The conditions were treacherous in the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles off the Mexico–Guatemala border. There were gale-force winds and 9-foot seas. It would be dangerous if you were on a boat, nevermind if yours was blown out of the water.

Eight men leapt into those rough seas on December 30 when the U.S. rained down a barrage of munitions, sinking three vessels. They required immediate rescue; chances were slim that they could survive even an hour. In announcing its strike, U.S. Southern Command or SOUTHCOM, said it “immediately notified” the Coast Guard to launch search and rescue protocols to save the men.

But it took the United States Coast Guard almost 45 hours to begin searching the attack zone for survivors, new reporting by Airwars and The Intercept reveals.

Help did not arrive in time. A total of 11 civilians died due to the U.S. attack on December 30 — including the eight who jumped overboard, according to information provided exclusively to The Intercept by SOUTHCOM, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in and around Latin America and the Caribbean. This represents one of the largest single-day death tolls since the U.S. military began targeting alleged drug smuggling boats last September.

“SOUTHCOM doesn’t want these people alive.”

Using open-source flight tracking data, Airwars and The Intercept learned that a Coast Guard plane did not head toward the site of the attack for almost two days. A timeline provided by the Coast Guard confirmed that it was roughly 45 hours before a flight arrived at the search area.

The slow response and lack of rescue craft in the area suggests there was scant interest on the part of the U.S. in saving anyone. It’s part of a pattern of what appear to be imitation rescue missions that since mid-October have not saved a single survivor.

On December 30, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the Coast Guard’s parent agency — the Department of Homeland Security — that SOUTHCOM stood ready to provide them with “specialized maritime capabilities” in support of their missions. But just hours later, it was SOUTHCOM that called on the Coast Guard to conduct the search and rescue mission for the eight men.

The Coast Guard told The Intercept that it received the initial report of people in distress from SOUTHCOM at 1:40 p.m. Pacific time on December 30. (The exact timing of the U.S. strike is not known, but when SOUTHCOM posted about the attack on X the following day it wrote that it had “immediately notified” the Coast Guard).

The survivors jumped into the Pacific approximately 400 nautical miles southwest of Ocos, Guatemala. They faced extreme conditions: 9-foot seas and 40-knot winds, according to Kenneth Wiese, a spokesperson for the Coast Guard Southwest District.

The Coast Guard said it soon began contacting Maritime Rescue Coordination Centers in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica; the Central American Air Navigation Services Corporation, which provides regional air traffic control and search and rescue coordination; and eight commercial vessels within 200 nautical miles of the last known position of the survivors. A lone container vessel, the Maersk Eureka, responded to the call. On December 31 at 6:44 a.m. Pacific time, the ship arrived at the last known position of the survivors and found nothing.

That morning at 9:19 a.m. Pacific time, a Coast Guard C-130 search and rescue plane took off from Sacramento, California, and headed to Liberia, Costa Rica, “for refueling and crew rest.” A day later, on January 1 at 7:33 a.m. Pacific time, the aircraft left Costa Rica and headed toward the “search area,” according to the Coast Guard. It finally arrived “on scene” at 10:18 a.m. Pacific time on New Year’s Day.

The Coast Guard said that it suspended its search on January 2, reporting “no sightings of survivors or debris.” A U.S. government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, said the men were presumed dead when the search was ended.

“Suspending a search is never easy, and given the exhaustive search effort, lack of positive indications, and declining probability of survival, we have suspended active search efforts pending further developments,” said Coast Guard Capt. Patrick Dill, chief of incident management, Southwest District, at the time.

A second government official who spoke with The Intercept said the Coast Guard response didn’t look like “foot dragging,” but questioned why, after months of attacks in the region, search and rescue assets weren’t pre-positioned closer to the Eastern Pacific.

“SOUTHCOM doesn’t want these people alive,” that official said.

Asked for comment on the allegation, Southern Command spokesperson Steven McLoud said: “SOUTHCOM does not comment on speculative or unfounded reporting.”

The Coast Guard confirmed the C-130 sent from Sacramento was its only aircraft in the area. “There were no other Coast Guard assets in the area to assist with the search,” said spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Lauren Giancola.

The Coast Guard would not explain why it hadn’t pre-positioned assets in the region. “Any questions regarding military operations including recent strikes should be referred directly to the Department of War,” Giancola told The Intercept.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not return a request for comment.

The search and rescue operation for the boat strike survivors differs starkly from the U.S. response when a U.S. Marine involved in the military campaign in the Caribbean fell overboard from the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima in the SOUTHCOM area of operations this month. It sparked a “nonstop search and rescue operation” that included hundreds of flight hours and extensive aviation support, according to a statement from the Marines’ II Marine Expeditionary Force. Five Navy ships, a rigid-hull inflatable boat, surface rescue swimmers from the Iwo Jima, and 10 aircraft from the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force joined the search efforts. (Lance Cpl. Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, 21, was declared deceased on Feb. 10, 2026.)

