Why the US Military Is Hunting Cocaine Boat Crews

Transcript

Robert Sánchez unloaded his catch, told his mother he would see her in a couple of days, and left. His family learned he was dead from social media. This is why the US military is hunting what it says are cocaine boat crews, and who they really are. By InSight Crime’s count, at least 238 are dead as of October, in what may be the deadliest job in crime. Has a year of missiles stopped the cocaine? And why would a fisherman say yes?

On the second of September 2025, a small boat left Sucre, on Venezuela’s northeastern coast, and headed out into the Caribbean. It never arrived anywhere. The United States military struck it at sea. Soon after, President Donald Trump posted a clip of a small vessel appearing to explode in flames. He said the boat had left Venezuela carrying drugs, and that all 11 men aboard were members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Every one of them, he said, was dead.

Venezuela’s government had not even acknowledged the deaths. So how did one family find out? Then a photo spread on social media: a body, washed ashore in Trinidad and Tobago. His family knew him at once by the watch on his left wrist, one of his most treasured belongings. Luis Martínez, known as Che, was 60 and, people who knew him told the Associated Press, a local crime boss who smuggled drugs and people. His relatives say he died in that first strike. His relatives did not believe he belonged to Tren de Aragua. The strikes, villagers would later say, changed who got into the boats.

And they did not stop. Six weeks later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth compared the cartels to Al Qaeda and promised they would be hunted, and killed. The campaign spread from the Caribbean to the eastern Pacific. By InSight Crime’s count, American forces killed 15 people on four boats in a single day. Mexican rescuers searched for one person who had survived. The search failed.

Then came a darker question about that very first strike. Three months later, the Washington Post reported that men had survived the first hit, and the military struck again. Some lawmakers asked whether that second strike was a war crime. There were allegations that Hegseth had given the order to kill them all. Senior military commanders later testified to Congress that he had not. Michael Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Al Jazeera: “That is murder.”

Trump said every boat sunk saved 25,000 American lives. But the boats, the Associated Press found, appear to have carried cocaine, not the synthetic opioids killing tens of thousands of Americans a year. By March, the president was claiming the campaign had helped wipe out nearly all drug trafficking into the United States by sea. Hold on to that claim. Later, the people who live where the boats leave from will tell you if it is true.

Thirteen months on, the reporting network OCCRP counts 70 strikes. The military’s press releases never name the dead, or say where they came from. So the men are counted, and named, by journalists and by their own communities. Washington calls every one of them a narco-terrorist, so who was actually steering those boats?

By the time the AP published the first detailed account of the dead, the military had blown up 17 boats. Associated Press reporters went to the villages on Venezuela’s northeastern coast where some of the boats set out, and asked. Those who spoke asked not to be named, for fear of the smugglers, their own government and Washington. No government confirmed the deaths; relatives worked them out from word of mouth and social media. “I want an answer, but who can I ask?” one relative said. The men the AP traced had indeed been running drugs, residents and relatives said, but they were not narco-terrorists or cartel leaders.

Robert Sánchez, the fisherman from the start, was among the peninsula’s best pilots, friends said, able to cross at night without instruments. He earned about 100 dollars a month, relatives said, and most of it fed his children. His dream was a 75-horsepower engine, so he could run his own boat instead of working for others. Money, and that dream, his friends said, made him say yes to the traffickers. The traffickers wanted someone who knew those currents, friends said. He did. The next two men were not sailors at all.

Dushak Milovcic, 24, quit Venezuela’s National Guard Academy for the money and the rush, those who knew him said. He started as a lookout for smugglers, they said, and was promoted to the boats with no experience at sea. Juan Carlos Fuentes drove a bus until it broke down and the government did not fix it. With no fares coming in, he could barely feed his family. He had never worked at sea either. His first run went smoothly, friends said, so he agreed to join another crew. Weeks later, friends said, a missile strike killed him. Most of the men the AP traced were on their first or second run, for at least 500 dollars a trip, residents and relatives said.

Across the water, in Trinidad and Tobago, two families tell a different story. Chad Joseph, 26, often crossed to Venezuela for farm work, fishing and odd jobs, his family says. Two days before the strike, he called his wife: he had found a boat ride home. Rishi Samaroo, 41, out of prison since the year before after a 15-year sentence, was tending goats and making cheese on a Venezuelan farm, his family says. He told his sister he would be home soon. Their families say both men were on their way home when a missile hit their boat. The US has not said who they were. So why weren’t they simply arrested?

