Dominican Republic officials announced Sunday that they’ve seized 377 packages of cocaine from a speedboat the US Navy recently blew up. The boat was hauling around 1,000 kilograms of the drug as part of a bold US crackdown on drug trafficking in the southern Caribbean.
The incident happened about 80 nautical miles south of Isla Beata, a tiny island off the Dominican Republic’s coast. Authorities say the Dominican Republic Navy teamed up with US forces to track down the vessel, which they believe was heading to the island nation to use it as a stopover point for smuggling cocaine into the United States.
“This marks the first time in history that the United States and the Dominican Republic have joined forces against narco-terrorism in the Caribbean,” the National Directorate for Drug Control said in a statement.
The operation ties into a larger anti-narcotics mission launched by the Trump administration in August. Back then, the US deployed eight warships and a submarine to the region to battle drug smugglers. So far, this naval flotilla has taken out three speedboats loaded with drugs in separate strikes, killing more than a dozen people on board.
The White House points out that at least two of those boats launched from Venezuela. Trump officials often label Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro a drug kingpin tied to the so-called Cartel of the Suns, a powerful smuggling network. Maduro rejects the accusations and calls the US military presence in the Caribbean an outright invasion of his country.
Not everyone supports the aggressive tactics. Human rights groups argue the boat strikes amount to extrajudicial killings. On Friday, two Democratic senators introduced a congressional resolution to halt any more such actions by the administration.
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