The slow pace of the U.S. search for boat strike survivors suggests the goal wasn’t to save lives, said Brian Finucane, a former state department lawyer who is a specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war.

“It does not appear as if they were eager to rescue additional survivors and then be faced with the question of ‘what do we do with them?’” he told The Intercept. “We’re going to hand off responsibility to the Coast Guard, which is going to arrive in a few days from California and look around and not find anything. So you can draw your own conclusions from that sequence.”

The U.S. military has carried out more than three dozen known attacks, destroying 40 boats, in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September, killing at least 134 civilians.  The most recent attack on Friday – the first known strike in the Caribbean Sea since early November – killed three people.

From the first strike, crewmembers have periodically survived initial attacks, leading the U.S. to employ a hodgepodge of strategies to deal with them, ranging from execution to repatriation. The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed two survivors of the initial boat attack on September 2 in a follow-up strike. The two survivors clung to the wreckage of a vessel attacked by the U.S. military for roughly 45 minutes before Adm. Frank Bradley, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered a follow-up strike that killed the shipwrecked men.

Following an October 16 attack on a semi-submersible in the Caribbean Sea that killed two civilians, two other men were rescued by the U.S. and quickly repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. President Donald Trump called them “terrorists” in a Truth Social post and said they would face “detention and prosecution.” But both men were released without charges in their home countries. Since this attack, the U.S. appears to have settled on a strategy of calling for what increasingly resemble imitation rescue missions.

Following three attacks on October 27 that killed 15 people aboard four separate boats, a survivor of a strike was spotted clinging to wreckage, and the U.S. alerted Mexican authorities. The man was not found, and he is presumed dead.

Last month, SOUTHCOM again called on the Coast Guard. “On Friday, January 23rd, the U.S. Coast Guard was notified by the Department of War’s Southern Command of a person in distress in the Pacific Ocean,” Coast Guard spokesperson Roberto Nieves told The Intercept. A timeline provided by the Coast Guard shows that it took about 17 hours for a Coast Guard C-130 to arrive at the survivor’s last known position, but that aircraft only conducted an hourlong search before “diverting to El Salvador for fuel and crew rest.” It returned to the last known position of the survivor on January 25, about 51 hours after the initial distress call. The search was suspended that night just before 8 p.m. Pacific time, and that person is now also presumed dead.

“The expected result is essentially the same as putting a gun to their head.”

Following a strike last week — the third since Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan became SOUTHCOM’s new commander earlier this month — the command announced that it had once again notified the Coast Guard “to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivor.” The Coast Guard, in turn, told The Intercept that Ecuador’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Center “assumed coordination of search and rescue operations, with technical support provided by the U.S. Coast Guard.” The Coast Guard then walked it back and said the U.S. had only “offered” assistance. Ecuador’s rescue authorities did not return multiple requests for an update on the search.

The second government official, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment about the boat strikes, said that survivors created “complications and questions” for the U.S. military and intelligence community. Rather than risk exposing intelligence sources and methods by bringing these men to court, the official said it was simpler to leave them to drown. Finucane echoed this assessment. “After rescuing the men in October, it was apparent there would be a strong incentive not to have additional survivors on their hands,” he said.

William Baumgartner, a retired U.S. Coast Guard rear admiral and former chief counsel of that service branch, said the December 30 attack was tantamount to a death sentence. “Once the people jump in the water and you blow up the only thing that could possibly save their lives, that’s essentially killing them,” Baumgartner told The Intercept last month. “The expected result is essentially the same as putting a gun to their head.”

Experts say the survivors of the December 30 attacks likely died within minutes. Accomplished swimmers, clinging to wreckage or flotation devices in warmer waters, could survive longer, some said. None considered that likely in this case.

“The combination of the wind and the waves would force feed water into the victim. If the waves don’t drown you, the hypothermia will kill you,” said Tom Griffiths, the founder of the Aquatic Safety Research Group, who previously served as the director of aquatics and safety officer for athletics at Penn State University. “Drowning often takes as little as four to six minutes for a non-swimmer but can be as quick as 90 seconds. I would think under these conditions it could be almost as quick.”

John Fletemeyer, an aquatics expert and co-author of “The Science of Drowning,” said that people have survived in the water for up to two days. But such cases, he said, are “outliers.”

“It can be almost instantaneous, where it can happen in just a couple minutes if someone cannot swim and they go underwater,” Fletemeyer said. A frequent expert in murder-homicide cases, he explained in detail the pain and suffering involved in drowning. There is also the potential for shark attack, he said, due to blood in the water from those killed in the initial strike.

“If we know somebody is in the water dying,” he said, “I think we have a human responsibility to try to save them.”