in Manta. Eduardo Soteras Photographer 5:00am BST here was a choice, but it was a grim one.

You could pick your executioner: the Americans or the cartels. Depending on how you chose, you might die from a bullet to the back of the head or a drone strike from the sky. If you were lucky, it would be quick. But for the fishermen plying the waters off Ecuador’s Pacific coast, how to escape death altogether was less clear.

In the villages and towns of Manabí province, they call it the “fishermen’s dilemma”. Defying the drug-smuggling gangs that order them to carry contraband across the ocean invites retribution. Yet obeying them increasingly risks death from above, as Donald Trump’s campaign against maritime narcotics smuggling in the Americas gathers pace.

Overshadowed by his grander, if equally inconclusive, showdown with Iran, the US president’s other war is a murkier affair, waged from the air over the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Since it began last September, the US has acknowledged striking 71 fishing vessels, killing at least 239 people, although no official tally has been maintained.

The fishermen’s dilemma For the fishermen of Ecuador, the choice between obeying and defying the cartel can be fatal | Credit: Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph The true toll may be higher. In recent months, as the campaign has shifted towards the waters off Ecuador, several vessels have been struck by drones whose provenance remains unacknowledged, deepening the mystery surrounding a war whose geopolitical stakes may be lower than those of the conflict with Iran, but whose conduct is just as controversial.

In early March, the Negra Francisca Duarte set sail from Manta, a city on the Manabí coast built around the tuna industry, bound for the rich fishing grounds off the Galápagos Islands. The 550-mile stretch of water is described by US officials as a “cocaine superhighway”.

Captain José-Hernán Flores, survivor of an attack on the vessel Francisca Duarte II Credit Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph José-Hernán Flores, its captain, insists that he and his 15 crewmen were doing nothing more sinister than fishing. For the first fortnight, the expedition passed uneventfully. Then, as they finished lunch on deck on a balmy, windless day, they spotted small drones rising from a blue vessel that had been trailing them for hours.

Mr Flores thought nothing of it. The Ecuadorian coastguard had inspected them earlier that day. Perhaps they were still being monitored.

“I told my crew, ‘Just let them be, it’s nothing’, but as soon as I said those words there was an almighty explosion,” he said. “It landed on the deckhouse, collapsing the cabins where two of the crew were sleeping. I felt a blast of heat on my back and a violent ringing in my ears.”Two more drones struck moments later, sending the crew into a panic.

Mr Flores’s badly wounded nephew Jordin escaped the burning wreck with his foot mangled | Credit: Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph“Everyone was bleeding and screaming,” he recalled. “I grabbed the fire extinguisher but the flames were spreading too fast and the fuel drums and gas canisters were all exploding.”One crewman was thrown into the sea. Others leapt in, including a man whose back was on fire. Somehow, they launched two skiffs, rescued Mr Flores’s badly wounded nephew Jordin, whose foot had been mangled, and escaped the burning wreck. They made for the mysterious blue vessel, where armed men were waiting. An aircraft swooping overhead left them fearing another attack.

The men spoke English with American accents. They handcuffed the fishermen, hooded them and interrogated them through a Spanish-speaking interpreter, asking whether they were carrying anything illegal.

“They searched us and at that point they sort of scratched their heads and started arguing,” Mr Flores said. The interrogators wore military uniforms, one bearing a US flag patch. They had searched the wreckage for cocaine or fuel drums that could be used to resupply the gangs’ fast boats. Having found neither, they seemed at a loss what to do.

Eventually, the crew were handed over to El Salvador’s coastguard and allowed to return home. All survived. None has been charged or given an explanation.

Jonny Valencia and his wife stand beneath their missing son’s shoes, hanging above the family’s doorway in Jaramijó, Ecuador, in the hope that local seafaring tradition will guide him home Nor have answers emerged from the mysterious sinking two months earlier of the Fiorella, whose disappearance in international waters off the Galápagos left eight of its ten crewmen missing.

