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De­fence Sec­re­tary Pe­te Hegseth on Mon­day an­nounced the lat­est in a se­ries of strikes on boats ac­cused of fer­ry­ing drugs, killing six peo­ple in at­tacks on two ves­sels in the east­ern Pa­cif­ic Ocean.

The dual strikes on Sun­day bring the to­tal num­ber of known at­tacks up to 19 and the death toll to at least 75 peo­ple since the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion launched a cam­paign against drug traf­fick­ing in South Amer­i­can wa­ters that many see as a pres­sure tac­tic on Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro.

“These ves­sels were known by our in­tel­li­gence to be as­so­ci­at­ed with il­lic­it nar­cotics smug­gling, were car­ry­ing nar­cotics, and were tran­sit­ing along a known nar­co-traf­fick­ing tran­sit route,” Hegseth post­ed on so­cial me­dia.