1,000 kilos of cocaine seized from boat US targeted, Dominican Republic says
Officials in the Dominican Republic said they confiscated approximately 1,000 kilograms of suspected cocaine from a speedboat targeted recently in a U.S. airstrike in the southern Caribbean.
At a press conference, local officials said the National Drug Control Directorate (DNCD) and the Dominican Republic Navy seized 377 packages of suspected cocaine from the boat about 80 nautical miles south of Beata Island, an island in the Dominican Republic.
The speedboat “was loaded with narcotics and was heading to Dominican territory, with the intention of using the country as a bridge to take it to the United States,” the DNCD said in a statement, citing intelligence reports.
Dominican authorities said the operation was carried out in “close coordination” with the U.S. Southern Command and the Joint Interagency Task Force South.
“This is the first time in history that the Dominican Republic and the United States have carried out a joint operation against narcoterrorism in the Caribbean region,” the DNCD statement read.
The disclosure comes after President Trump announced on Friday the third strike this month on a ship in the Caribbean that he said was carrying narcotics.
The president said the ship was traveling on a “known” narcotrafficking passage in an effort to “poison Americans.”
“The strike killed 3 male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel, which was in international waters,” Trump wrote. No U.S. forces were harmed in the strike.
Trump ordered, and the military carried out, similar strikes on Sept. 2 and Sept. 15 in the Caribbean as part of Trump’s efforts to curb fentanyl trafficking. Trump says the boats were connected to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, now designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. The U.S. has said the three strikes have resulted in 17 deaths.
Venezuelan authorities say the ship struck by American forces on Sept. 2 was not carrying gang members.
The strikes have prompted backlash from Democratic senators, including Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Tim Kaine (Va.), who last week introduced a resolution under the War Powers Act to stop the U.S. military from attacking boats without congressional approval.
“Congress alone holds the power to declare war,” Schiff said Friday in a statement. “And while we share with the executive branch the imperative of preventing and deterring drugs from reaching our shores, blowing up boats without any legal justification risks dragging the United States into another war and provoking unjustified hostilities against our own citizens.”