3 separate US strikes on alleged drug boats have initially left survivors. Each time they’ve been treated differently

By Haley Britzky, CNN

(CNN) — As the US military has undertaken a campaign of attacks against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, at least five people have survived initial strikes ending up in the water after explosions killed fellow crew members and disabled their ships.

But what happened next to the survivors varied greatly – two were detained by the US Navy only to be returned to their home countries, one was left to float in the ocean and is presumed dead, and two more have been at the center of intense scrutiny in recent weeks following reporting that the US military conducted a second strike killing them as they clung to their flipped and damaged boat on September 2.

The contrast in treatment has happened while policy on how the military will handle survivors remains steady, according to defense officials.

That September 2 strike was the first conducted by US forces against alleged drug boats, a campaign that has resulted in the killing of 87 people on 23 boats.

Democratic lawmakers have demanded answers about the follow-up strike with some suggesting that the US military may have violated international law by killing the survivors.

Last week, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in closed-door meetings to explain the attack. Bradley was the commander of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike and oversaw the attack; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the White House have said Bradley was ultimately the official who directed the follow-on strikes, and that they support his decision.

Bradley told lawmakers he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, CNN has reported. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went.

People briefed on the follow-up strike said they were concerned that it could violate the law of armed conflict, which prohibits the execution of an enemy combatant who is “hors de combat,” or taken out of the fight due to injury or surrender.

“They’re breaking the law either way,” Sarah Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon who now serves as a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, previously told CNN. “They’re killing civilians in the first place, and then if you assume they’re combatants, it’s also unlawful — under the law of armed conflict, if somebody is ‘hors de combat’ and no longer able to fight, then they have to be treated humanely.”

The second time the military found survivors after an initial strike, the response was very different.

On October 16, the US picked up two survivors from an attack in the Caribbean on a submarine alleged to be carrying narcotics, and soon after released them to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia. Two other crew members were killed in the strike.

A US official said the two men were the only survivors after their submersible sunk, meaning they did not have access to the drugs allegedly on board, and they were on life rafts.

Hegseth said Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum that there “was protocol for dealing with survivors” and that the strike on October 16 was simply “a different circumstance” than the strike that included the follow-up attack that killed survivors.

“We didn’t change our protocol, it was just a different circumstance,” Hegseth said. “A couple guys jumped off and swam, from what I understand a ways away. When we struck the submarine a second time, it sunk, and then you had two people that you had to go get, and we had the ability to go get them. We gave them back to their host countries.”

Detaining the men created a potential legal conundrum for the Trump administration. It was not clear under what legal authority the US military could hold the men, and had they remained in US custody they could have challenged their status in court.

The most recent crew member to survive a strike was on one of four boats attacked October 27, initially killing 14 people. CNN reported at the time that the Mexican Navy got a call from the Pentagon informing them there could be a survivor of a US strike in the Pacific Ocean, which surprised Mexican officials given they had not received advance warning of any strikes.

Three days after those strikes, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said there was “no new information” on the survivor and that the Mexican Navy was searching in coordination with maritime protocol, which requires search and rescue efforts for 96 hours. The same US official said that person was treated differently as he was no longer a threat after the strike, although it’s unclear why the US military didn’t pick up the survivor, as they’d done 11 days before.

The survivor of that strike was not found and is presumed dead. The Pentagon previously had not been counting that individual in its total tally of people killed in the ongoing campaign, but a spokesperson said Monday they were now being included.

The pace of US strikes has slowed considerably, with a gap of 19 days before the most recent attack on December 4.

Hegseth acknowledged that reduced pace in answering a reporter’s question during a Cabinet meeting two days prior about the killing of survivors. He said he did not directly order the follow-up strike, but that he supported Bradley and insisted the controversy wouldn’t change US plans.

“We’ve only just begun striking narco boats,” he said.

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