‘We were terrified they were going to kill us’: fishers who survived US boat strike speak out

By 4pm, the light was softening over the Pacific, and the crew of the Don Maca were finishing a long day hauling in lines of swordfish and albacore. Down in the hold, the mood had settled into the familiar rhythm of a fishing day drawing to a close.

“We were just working, waiting for the last trawler to return,” said Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, one of the fishers. “Everything was perfectly fine.”

From nowhere, an explosion ripped through the boat. “There was a sudden crash – boom! It came from a drone,” he said.

The blast tore through the vessel, shattering glass, and injuring several crew members. “I ran upstairs and saw the boat destroyed … The whole ship was stripped bare,” he said.

A group of Ecuadorian fishers have described how they were attacked in a double drone strike and then detained at gunpoint by soldiers on a US-flagged patrol vessel, in a rare first-hand account by victims of Donald Trump’s militarized campaign against alleged drug-trafficking boats off South America.

At least 178 people have been killed in US military airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific since the offensive began in September, according to a tally by the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola).