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House Progressives Demand Pentagon Answer for Alleged Abuse in US-Ecuador Operation
"The United States cannot continue to be complicit in abuses abroad. There must be accountability," said Rep. Chuy García, who co-led a letter to the Pentagon.
May 13, 2026
Backed by anti-war and human rights organizations, 20 "deeply concerned" progressives in the US House of Representatives sent a letter to the Pentagon on Wednesday demanding answers about "reports of serious human rights violations and the bombing of what appear to have been civilian facilities during joint US-Ecuador military operations conducted in northern Ecuador."
While bombing Iran and boats allegedly running illegal drugs through the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, President Donald Trump deployed US troops to Ecuador in March for a joint campaign combating "narco-terrorists" in the South American country.
Led by Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), and Sara Jacobs (Calif.), the lawmakers called for "an explanation of the administration's legal justification for the involvement of US armed forces in these operations, which have not been authorized by Congress," as well as their immediate suspension "until these incidents are fully investigated."
The Democrats' letter to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth cites reporting that one target "appears to have been a civilian dairy and cattle farm with no known links to armed groups or drug trafficking," where witnesses said "Ecuadorian military personnel interrogated and assaulted unarmed civilians, burned homes and infrastructure, and subjected detainees to torture."
"Beyond these recent incidents, we are concerned that our military is deepening its ties with the government of Ecuador, even as it undergoes an alarming authoritarian and anti-democratic drift," the Democrats wrote, pointing out that "President Daniel Noboa has overseen the violent repression of Indigenous-led protests, publicly threatened the Constitutional Court, and frozen the bank accounts of civil society organizations."
Noboa's allies "have also pursued questionable cases against his political opponents," as "Ecuadorians have endured more than two years of a prolonged state of emergency, marked by the military's domestic deployment to combat so-called 'narco-terrorists," the letter continues. "With investigative reporting now linking President Noboa's family business to drug trafficking and the same illicit networks he claims to be fighting, an independent and transparent investigation into these allegations is warranted."
The letter stresses that "if US forces provide new or continued security assistance to units that engaged in acts such as torture, extrajudicial killings, or enforced disappearances, and there is no credible investigation or prosecution underway, this would constitute a violation of the Leahy Laws, which prohibit assistance to foreign security forces credibly implicated in gross human rights violations without effective steps to bring those responsible to justice."
The Democrats—supported by Amnesty International USA, Center for Civilians in Conflict, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Human Rights First, Latin American Working Group, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, StoptheDrugWar.org, Washington Office on Latin America, and Win Without War—demanded "a prompt and complete response" to their list of questions by May 22.
"The United States cannot continue to be complicit in abuses abroad. There must be accountability," García said on social media.
As El País reported Wednesday, the letter was made public as Noboa began a two-day trip to Washington, DC, during which he is set to meeting with US Vice President JD Vance and Organization of American States Secretary General Albert Ramdin.
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Boat Strike Survivors Say They Were Captured, Tortured by US Forces
"They treated us like animals," said an Ecuadorian fisher who survived an attack on the Don Maca.
Apr 21, 2026
President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and US Southern Command have repeatedly taken to social media to brag about deadly boat bombings supposedly targeting drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean for nearly eight months. On Tuesday, survivors of some alleged US strikes on fishing boats accused American forces of torture.
The Ecuadorian fishing boat La Fiorella "went up in smoke" on January 20, and "the eight fishermen aboard have not been seen since," Camila Lourdes Galarza reported for Drop Site News on Tuesday. "Now, 36 survivors of two Pacific attacks fitting a similar profile alleged that they were abducted and tortured by American forces and taken by boat all the way to El Salvador before being returned to Ecuador."
The journalist spoke with attorneys, relatives, and survivors, including Hernán Flores, captain of La Negra Francisca Duarte II, which was bombed by a drone with a yellow cylinder on March 17. Flores said: "A lot of us had wounds all over our bodies from the explosion. One young man was bleeding so much he filled the floor of our lifeboat with blood... The drone had flown through our cabin window, torn my nephew's foot so bad you could see flesh and bone, and made the boat's roof cave in on the back of my neck. A few seconds later, an explosion shook the boat, causing a terrible ringing in our ears. Out of exasperation, the guys threw themselves into the water, some without life jackets, even the ones who don't know how to swim."