In the days before the vessel vanished, its captain, Juan Carlos Valencia, sent text messages and made calls to his father, Jonny, from the ship’s satellite phone. The messages, reviewed by The Telegraph, described a white plane repeatedly circling the boat.

“I kept telling my son, ‘Just stay calm’,” Mr Valencia said. “But he was extremely worried.”The plane was not the only source of concern. A mysterious vessel was tracking them in the distance, Mr Valencia told his father. It was blue and appeared to be flying a US flag, though he could not be sure.

Maria Auxiliadora Cueva, mother of missing fisherman Jefferson, clings to hope that her son will return home, as the shoes above her doorway keep alive the possibility of his return Then the Fiorella disappeared. Two crewmen who had gone fishing in one of its skiffs saw black smoke rising from the horizon at the precise location where the ship’s satellite tracker went dark. They never saw their shipmates again.

No wreckage was found, no bodies recovered and no search-and-rescue vessel dispatched to investigate. In Jaramijó, the coastal village from which the Fiorella sailed, the shoes of missing fishermen hang above their families’ doorways, pointing inwards. According to local seafaring tradition, this may help the wearer return home. With no answers, superstition is all the relatives have to cling to.

“All doors have been closed to us,” said Maria Cueva, whose 25-year-old son Jefferson is among the missing. “They tell us, ‘It’s only eight people, why make such a fuss?’”Jefferson is among eight crewmen who vanished when their fishing boat, the Fiorella, disappeared at sea. With no bodies recovered and no answers from authorities, Maria refuses to give up hope | Credit: Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph Worse, she says, many people assume her son was a drug dealer, despite the poverty in which the family lives. She pointed to his bed in the corner of the bare living room of the tiny house she shares with her husband and six relatives.

“Look around you. How could we live like this if he was running drugs?”A war with popular support Yet there is little sympathy in Ecuador for the fishermen of the Fiorella or other vessels struck at sea, regardless of whether or not their crews were innocent.

Human rights activists argue that Mr Trump’s authorisation of strikes against vessels suspected of carrying narcotics amounts to extrajudicial killing. Under US and international law, legal experts say, military force cannot be used against civilians who pose no imminent threat of violence, even if they are suspected of criminal activity.

Seeking a workaround, the US president has repurposed laws adopted after the September 11 attacks, designating drug cartels as terrorist organisations in an effort to turn the war on narcotics into an extension of the war on terror.

Heavily armed US troops have joined Ecuadorian police in joint operations targeting the country’s drug cartels | Credit: AFP / Ecuador Interior Ministry Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, has branded the smugglers “narco-terrorists”, calling them “the Isis and al Qaeda of the western hemisphere”.

Many in Latin America would agree with the designation, even if it means innocent lives are sometimes lost.

Mr Trump may have struggled to persuade European allies to join his war on Iran, but he has encountered less resistance in the Americas, where right-wing governments promising “iron fist” strategies against the cartels are sweeping to power.

Eighteen countries in the region have joined Washington’s “counter-cartel coalition”, which seeks “to degrade, dismantle and destroy narco-terrorist networks”. Its motto, chosen in characteristic fashion by Mr Hegseth, is: “We do bad things to bad people.”Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, was in Panama City in August for the launch of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, a US-led alliance aimed at dismantling drug-trafficking networks across the region Mr Trump has made his offer to Latin American allies explicit. The US military will “knock the hell out of” drug boats, he has said. All they need to do is “tell us where they are”.

Few countries have embraced the campaign as eagerly as Ecuador, which formally launched joint military operations with the US in March.

Such enthusiasm is born of desperation. Ecuador is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, despite producing none itself. It serves as a trafficking corridor for criminal groups operating in Colombia and Peru, with the country’s many ports, weak institutions and use of the US dollar making it attractive to the cartels. Some estimates suggest that 70 per cent of the world’s cocaine passes through Ecuador.

As global consumption reaches record levels, according to the United Nations, the country’s importance to traffickers is growing. The trade in cocaine smuggled into Britain alone is worth £11 billion a year. Britons are the world’s second-biggest consumers of the drug.

