A prosecutor investigating the U.S. boat strikes was shot dead in Ecuador

Three fishing boats, thirty-six men who came home, eight who did not, and the prosecutor who was asking about them.

Aug 24, 2026 · Investigation

Since September 2025 the United States has been bombing boats in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, on the stated grounds that they carry drugs. Sixty-six boats, and more than 220 people, as of this month.

The campaign has a name, Operation Southern Spear. The administration's legal position is that the people on board are unlawful combatants in a non-international armed conflict with cartels, which is the argument that makes a boat a target rather than a police matter. The Council on Foreign Relations set that position out in an analysis on 17 August, and put the number of confirmed attacks at sixty-six.

Radio San Mateo · source · Rights reserved. Used under fair use as the subject of reporting.

Three of the boats were Ecuadorian fishing vessels. The Fiorella went on 20 January with eight crew who have not been found. The Negra Francisca Duarte II burned on 17 March. The Don Maca was hit on 26 March. Thirty-six men came back from those last two.

U.S. Southern Command · source · Public domain (DVIDS)

What those men describe is not a strike followed by a rescue. Hernán Flores, the captain of the Negra Francisca, told Drop Site News that men he described as blonde and armed to the teeth put hoods over their heads and held them on a metal deck for more than a day, until the heat blistered them, and that the ship they were held on carried the word Spear on its hull. He said one of the young men bled so heavily it covered the floor of their lifeboat. Erik Coello, from the Don Maca, lost seventy percent of his vision to pellet wounds. A lawyer for the crews says the men were held eight days and put ashore in El Salvador.

The United States denies it. Southern Command has said it had no involvement with the Negra Francisca or the Don Maca, and the Pentagon has rejected any role in the sinking of the third boat. When Drop Site went back to Southern Command, it declined to comment and pointed at Ecuador. Ecuador's president has not stood behind the fishermen either. Speaking in May about one of the vessels, Daniel Noboa said it had been in international waters, and added that the country has hundreds, hundreds of fishermen involved in drug trafficking.

Alexandra Bravo was the prosecutor in Manta assigned to the three boats. Human Rights Watch says she investigated the strikes on the Fiorella, the Negra Francisca Duarte II and the Don Maca, and that one of its researchers spoke with her about that investigation in May.

On 14 June, around eleven in the morning, Bravo and her sister Olinda left a café on Avenida Flavio Reyes in Manta. A gunman on a motorcycle shot them both, and both died. Officers who reached the scene found five 9mm casings and Bravo's wounded driver. The police detail assigned to protect her was not there. Expreso reports that she did have an assigned detail, and that its absence is itself part of what the police are now examining.

Bravo was not only on the boats. She handled homicides, kidnappings and organized crime, and eight days before she died she had taken on the burning of twenty-seven vessels in the port of Manta. The Ecuadorian press led with those cases. No motive in her killing has been announced.

Two things about the boat cases are on the record. Camila Lourdes Galarza, the Drop Site reporter who worked the story, said on Democracy Now that Bravo came under pressure from her own superiors to treat the three attacks as disappearances rather than as attacks. And in the days before she was killed she was moved to the prosecutor's office in Montecristi, where her caseload changed and the boats were no longer hers.

She was the fifth official of Ecuador's Attorney General's Office to be killed in Manta since 2022, and the twenty-sixth member of the country's justice system assassinated since 2020. Two of the five, César Velásquez and Víctor Pico, were shot together three weeks before her.

There is one American review open. On 11 May the Pentagon's inspector general opened an evaluation of Operation Southern Spear on its own initiative, examining how targets are selected. By 12 May the campaign had destroyed fifty-eight vessels and killed at least 182 people. In December the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee closed his own committee's inquiry, saying it was done and that he had all the answers he needed. Ecuador's national police are investigating Bravo's killing, and Expreso reports that the absence of her protection detail is part of what they are examining.

Eight of the fishermen have not come home, and the only American inquiry still open belongs to the Pentagon.

By the numbers

66 — boats struck since September 2025^[1]
more than 220 — people killed in the campaign^[2]
8 — Fiorella crew still unaccounted for^[3]
36 — crew who came home from the other two boats^[4]
5 — 9mm casings recovered at the scene in Manta^[5]
58 and 182 — vessels destroyed and people killed by 12 May 2026^[6]
5th — Attorney General's Office official killed in Manta since 2022^[7]

The reporting

This story is built on reporting by Drop Site News. Read the original →

Sources

Image credits

Hero: source (Public domain (DVIDS)) — U.S. Southern Command
In text: source (Rights reserved. Used under fair use as the subject of reporting.) — Radio San Mateo
In text: source (Public domain (DVIDS)) — U.S. Southern Command

We do our best to source photographs that accurately reflect each story, but we are a small team. Some images are illustrative rather than photographs of the specific event described. Every source is listed above.

Citations

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