The survivors made their way to a blue boat with "spear" on the hull, full of armed, blond, English-speaking men in camouflage uniforms—who drew their guns, handcuffed the fishers, put hoods over their heads, and held them on the vessel's "scorching metal deck for over 24 hours, blistering their skin," Galarza reported. They were only given a bottle of water, and "all but one fisherman were denied medical attention, despite the severity of what they had just endured."
They were eventually returned to Ecuador, where Trump has recently deployed US forces for a joint campaign targeting "narco-terrorists." However, first, they were turned over to El Salvador's Coast Guard—which, on April 3, also intercepted 20 more Ecuadorian fishers with "vision and hearing loss, bruised limbs, and perforated arms."
According to Galarza, those fishers had been aboard the Don Maca, and "they reported a strikingly similar account of an alleged attack by US soldiers: a bombarded boat, a round of bullets, and no due process." Sebastián Palacios, one of the survivors allegedly held hostage for eight days, said that "they treated us like animals."
⚡️New from @dropsitenews.com: Rare Survivors of Pacific Boat Strikes Allege US Forces Kidnapped & Tortured ThemAs airstrikes & reports of torture under Ecuador’s US-backed military regime continue to mount, fishermen tell Drop Site...By Camila Lourdes Galarzawww.dropsitenews.com/p/rare-survi...
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— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) April 21, 2026 at 2:50 PM
Galarza noted that US SOUTHCOM directed questions about all three incidents to Ecuador, whose Port Authority hung up after hearing that a phone call requesting comment was from journalists.
Harriet Barber got a similar response from SOUTHCOM for her Tuesday reporting on the Don Maca attack in The Guardian. The journalist spoke with survivors, including Palacios, as well as an attorney representing the crew, Fernando Bastias Robayo of the Human Rights Council.
"A US vessel intercepted them and forced them aboard. Once they were detained, their fishing boat was blown up," said the lawyer. "They were arbitrarily hooded and later abandoned on the Salvadorian coast. Any apprehension followed by incommunicado detention constitutes an enforced disappearance."
"It was a form of psychological torture, not knowing what's really going to happen to your life and having your face covered," he added.
Palacios told Barber that "I get scared in the middle of the night. I can't sleep well. My ears still hurt... I think that's it for me. I'm done with fishing. Going back out there is impossible. I thought they were going to kill us."
“If there were no drugs aboard those boats, it’s a hugely embarrassing ‘false positive’ for US intelligence at a time when that intelligence is being used to kill people, no questions asked.”
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— Adam Isacson (@adamisacson.com) April 21, 2026 at 10:23 AM
Tuesday's reporting came just two days after SOUTHCOM announced on social media that "Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by designated terrorist organizations... along known narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean," killing three alleged "male narco-terrorists."
Sunday's strike brought the death toll from Trump's boat-bombing campaign to at least 180, according to The New York Times. The Intercept's tally is 181, while the Washington Office on Latin America believes 182 people are dead. Critics of the campaign have accused the US administration of "war crimes, murder, or both."
Responding to Trump's latest confirmed attack, Amnesty International USA on Monday condemned "three more murders at sea" and declared that "Congress must act to stop these bombings."
So far, both chambers of the Republican-controlled Congress have refused to pass war powers resolutions aimed at halting Trump's boat strikes. Similar measures targeting his aggression toward Venezuela and Iran have also failed to advance.
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More War in Latin America Feared as Farmers Describe Torture From US-Ecuadorian ‘Operation Total Extermination’
An Ecuadorian human rights group has called for a probe after “bombings, burning of homes, arbitrary detentions, torture, and threats against the civilian population” by the joint US-Ecuadorian military operation.
Mar 24, 2026
Just a day after President Donald Trump suggested that he'd use his crushing economic blockade in a bid to "take" Cuba, an administration official said much more American warfare is on the horizon across Latin America.
It's called "Operation Total Extermination," according to Joseph M. Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, who testified last week before the House Armed Services Committee.
Humire explained in written testimony that beginning on March 3, the US Department of Defense (which the Trump administration refers to as the Department of War) "supported, at the request of Ecuador, bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border."
"The joint effort," Humire said, "is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the US, setting the pace for regional, deterrence-focused operations against cartel infrastructure throughout Latin America and the Caribbean."
The operation with Ecuador, led by the right-wing president Daniel Noboa, is part of "Operation Southern Spear," the Trump administration's illegal bombing campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, targeted at boats accused, with little evidence, of ferrying drugs to the US.
The latest of these bombings, which killed at least two more people, occurred on Friday and brought the total death toll since September of last year up to at least 160.
