.

Greek police later confirmed that the captain of the Ourania A—a sixty-two-year-old man arrested at sea—was the very same captain who had crewed the Africa 1 in 2004.

Another ship, the United S, is almost a textbook example of the aging, nearly disposable vessels used in these trafficking operations: eight documented name changes, five different flags over the course of half a century, and nominal ownership by a Turkish company based in Mersin. The same hull had already been seized in September 2013 carrying eighteen tons of hashish under the name Moon Light.

Built in Denmark in 1975, the United S spent ten days docked in Banjul, Gambia, between November 3 and 13, 2025. While it was there, on November 9, something unusual happened. The vessel changed its AIS identity from a Togolese registration to a Cameroonian one: according to Global Fishing Watch records, just nine minutes and twenty-six seconds elapsed between its final transmission as Joud S and its first as United S.

It crossed the Atlantic toward Brazil. According to the Ceará Port Authority, it docked at Mucuripe Pier in Fortaleza on December 4 and departed two days later, requesting only fuel and mechanical maintenance, with no cargo operations declared. Like the Ourania A, it loaded the cocaine offshore, somewhere between the coasts of Brazil and Suriname, in a ship-to-ship transfer. Beginning on December 29, the vessel stopped transmitting altogether and spent nearly two weeks in silence before it was finally intercepted.

In the early hours of Sunday, January 11, 2026, Spanish police boarded the United S some 535 kilometers southwest of the Canary Islands in an operation coordinated by JIATF-S, the DEA, Lisbon’s MAOC-N, Brazil’s Federal Police, and Spain’s National Police. Inspectors found 9,994 kilograms of cocaine packed into bales marked with logos in five different colors—five criminal organizations dividing up the shipment. The thirteen crew members—Indian, Turkish, and Serbian nationals, one of them armed—were all arrested alive. It was the largest maritime cocaine seizure in European history.

“It was a textbook operation in terms of planning, execution, and international cooperation. The target was a large cargo vessel carrying a massive load along a well-known trafficking route,” an investigator with Spain’s Organized Crime and Narcotics Unit told the newspaper El Español.

During its voyage, the United S crossed the central Atlantic well within the reach of Southern Command’s surveillance and operational capabilities, even as Operation Southern Spear was at the height of its campaign of missile strikes against small boats. Yet neither this suspicious freighter, nor the Ourania A, nor the Little Girls was targeted with missiles. The U.S. anti-narcotics system knew where they were headed and had concrete suspicions about their illegal purpose. It chose to let them continue and to work with partner countries to intercept them later.

The same pattern repeated itself in the Pacific. On November 9, 2025, in Panamanian waters off the Pearl Islands archipelago, Panamanian authorities and the DEA intercepted a tugboat that had departed Colombia bound for Mexico. Authorities seized 13.5 tons of cocaine and arrested ten people, including Colombians, Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, Peruvians, and Venezuelans.

Four days later, on November 13, the U.S. Embassy in Panama praised its “seamless collaboration” with the DEA. Just one month earlier, President Trump himself had defended the missile strikes by arguing that maritime interdiction had been “totally ineffective” for the past thirty years.

That single seizure near the Pearl Islands yielded better results than the string of bombings the U.S. government carried out in the Pacific over the following days. Between November 15 and the end of January, the lethal strikes left dozens more dead as one vessel after another was destroyed by missile fire.

In two additional cooperative operations carried out while the bombings continued, the DEA once again supported interdictions that ended without a single death. On September 13, officers from Spain’s National Police arrested three South American crew members on a beach in A Pobra do Caramiñal, in La Coruña, as they attempted to unload 3,650 kilograms of cocaine from a semi-submersible vessel.

The evidence gathered and the three arrests led to a second phase—Operation Saona—which dismantled the network’s logistical support structure and resulted in eleven more arrests. Then, on November 3, an international operation involving JIATF-S, the DEA, and Portuguese, British, and French authorities led to the interception of another semi-submersible west of the Azores: 1.7 tons of cocaine seized and four people arrested alive. During those same early November days, while these operations concluded without a single missile fired, the Pentagon carried out additional bombings in the Caribbean and the Pacific that left at least nine people dead aboard destroyed boats.

Over the course of half a century, the United States built an institutional architecture for the war on drugs through agreements, protocols, and coordinating offices stretching from Florida to Lisbon. During the six months examined here, that system was neither dismantled nor weakened. On the contrary: it was producing record-breaking results.

The DEA, JIATF-South, and the Coast Guard continued coordinating with fifteen countries to seize major shipments, delivering more than 160 detainees into the judicial system along with the drugs, the vessels, and the documentary evidence that in some cases led investigators to the owners and financiers behind the operations.

That very same structure, operating in the same waters during the same months, also provided the intelligence used to bomb forty-four small boats and kill at least 140 people, according to the U.S. government itself—without recovering evidence, publicly identifying a single person responsible, or even naming the boat pilots who were killed.

Neither the amount of drugs involved nor the danger posed by the traffickers explains the difference between their living or dying, between appearing before a judge or vanishing at sea.

Los bombardeados: sin derecho a la defensa es una investigación sobre las víctimas civiles de los ataques de Estados Unidos en Latinoamérica, coordinada por el Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP) en alianza con Casa Macondo, Verdad Abierta y 360 grados (Colombia); la Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Venezuela); The Guardian (Trinidad y Tobago) y con el apoyo de Airwars (Reino Unido) y El Veinte.