The U.S. military has destroyed at least eight Ecuadorian fishing vessels originating in Manta since Aug. 28, according to U.S. Southern Command. Crews were removed and handed over to Ecuadorian authorities before the boats were sunk. Since September 2025, the U.S. military has reported killing approximately 230 crew members in Pacific and Caribbean waters on vessels allegedly carrying drugs. The reporting that documents those figures — a Wall Street Journal feature on Manta, a port city of about 300,000 — also documents the structural condition that produces the targets: a single drug run reportedly pays $20,000 to $40,000, while fishing yields roughly $300 per month.

A Manta fisherman was paid $30,000 to transport about two tons of cocaine in 2023, using the proceeds to replace a cane dwelling with a brick house. Jhony Garay, arrested in 2017 after a cocaine shipment he undertook to rebuild following a 2016 earthquake, was released last year, returned to sea, and was captured in July with more than a ton of cocaine about 1,000 miles off El Salvador. Bryan Mendoza, a sociologist at Eloy Alfaro Lay University of Manabí, frames the shift: the trade is “no longer seen as an isolated activity, but as a possible means for individual and family development.”

If the recruitment driver is a roughly 100-fold income gap with no documented lawful substitute, interdiction removes a vessel but does not remove the condition that produced the next crew. The context compounds the difficulty: Manta’s homicide rate was approximately 137 per 100,000 last year compared with 5.4 a decade earlier, placing the city among the world’s most murderous. Los Choneros and Los Lobos, designated by the U.S. as terrorist organizations, contest control of Manta’s maritime route, according to national police. A prosecutor was killed in June; the mayor was assassinated in 2023.

Interdiction and structural reform are not substitutes but co-requirements — and the operations as currently configured deliver neither. The U.S. operations treat the symptom (the boat); the recruitment driver (poverty without alternatives) and the destabilization driver (gang control of a strategic route) require instruments the maritime campaign does not contain. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on a visit to Ecuador this month, framed the operations as targeting drug traffickers who have “rapidly transformed Ecuador into one of Latin America’s most violent countries” rather than fishermen, adding, “Nobody is looking to kill fishermen here, but the greatest risk is that these groups will continue to operate, because they are killing people.” He concluded, “We’ll still blow up ships if need be.”

That framing is in tension with documented conduct in the same reporting. A Manta judge ordered the release of 28 detained fishermen picked up from two sunk vessels, ruling the operation unauthorized and that the strike destroyed the crime scene. The U.S. military has denied involvement in drone strikes near the Galápagos in March and the disappearance of a Manta vessel in January, episodes that survivors Hernán Flores and his crew — who say they were picked up by English-speaking men with guns and transferred to Salvadoran authorities — describe as direct attacks on their boat. “We were afraid they were going to kill us,” Flores said. “We are fishermen. We set out to catch fish, never imagining that this would happen.” A U.S. Southern Command spokesman said operations are conducted in compliance with “U.S. and international law.”

A national-security paradigm, articulated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on his Ecuador visit and grounded in Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa’s membership in the Shield of the Americas security alliance, which includes other right-wing governments in Latin America, treats the boats as legitimate targets in a counter-narcotics campaign with Ecuador’s consent. A human-rights paradigm, voiced by United Nations special rapporteur Ben Saul, characterizes the strikes in the Pacific and Caribbean as “unlawful extrajudicial killings” that could “plausibly constitute crimes against humanity” — locating the legal insufficiency in international law on the use of force at sea and in the absence of due-process protections for those killed. A sovereignty paradigm, anchored in the Manta judge’s ruling and in the testimony of family members who gathered on Manta’s waterfront with signs reading “Justice for our fishermen,” locates the legal insufficiency in the absence of authorization under Ecuadorian domestic procedure.

Each paradigm recognizes the economic asymmetry Mendoza described; none resolves it. The national-security frame uses interdiction precisely because the underlying economic conditions cannot be approached militarily. The human-rights frame finds the cost borne by crews disproportionate and the international-law framework insufficient to authorize the strikes. The sovereignty frame finds the operations conducted without authorization under the domestic procedure the strike-affiliated state itself controls, evidenced by the release order and by the survivor testimony the U.S. denies involvement in.

The documented contradiction most consequential for the accountability framework is the Manta judge’s finding that a strike “destroyed the crime scene.” That phrase, from a domestic court reviewing the operations’ output, indicates interdiction as currently configured does not produce evidence admissible under the legal system the strikes claim affiliation with. The documented destruction of the crime scene in the Manta judge’s review, combined with the U.S. military’s denial of involvement in two other incidents the survivors describe, indicates the operations do not consistently produce evidence that survives domestic review. Carlos Carrión, who runs a group in Manta for family members of fishermen jailed abroad for drug smuggling, said there are hundreds of Ecuadorian fishermen imprisoned in the U.S. and Central America, and that their families in Manta are “living in absolute destitution.”

The recruitment driver Mendoza described and the legal-sufficiency question the judge raised are not separate problems but the same problem viewed from different angles — and the operations as configured address neither. Whether the Shield of the Americas alliance contains instruments commensurate with the structural scale of the problem — economic alternatives, jurisdictional clarity, evidentiary protocols that survive domestic review — is a question the maritime campaign it now conducts does not address.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Dialectical Analysis
Holds thesis against antithesis and works toward a higher synthesis.
Red-Team Assessment
Models a capable adversary probing a plan for the seams they would exploit.
Worldview Cartography
Maps the clashing worldviews underlying a dispute.