No casualty counts have yet been released by the US or Ecuadorian government for its operations to target what they said were "domestic terrorist organizations." But reports from those on the ground suggest they may have been similarly bloody.
Víctor Gómez, a journalist for the Ecuadorian outlet Radio Sucumbíos, conducted interviews with the residents of the rural town of San Martín in northeastern Ecuador near the Colombian border, who said their community was attacked twice by Ecuadorian and American forces on March 3 and 6.
Noboa celebrated the attacks on the area, which he said housed "a training ground for drug traffickers," and reportedly the home of "Mono Tole," who is the leader of the Colombian drug trafficking group known as the Border Commandos.
But Gómez described the town as having "no trenches, no firing ranges, no traces of a clandestine military infrastructure," adding that "the only things there are horses, cows, and donkeys, at least that's what can be seen on the Radio Sucumbíos cameras."
Locals, many of whom did not have their names published to avoid retaliation, describe military patrols landing on the riverbank on March 3 and launching an "ambush" against four farmers.
“They tied my hands and feet and then hung me up. They put me in a bucket of water, as long as I could stand it… they kicked me, they hit me with the butt of a gun," one of the workers described.
Another said that the soldiers "were looking for someone we didn't know... they told us to hand things over, but we had nothing to hand over."
The soldiers then reportedly "doused the main house and the wooden kitchen with gasoline" and set it ablaze, leaving the flames to consume large amounts of farm equipment.
As residents attempted to advocate for their loved ones, the farm owner said, "The commander in charge wouldn't let us near; they greeted us with gunfire until they took them away."
The four captured farmers were reportedly transported by helicopter to the capital of Sucumbíos, Lago Agrio, where one of the young men described being taken to a tiny room and tortured.
“They shocked us with that thing they called a taser," he said. "They poured water on me and placed it on my ribs and asked us questions."
After finding no evidence of guilt, authorities released the four men near a hospital in the capital.
Three days later, planes and helicopters flew over San Martín, dropping bombs on the ruins of the same house that had already been burnt to the ground three days earlier and on another abandoned house.
Video of that bombing was shared on social media by the Ecuadorian Armed Forces.
“First they burned it on the 3rd, and then on the 6th they came to bomb it. That’s what they did," said the farm's owner.
“How can it be a training camp if this is a livestock area?" he asked. "There is nothing to justify it, there are no training grounds, there is nothing."
The Alliance for Human Rights Ecuador has called for an investigation into the military's alleged "bombings, burning of homes, arbitrary detentions, torture, and threats against the civilian population," which it said were "serious violations of international humanitarian law."
The fallout from the attack has spilled over to create an international incident with neighboring Colombia. Two weeks after the bombing of San Martín, an unexploded 500 lb. bomb was discovered on a farm on the other side of the San Miguel River in Colombia's Putumayo region.
The bomb was identified as a US-made Mark-82. According to the New York Times, "had the bomb exploded, it would have done so with the force of 192 pounds of TNT" and could have harmed people as far as over 1,900 feet away.
"We're being bombed by Ecuador," said Colombian President Gustavo Petro in response to the explosive's discovery. Noboa denied the accusation, saying that "we are acting in our territory, not yours."
Following the US military's January abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the US Department of Justice accused of drug trafficking, leaks have suggested that the US may soon attempt to bring similar charges against Petro, another left-wing leader who has resisted cooperation with Trump. Petro has denied accusations of drug trafficking.
One unnamed official told Nick Turse of The Intercept that attacks along the Ecuador-Colombia border "increasingly look like a coordinated campaign to foment 'discord' if not conflict" in the country.
In his hearing before Congress, Humire said that the US military was providing Ecuador with “capabilities that they otherwise would not have."
Humire said he was not sure how many strikes have been conducted on land so far as part of Operation Total Extermination, but responded "yes" when asked by the committee's ranking member, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), if the Department of Defense would “be moving to a lot more terrestrial strikes."
He said that these attacks were "just the beginning" of a much broader campaign, adding that the US has entered into agreements with 17 partner nations in the Western Hemisphere as part of the so-called Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.
While Humire said the nations that have reached these agreements "want this support and most of them all are looking for this,” the same cannot necessarily be said for the people living in the crossfire of the operation.
Gomez said that the people of San Martín are still living with “psychological trauma” following the attack. According to the town's vice president, Vicente Garrid, families are living in constant fear that their homes could be targeted next.
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