The 28 men arrived in the port city of Manta on a police bus , handcuffed, a little after 6 in the evening on Sept. 4. Nine had been aboard the Conquista 2 and 19 aboard the OM2, Ecuadorian fishing boats that U.S. forces boarded and sank in the eastern Pacific days earlier. Outside, their families waited for information about their loved ones.
By the end of Saturday, a judge had released them . The prosecutor could not show grounds to suspect a crime.
That was the smaller of the two decisions. The same day, on a habeas corpus petition brought by Fernando Bastías of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDH) for eight men from the Conquista 2 who were still missing, Judge Isaías Mendoza opened a six-day evidentiary term to find out what had become of them. He ordered the navy, the police, and two ministries to produce what they knew, told the naval oceanographic institute to reconstruct the currents and drift so the search could be widened, and reminded the navy that looking for missing men was its obligation whether a judge said so or not. He had already ordered eight state institutions to hand over the boat’s track, the surveillance data and the chain of custody, and to preserve every record of the operation.
Then he went further. He gave the Foreign Ministry 24 hours to send an urgent diplomatic note to the U.S. Embassy demanding an accounting of the operation. It was to ask which U.S. naval units took part, the names of everyone removed from the boat, whether there were injuries, force or interrogations, and the exact point and method by which the Conquista 2 was sunk.
A year into the Trump administration’s campaign of lethal attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific, two members of Congress have written to four government agencies demanding an accounting of the Ecuadorian boats and received no answer. Now a court is asking, and it sits in a Manabí fishing port rather than in Washington.
Shrouded in secrecy
The eight men turned up alive on Sept. 6, drifting in four skiffs. A coast guard cutter brought them in . They were luckier than the crew of the Fiorella. It left Manta on Jan. 13 and stopped transmitting a week later, west of the Galápagos. Two of its crew members were picked up and described an attack from the air. The other eight are still missing; no government has claimed responsibility, and no wreckage has been produced. The survivors and the families gave their account to a reporter in the spring, and it changed nothing.
The prosecutor could not show grounds to suspect a crime.
Days later, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood beside Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa in Quito and said the operations would continue. He announced the Trump administration would seek $45 million from Congress for Ecuador, along with a Coast Guard cutter and five interceptor vessels. He also said the purpose was not to kill fishermen.
When asked how these operations are decided, Rubio answered that when U.S. forces conduct joint operations in territorial waters, they must reach an understanding with the other country about how those operations are going to occur. So somebody in Quito knows whether there was an understanding when U.S. Marines took the Conquista 2 on Sept. 2, and whether there was one in March, when the Negra Francisca Duarte II and the Don Maca burned and no one admitted to it. Nobody in either government has been asked.
U.S. Southern Command’s silence
The United States has been destroying boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since September 2025, alleging that they carry drugs. More than 200 people have been killed in over 60 strikes, none of them authorized by Congress.
Between January and March, three fishing boats out of the coastal province of Manabí were attacked in the eastern Pacific, according to the crew members who survived. Washington claimed the strikes had not occurred. A congressional committee chairman read the denial into the record in June, and no government has claimed responsibility for the attacks since. Human Rights Watch, which checked the criminal records of all 46 crew members, found only four of them had any record, and none related to violence or drug trafficking.
Since Aug. 28, the U.S. Southern Command has announced six such operations, posting videos of them on its website. Each press release follows the same sequence: a floating refueling station interdicted in international waters, Marines from the USS San Antonio boarding the vessel, those aboard handed to Ecuadorian authorities, the boat then sunk. Each says the operation was carried out in coordination and collaboration with the government of Ecuador. Quito does not dispute it; the interior minister calls it international cooperation .
An Ecuadorian boat is destroyed, and nobody outside the Southern Command knows on what basis.
The two sets of events are not the same. In the spring, the boats were hit from the air, the crews left in the water, and Washington denied any of it had happened. Since August, the crews have been evacuated before the boat is destroyed, and Washington publishes the video. What has not changed is this: An Ecuadorian boat is destroyed, and nobody outside the Southern Command knows on what basis.
Washington does not identify what it destroys. None of the six releases names a vessel, gives a crew number or says how many people were detained. The Sept.7 sinking was reported without a name because the Southern Command did not supply one. It was the families who later identified the boat as the tuna vessel Montecristi. Similarly, every name in the Ecuadorian press has come from families and lawyers. The New York Times reported this month that the campaign has turned deliberately to large fishing vessels alleged to be refueling smuggling craft. Six of them have been sunk in two weeks.
There has been only one exception to the policy of anonymity. In an Aug. 28 press release, the Southern Command claimed the vessel it intercepted had been identified and targeted under U.S. Treasury Department sanctions. Eight days earlier, the Treasury Department had sanctioned a Manta fishing network, freezing 10 vessels as property, on the claim that a fleet operating under the guise of legitimate fishing businesses was transferring cocaine to go-fast boats. The names of the vessels were published in the Federal Register: four named Arca de Noé (II, III, IV and V), the Conquista, Costa Marlin, Rey de Arca, Siempre Mi Arca, Solo Es Mejor and Todos Vuelven.
