Mysterious bomb-dropping drones sank their fishing boats, survivors say. Who was behind the attacks?

Ecuadorian Fishermen Describe Drone Strikes That Sank Their Boats in the Pacific

Healfromzero.com – Two Ecuadorian fishing vessels were destroyed in separate Pacific Ocean incidents in March, according to crew members who say small rotor drones dropped explosives onto their boats while they worked hundreds of miles from shore. The attacks, carried out by armed men aboard an unidentified blue vessel, have drawn sustained attention in Washington, where a Washington Post report this week alleged the strikes were executed under a covert Central Intelligence Agency program. A CIA spokesperson told CNN that the agency had “no guidance to offer” on the matter, leaving the question of who ordered the strikes unresolved.

The two crews — one aboard the La Negra Francisca Duarte II with 16 men, the other aboard the Don Maca with 20 — described nearly identical sequences of events despite being struck on different dates. Both reported spotting an unfamiliar blue ship and small aerial objects trailing them at a distance during the first several days of their fishing trips. Neither group felt threatened at the time and continued hauling nets as usual.

The Drones and the Strikes

Within a day or two of first noticing the watchers, both crews said their boats were hit without warning. The fishermen described the drones as roughly the size of a pillow, equipped with rotors at all four corners and a central tube from which ordnance appeared to be released. On the La Negra Francisca, struck on March 17, one drone reportedly crashed directly onto the vessel’s gas tanks and detonated on impact. The second drone, they said, dropped an explosive onto the deck.

Captain Hernán Flores, who led the 16-man crew of the La Negra Francisca, recalled the moment of impact with visceral clarity.

“We heard the explosion – boom! It was the kind of blast that left my ears ringing. Right then, I felt blood running down me.”

One drone struck the boat hard enough to severely injure the foot of Flores’s nephew, Jordyn. Flames from a secondary explosion scorched the upper back of another crew member, according to Jorge Chiriboga Dávalos, the crew’s attorney, who shared photographs of the wounds.

Nine days later, on March 26, the Don Maca suffered its own strike. Jaime Rubén Cervantes Macías, one of the 20 men aboard, described being thrown into the air by the first blast.

“I went flying and slammed into a diesel tank that was sitting there. People were shouting, ‘Drone, drone, drone!’ So, I jumped up quickly to take a look – and it was a drone firing at us, dropping the bomb on us.”

His crewmate John Sebastián Palacios said the concussive force of the explosions damaged his hearing. Another fisherman on the Don Maca reported losing most of the vision in his left eye from the blast.

Aftermath: The Blue Ship and Armed Detention

Following each attack, both groups abandoned their crippled vessels and transferred to smaller auxiliary craft. They then rowed toward the blue ship they had seen days earlier, hoping for assistance. When they reached it, armed men aboard trained rifles on them. Only after several fishermen indicated they were wounded did the men allow the survivors to board.

Once aboard, the armed men detained and questioned the fishermen. In the second incident, Cervantes Macías said the attackers launched additional strikes to ensure the Don Maca sank before departing with the survivors. The La Negra Francisca was left ablaze. Hours after the March 17 strike, another fishing crew arrived at the scene and filmed the burning hull, Chiriboga confirmed.

That crew logged the burning vessel’s position at coordinates 1.591783, −87.741783 — roughly 170 nautical miles west of the Galápagos Islands, well inside Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite detected a thermal signature consistent with a fire at that location on March 17 at 3:02 p.m., shortly after the first reported strike.

A Surveillance Aircraft in the Sky

During both incidents, the crews said they observed a separate gray aircraft circling overhead. Flores called it a “mini plane” with long wings and sketched the craft with a bulbous nose tapering toward the fuselage. Public flight records, first surfaced by the New York Times and later confirmed by CNN, indicated that a plane registered to a company whose listed address was a private mailbox at a United Parcel Service store in Richmond, Virginia, was patrolling the area near the boats’ last known positions.

What the Attacks Mean

The Galápagos region sits at a strategic crossroads of Pacific shipping lanes and has long been a zone of interest for intelligence agencies monitoring maritime traffic. Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone stretches thousands of miles into the Pacific, and fishing operations there are routine but rarely scrutinized by foreign actors. The combination of small explosive drones, armed boarding parties, and a surveillance aircraft registered to a U.S. mail-drop address raises questions about who authorized the strikes and what intelligence objective they served.

For the men who survived, the questions are more immediate: medical treatment for burns, shattered feet, and lost eyesight; compensation for vessels destroyed in international waters; and answers from a government that, so far, has offered no public explanation for why two fishing boats were targeted in the open ocean.