In the past, the AP reported, boats like these would have been stopped at sea and the crews charged in court. The US government “should have stopped them,” one relative told the AP. By the accounts of those who knew them, most of the men the AP traced were hired hands, not the men who hire them. Once the missiles started, villagers said, seasoned traffickers stayed ashore and hired novices.

In a hidden shipyard on Marajó island, in Brazil’s Amazon, federal police once caught a narco-sub before it could set out for Europe. Fernando Casarin, the police chief whose special forces seized it, said you could pay him all the money you wanted and he still would not make that crossing. Yet men keep making it. So what is the money that gets them in?

Start with one kilo of cocaine. On Brazil’s border with Colombia, Casarin says, it sells for 1,000 to 2,000 dollars. In Europe, he says, the same kilo goes for about 60,000 dollars. Same drug. Other side of the ocean.

Casarin says a narco-sub that lands five or six tonnes in Europe could earn its owners 200 to 250 million dollars. Casarin calls the profits astronomical.

Now look at the men aboard. Casarin estimates that Brazilian sailors earn 30,000 to 50,000 Brazilian reais for a crossing, at most about 8,000 euros. Against the cargo, that is less than one euro for every 20,000 euros it earns. Back on Venezuela’s coast, the pay relatives described for one trip was at least five months of what Robert Sánchez earned fishing. It is easy to see why he said yes. So who decided a life on that boat was worth so little?

And is this really the deadliest job in crime? InSight Crime’s figure counts the dead, not everyone who was aboard the boats that were hit. So its numbers cannot give these crews a death rate. But crime work has been measured before. In a 1998 working paper, the researchers Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh went through a drug gang’s own books, kept by its leader. For most of the study, its street dealers appear to have earned less than the minimum wage, and seven percent of its members died violently every year. Their conclusion: the members placed a very low value on their own lives.

In Mexico, researchers at the Complexity Science Hub estimate that the cartels must recruit at least 350 people a week just to keep going. Within a decade, they say, 17 percent of those recruits are dead. Juan Carlos Fuentes knew the risks of the boats, his friends said: the weather, rival gangs, even the US military. That last danger is one no study of crime work ever had to measure. And on the Atlantic route to Europe, the crew sits behind the cargo for weeks, never sure they will reach land.

One night in late October 2019, a homemade submarine slipped out of the Amazon delta into the Atlantic. It had been built in Macapá, in Brazil’s Amazon, and named the Che, after the Argentine guerrilla. Three men were inside, with about three tonnes of cocaine.

The captain, Agustín Álvarez, was a Spaniard and a former boxing champion who knew the Atlantic. His crew were two Ecuadorian cousins, Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, sailors who had never made that crossing. The Ecuadorian magazine Vistazo reports the cousins were promised 55,000 dollars. The author of a book on the case told the Guardian it was about 15,000 dollars. Vistazo’s account says all signs point to a plan to hire very cheap labour, willing to risk their lives for almost nothing. They were about to find out what that meant.

Their space was barely two metres by two, wedged behind the cargo and 5,000 gallons of fuel. They ate sardines, rice and crackers, and shared one plastic bag as a toilet. Brazilian police say the real danger in these boats is not drowning but the engine’s fumes. For a week, the sea was calm. It would not stay that way.

Then a storm hit, and it lasted for days. It pushed them off course, opened leaks in the roof and damaged the oil sump, and oil began to seep into their space. When it passed, they were drifting in a shipping lane, and a giant cargo ship nearly ran them down. None of them can explain how they survived.

So they did something risky. The captain made two satellite calls, to his contacts in the trade and to childhood friends, and the Portuguese navy picked up both. The boats meant to meet them broke down, the fuel ran out, and after 27 days, twice as long as planned, the sub ran aground in Galicia, Spain.

