Dominican Republic says it recovered cocaine from boat struck by US

President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic addresses the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations in New York on Sept. 25, 2024. (Dave Sanders/The New York Times)

By YAN ZHUANG

Authorities in the Dominican Republic said Sunday that they had recovered cocaine from a speedboat that was recently destroyed in a U.S. military airstrike, part of the Trump administration’s campaign targeting Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels.

It was the first time the Dominican Republic and the United States had carried out a joint operation in the Caribbean Sea against “narco-terrorism,” the Dominican Republic’s National Directorate for Drug Control said in a statement posted on social media Sunday.

The U.S. military conducted airstrikes this month on three boats in the Caribbean in what the Trump administration has characterized as a counternarcotics and counterterrorism mission in the region.

The speedboat had been carrying about 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of “suspected cocaine,” the Dominican Republic’s drug control agency said in its statement.

President Donald Trump has claimed the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from being governed by law enforcement rules to wartime rules, which he says give him the authority to order the military to summarily kill drug-running suspects as if they were combatants on a battlefield. The strikes have been condemned by legal experts and Democrats, who say they violate international law.

It was not clear if the Dominican Republic’s announcement was connected to the recent strike in the Caribbean, announced by Trump on social media Friday. That strike killed three people, whom the president described as “narco-terrorists” without offering more details. He also posted a one-minute video showing a speedboat being blown up.

The Dominican Republic’s drug control agency said in its statement that officials working with the U.S. Southern Command and the Joint Interagency Task Force South had detected a speedboat that, according to intelligence reports, was carrying narcotics. The Dominican Republic’s drug control agency said the boat was heading toward Dominican territory and intended to transport its narcotics to the United States.

Teams from the Dominican Republic’s navy and the drug directorate recovered 377 packages, wrapped in adhesive tape and with different logos, from the remnants of the boat. Sixty packages were destroyed in the explosion, the statement said. The packages were recovered about 80 nautical miles south of Beata Island, off the southern coast of the Dominican Republic.

The Dominican Republic did not provide any details about when the operation had occurred or about the people who had been on board.

President Luis Abinader of the Dominican Republic has pledged to collaborate with the United States against drug trafficking, and his country has emerged as a key security partner for Washington. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has praised the Dominican Republic for intercepting drugs “destined for the streets of the United States.”

Reached by phone, the U.S. Southern Command said that a spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. The Joint Interagency Task Force South directed an inquiry about the operation to the Office of Secretary of Defense Public Affairs, which directed the inquiry to the White House.

The Trump administration has recently ramped up its deadly campaign against drug smugglers in the Caribbean, whom it has accused of bringing illegal drugs into the United States.

Trump announced the first strike on a vessel in the Caribbean on Sept. 2, saying 11 people had been killed. The second strike, announced Sept. 15, killed three people, he said.

The Pentagon has built up its military presence in the Caribbean as part of its campaign there. Military officials, diplomats and analysts have said that a main purpose of the deployment is to ratchet up pressure on Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whom top figures in the Trump administration have called an illegitimate leader and have accused of directing the actions of criminal gangs and drug cartels.

Maduro condemned the U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan boat Sept. 2 as a “heinous crime” against civilians who presented no threat, and said the strike violated U.S. and international laws. He said that the United States should have arrested the people on the boat if it believed that they were drug traffickers.

The strikes have also drawn backlash in the United States, with congressional Democrats and international law experts assailing them as illegal.

“The president’s decision to use lethal military force against civilians based on unproven claims that they are drug traffickers is morally reprehensible and strategically unsound, and will end up making it harder to prevent dangerous drugs from entering our communities,” said Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.