U.S. Forces Board and Sink Cartel Fuel Ships Off Ecuador; Crews Removed First (Video)

U.S. forces operating with Ecuador near the eastern Pacific shipping lanes intercepted and destroyed commercial vessels the Pentagon says were being used as floating gas stations for boats moving narcotics toward the United States, U.S. Southern Command and officials familiar with the operations said this weekend.

Unlike the missile and drone strikes that have marked other parts of the year-old counter-cartel campaign, the latest interdictions were board-and-scuttle jobs. Marines and sailors launched from the amphibious transport dock USS San Antonio stopped the vessels, removed everyone aboard, and then sank them. Officials said no one on either side was killed. The crews were turned over to Ecuadorian authorities.

SOUTHCOM said intelligence tied the targets to Los Choneros, the Ecuador-based organization the State Department designated a foreign terrorist organization at the start of the maritime campaign. The command described the ships as “a critical node” in the traffickers’ logistics chain — hulls that let the smaller go-fast boats top off far from shore instead of running home for fuel. At least one of the vessels had already been listed in Treasury sanctions.

A U.S. official told the New York Times the Saturday operation was the fourth interdiction of a floating refueling platform in the eastern Pacific. SOUTHCOM had announced similar board-and-sink actions earlier in the week, including a Sept. 2 seizure it said was completed “without incident.” Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the SOUTHCOM commander, said the task force is “taking decisive action to dismantle and destroy sophisticated logistics networks used by narco-terrorists to traffic drugs and spread violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.”

The work sits under Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere and the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition. The administration has treated the cartels as terrorist organizations rather than as a Coast Guard interdiction problem that ends at a dock. That designation is what lets the Navy and Marines treat a refueling barge in international waters as a military target after the crew is off it.

Saturday’s Iran tanker strikes and the Pacific cartel sinkings are not the same war. They are the same doctrine: identify the logistics node that pays for the threat, take the node, and publish the video. One funds the IRGC. The other funds the pipelines that move fentanyl and cocaine north. In both cases the United States is now shooting at the supply ship, not writing another indictment and waiting for a friendly port.

SOUTHCOM did not release the names of the hulks sunk this weekend or a running tally of narcotics that never left the beach because the fuel ship was gone. The command’s claim is narrower and checkable: the floating stations are being boarded, the people on them are being handed to Ecuador, and the hulls are on the bottom.