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

Source: The Guardian

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

An Ecuadorian fishing crew describe their ordeal as victims of Trump’s purported war on ‘narcoterrorists’

Harriet Barber in Guayaquil
Tue 21 Apr 2026 12.00 BST
Last modified on Tue 21 Apr 2026 12.03 BST

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,” Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, one of the fishers, told the Guardian. “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.

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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.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/apr/21/ecuador-us-boat-strike-survivors