US Coast Guard suspends search for survivors of latest boat strikes

WASHINGTON – The US Coast Guard late on Jan 2 suspended the search for survivors of a US military strike against several boats
in the eastern Pacific this week, after rescue operations faced high seas and fierce winds.

The Coast Guard said in a statement that it was calling off the operation after coordinating a search over four days with four vessels, including fishing boats and ships from other nations, in an area about 400 nautical miles south-west of Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

The Coast Guard had also launched an HC-130J Super Hercules reconnaissance aircraft from Sacramento, California, to sweep an area covering about 1,090 nautical miles, and issued an urgent broadcast to mariners in the region.

Altogether, the ships and the plane had spent about 65 hours as of Jan 2 searching for survivors, the service said.

But the Coast Guard noted that conditions in the area included 2.8m seas and winds approaching 80kmh. By late on Jan 2, the Coast Guard said there were “no sightings of survivors or debris”.

“At this stage of the response, the likelihood of a successful outcome, based on elapsed time, environmental conditions and available resources for a person in the water is very low,” Captain Patrick Dill, the chief of incident management for the Coast Guard’s South-west district in Alameda, California, said in the statement.

The strike on Dec 30 was the fourth known instance of people surviving, at least initially, one of the 35 military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific that have killed at least 115 people since early September.

A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The search for an undetermined number of survivors from the latest strike began around 3pm Pacific time on Dec 30 after the Coast Guard said that it was notified by the Pentagon that there were “mariners in distress” in an unspecified area of the Pacific Ocean.

In a separate statement Dec 31, the military’s Southern Command said that on orders from Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, it opened fire the day before on a three-boat convoy after intelligence analysts determined that the boats were traveling along “known narcotrafficking routes and had transferred narcotics between the three vessels prior to the strikes”. NYTIMES