It is the only time the United States has offered a documentary basis for destroying a particular Ecuadorian boat. The vessel taken that day, according to the CDH, was Los Tres Hermanos. It is not on the list.
There is, however, a Conquista on the list. It carries no number, was built in 1985, and is registered under a different series from the other nine. The Conquista 2 was sunk on Sept. 2, and its owner, César Pico, said that day that his crew had been fishing and that this might be a mistake, because there are boats called Conquista 1, Conquista 2 and Conquista 3. Ecuador’s vessel registry would settle whether those are the same hull. Nobody has published the answer.
The U.S. Southern Command has not been asked about either boat.
The pushback
On Sept. 7, the CDH and 14 other organizations issued a statement . They counted eight vessels attacked or destroyed since January, a figure that reached nine three days later, and at least 143 fishermen affected. They declared the Southern Command commander, Gen. Francis Donovan, persona non grata and asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for precautionary measures covering the Manabí fishing community as a whole rather than named individuals.
The declaration has no legal force, and the organizations know it. But it takes a clear position: suspecting someone of illegal activity should not make them a military target.
César Delgado of the Manta Crew Members Association said earlier this month that 80% of the fleet is tied up in port. He does not ask the United States to stop interdicting, only to produce its evidence before sinking a boat.
Suspecting someone of illegal activity does not make them a military target.
Manta lands more tuna than any other port in the eastern Pacific, and its fleet is really two: on one side, the canneries and industrial fishing vessels, and on the other side several thousand artisanal boats going out on credit and back on the catch. Those boats are squeezed from both ends. Diesel has cost more since the government cut the subsidy a year ago, setting off a national strike. At the same time, criminal gangs charge about $1,200 a trip to let a boat work, against the $40,000 a crew may be offered to carry cocaine . That gap is why the coast is inside this trade, and destroying a boat does not close it. An owner who loses an uninsured vessel loses the asset and still owes on it. The crew loses the papers that let them work, and some have lost more than that to gangs or a strike.
The families have taken more direct action. On Sept. 4, relatives blocked the roads around the Manta Port Captaincy. Earlier this year, the wives of the crew of the Fiorella spent a night outside the same building and were given no information .
On Sept. 8, prosecutors charged 32 of the 60 men taken from three vessels with criminal association and released them pending trial, over the objection of all four defense lawyers. On September 28, the court will decide whether they are guilty.
For the other 28, the prosecution offered nothing, and a judge ruled their detention unlawful. Juan Alvia, who defends four of the Conquista 2 crew, explained the underlying problem: The evidence needed for a conviction does not exist because it was destroyed. The boats are on the bottom of the Pacific.
This happened here before
None of this is new in Manta. It was the site of a U.S. forward operating location between 1999 and 2009. Ecuadorians kept the record of those years. The CDH holds its own archive, and it is a list of boats.
On June 30, 2001, the USS McInerney, a U.S. Navy frigate, sank the Daiki Marú, owned and captained by Carlos Llorente, who said his boat was fishing and carried neither migrants nor drugs. The Ecuadorian navy said the vessel’s conduct was suspicious and recorded that it had authorized the McInerney to inspect it and escort it to Manta. The two accounts, printed side by side in the newspaper El Universo three years later, agree on one point: The boat was inside Ecuadorian territorial waters. Ecuador had authorized the boarding, and the boat went down anyway.
None of this is new in Manta.
Llorente wrote to three ministries and to Congress. Foreign Minister Heinz Moeller wrote to the U.S. Embassy twice and got no reply. A federal court in Florida agreed to hear Llorente’s claim against the Southern Command, and it was still unresolved in 2005 , four years after the sinking.
A year later, the Jorge IV left Manta with 18 men and never came back; searchers found a life vest and a gas cylinder. Hermenegildo Santana, whose son was aboard, stood before the National Assembly and said the boat had been sunk by the U.S. military, one of 36 Ecuadorian civilian vessels the Latin American Human Rights Association counted as sunk by U.S. frigates. This June the case turned 24 years old , and it is still in the courts.
An Assembly commission confirmed at least nine vessels were sunk across those years. The fishers’ guild puts the number between 50 and 80. Almost none of the owners or crews were compensated.
Then the U.S. base closed. The 2008 Ecuadorian constitution forbade foreign bases, and on Nov. 16, 2025, Ecuadorians voted on whether to let them back; 60% said no. The Fiorella sailed eight weeks later.
Johnny Valencia has been at sea for 52 years. His son captained the Fiorella, and Valencia has spent months looking for the missing vessel, disputing the Port Captaincy’s coordinates, not as a father, but as a navigator who knows the water. Ecuadorians voted against foreign bases in the referendum, he says, but the vote turned out not to be worth anything.
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In Manta, Ecuador, a Community Is Devastated by U.S. Boat Strikes
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