The cousins jumped first, clutching their backpacks, though neither could swim well, and the captain went last. By then, Galician police and the DEA were following their movements through the phones. Benítez, the first to be caught, exhausted on the rocks, claimed he was a stowaway from a Spanish ship. All three were sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Six years later, the American strikes reached the narco-subs too. The first one hit, in October 2025, left two people dead and two survivors, who were sent home to Ecuador and Colombia. They were lucky. When the toll stood at 199, CBS News counted at least 22 people who had survived a first strike, only to be hit again or die at sea. By its count then, just three strike survivors were known to have been rescued.

On the desert coast of La Guajira, at the northern tip of Colombia, people know the sequence by heart. First the whine of drones overhead, then the boom of explosions. “And then in the following days,” a local businessman says, “the sea brings in a jerrycan, pieces of a boat, drugs, people too.” Over the past year, 21 American strikes have hit speedboats in these waters.

So have the boats stopped leaving? OCCRP’s reporters went to find out. Residents, officials and a young boatman told them the departures had not slowed. “A friend went out last night,” the boatman said, casually.

Marking a year of the campaign, US officials claimed illicit traffic at sea in this part of the Caribbean had fallen 60 percent. Remember the president’s claim, that the strikes had nearly ended drug trafficking by sea? A Drug Enforcement Administration assessment reportedly found the strikes did not reduce the cocaine entering the United States. The strikes forced smugglers to change their methods. Separately, a UN expert’s report found cocaine still reaches the country on container ships, which are not adequately checked.

In Riohacha, the region’s capital, a family of the Wayúu, the Indigenous people of this desert, has been waiting since May for a boatman who never came home. They have crossed the peninsula looking for his body, and they scan social media, where graphic videos of the strikes circulate. Many locals believe his death is in the video of a strike that month, whose US press release announced “two male narco-terrorists” killed. Memorial photos of two local boatmen soon spread online. Who were they? Both, OCCRP’s reporters found, were widely known as boatmen who sometimes worked for traffickers, yet La Guajira’s prosecutors told them neither man was under criminal investigation. Relatives asked the shipment’s owner for compensation, through a mediator. A neighbour says he apparently has not paid.

Because the owners do pay, for some things. The day after a strike, a local man says, they send people to search the wreckage, offering up to 3 million Colombian pesos, about 947 dollars, for every brick of cocaine recovered. Without a body, the boatman’s mother still refuses to accept he is dead.

On the 14th of October 2026, the government agreed to hand a secret document to a federal judge in New York. It is a legal opinion from the government’s Office of Legal Counsel, and the administration has fought to keep it from the public. According to reports, it calls the strikes lawful acts in an armed conflict with drug cartels, and claims to protect the people who order or carry them out from future prosecution. The ACLU, which sued for it, says the judge had already found that the Pentagon treats it as its working law. He is to read it, then decide whether you can too.

But the government asked the judge to reconsider the rest of his order. The cartels, the administration says, are unlawful combatants, and America is in an armed conflict with them. Southern Command says every narco-terrorist it neutralized was an affiliated member of a designated terrorist organization. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio told senators that every strike has a legal officer on deck, deciding whether the call is legal.

On the other side, the words are harder. In September, Ben Saul, the UN’s independent expert on counterterrorism and human rights, reported that 68 attacks through August had killed at least 223 people. He concluded they were serial extrajudicial killings that plausibly constitute crimes against humanity. Drug trafficking, he said, is not equivalent to a military attack.

But who could ever try it? As Al Jazeera explains, no American court can try it as a crime against humanity, because no federal law makes it one, and the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court. So the two families from Trinidad and Tobago are trying another door. In January, they brought the first case against the US government over the strikes. They are suing under the Death on the High Seas Act, a law that lets families sue over deaths in international waters. Earlier this year, the Pentagon’s own watchdog said it would examine only whether the military followed its targeting procedure, not whether the strikes are legal.

Asked by OCCRP’s reporters, the White House said every strike had hit designated narcoterrorists bringing deadly poison to American shores. “The President will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs.”

In La Guajira, a state official who travels the peninsula put it simply. When a boatman is arrested or killed, she says, the traffickers just get new ones. “Only the families of the dead feel it.”

Whether the strikes are war, as the government says, or murder, as its critics say, is still not settled. The government has agreed to give the memo to a judge, and the families’ lawsuit has yet to be decided. And on Venezuela’s coast, Robert Sánchez’s youngest son spent days asking whether his father might have survived, and still be out at sea. No, the adults told him.