The navies of Mexico and El Salvador reported major cocaine seizures in the Pacific this week totaling more than 10 tons, as President Donald Trump’s administration pressed an aggressive maritime campaign that has included deadly strikes on suspected smuggling boats in Latin American waters.
Mexico’s navy intercepted a semisubmersible vessel about 250 nautical miles south of the Pacific port of Manzanillo on Thursday and seized nearly four tons of suspected cocaine, Mexico’s Security Secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch said in a statement on social media.
Authorities said the low profile craft, outfitted with three visible motors, carried 179 bundles of drugs and that three people were detained.
Garcia Harfuch said that the interception pushed Mexico’s seizures for the week to nearly 10 tons and called it a “multimillion-dollar blow” to organized crime.
"This represents a direct and multimillion-dollar blow to the financial structures of organized crime, by preventing millions of doses from reaching the streets and protecting the safety of Mexican families," Garcia Harfuch wrote.
Semisubmersibles, sometimes called narco-subs, are designed to ride low in the water to evade detection and have become a common method for moving cocaine north from South America.
Mexican officials said the operation was carried out with intelligence shared by U.S. Northern Command and Joint Interagency Task Force South, a U.S.-led effort based in Key West, Florida, that tracks illicit trafficking routes in the region.
El Salvador’s navy said Sunday it had made the largest drug seizure in the country’s history after intercepting a Tanzania-flagged vessel about 380 miles southwest of the Central American nation’s coast.
Divers found 330 packages hidden in ballast tanks and authorities confiscated 6.6 tons of cocaine, El Salvador said, while arresting 10 men from Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, and Ecuador.
El Salvador identified the ship as the FMS Eagle and said it arrived Thursday at the port of La Union under naval escort.
The seizures come as Washington keeps up pressure on Mexico and other governments to disrupt cocaine and fentanyl supply chains, even as U.S. officials acknowledge fentanyl is typically trafficked across land borders rather than by sea.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has taken a more confrontational posture toward cartels than her predecessor while rejecting U.S. military action in the region, and she has pointed to expanded cooperation with U.S. authorities, including the January transfer of 37 fugitives wanted on U.S. charges.
The U.S. Justice Department said the 37, taken into custody in the United States on Jan. 20, face charges that include drug trafficking, firearms offenses and money laundering.
At sea, the Trump administration’s campaign has drawn sharp criticism from human rights advocates and some legal scholars after U.S. forces began striking small vessels suspected of carrying drugs, sometimes without publicly presenting evidence of contraband.
The U.S. military said airstrikes on three suspected smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific this week killed 11 people, and reporting by the Associated Press has found at least 145 people have died since the strikes began in September.
Separately, the U.S. Coast Guard said it recovered 2,083 pounds of cocaine near Puerto Rico after a pursuit in which a fleeing crew dumped bales into the sea, estimating the haul’s value at about $13.3 million.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.