A decade ago, Ecuador was one of the safest and most functional countries in mainland Latin America. Now it is among the region’s most violent, with criminal gangs establishing a parallel state that has devastated a once prosperous society.

Gangsters have carried out public executions and live-streamed the hanging of guards in prisons under their control. Beheadings, immolations and dismemberments have been staged before horrified audiences. Across Manabí, from Montecristi, birthplace and spiritual home of the Panama hat, to the streets of Manta and the squares of coastal villages, residents describe how extortion has upended their lives.

Small businesses, and sometimes ordinary households, are forced to pay monthly protection money. Refusing can mean being doused in fuel and locked inside a car before being burned alive, the charred corpse then hung from a pedestrian overpass as a warning to others.

Earlier this year, surfers arriving at a popular Manabí beach discovered five severed heads impaled on stakes in the sand. Retribution often extends to relatives. Children are not spared: in Guayaquil, the country’s main port, gangsters have cut out the tongues of children accused of informing for the police.

The limits of military force Given the scale of the violence, it is hardly surprising that Daniel Noboa, Ecuador’s telegenic young president, has turned to Washington. Last year he sought to allow the US military to re-establish bases in the country, from which it had been forced to withdraw by one of his left-wing predecessors. The proposal was defeated in a referendum.

US special forces have nonetheless gained a foothold, advising and supporting Ecuadorian commandos in raids on suspected drug-shipment facilities. Last month, American military personnel took a direct role in an operation to seize an infamous gang leader in Guayaquil.

US Southern Command has released footage on social media showing the destruction of vessels in waters around Ecuador as part of its campaign against suspected drug trafficking | Source: @Southcom via Co-operation at sea has also intensified. Since the beginning of September, joint operations have led to the seizure of eight boats off the Ecuadorian coast, according to officials, with the US now more likely to wait until fishermen have been removed before blowing up the vessels.

“What is happening with the boats is only part of a much broader collaboration,” said Capt Juan Guerrero, who commanded the naval component of a 1,700-strong counter-narcotics task force until his retirement in July. “Intelligence-sharing has led to a significant rise in major breakthroughs.”He concedes that the unorthodox nature of Mr Trump’s campaign will not appeal to everyone. But in a country as badly damaged as Ecuador, he argues, there is a case for believing that the ends justify the means.

“It’s very complicated. On the one hand you have international law, maritime law and human rights. But from the perspective of every Ecuadorian citizen, drugs have caused enormous problems here. Taking exceptional measures during exceptional times might be an important part of the solution.”Military force alone will not be enough, he admits. Defeating the gangs requires an independent judiciary, a capable police force and a political establishment clean enough to confront them.

At present, Ecuador has none of these, says a senior police officer who resigned last year after discovering that colleagues investigating the gangs in Guayaquil were themselves in their pay.

“Corruption extends from the lowest-ranking officers to those at the very top,” he said. “I had to leave to protect my integrity. The fact is that the streets of Ecuador are controlled by the gangs, not by the state.”Officials who dare to stand up to the cartels often pay with their lives. In Manta, gangsters have murdered a former mayor, a prominent city councillor shot dead with his wife in front of horrified children at a circus, and several prosecutors investigating drug smuggling.

Prosecutions of fishermen accused of carrying drugs have also faltered. Two cases collapsed in the past fortnight after judges ruled that the US military had effectively destroyed the evidence by blowing up the vessels.

No safe way out Caught between the Americans and the gangs are the fishermen themselves. Guilty or innocent, those putting to sea from Manta risk having their boats blown out of the water by US drones.

Ecuadorian fishermen prepare their skiff for a day in waters increasingly threatened by drug gangs and US military strikes | Credit: Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph Yet many would rather take their chances with the Americans than with the cartels, Capt Guerrero said. Some fishermen willingly carry drugs or fuel on their expeditions. Many others, however, are coerced into becoming mules by gangs that depend on their seamanship and intimate knowledge of the waters.

Refusing an order can put not only a fisherman’s life at risk, but those of his wife and children. Although some have taken refuge in safe houses run by activists, many have no livelihood other than fishing.

In Manabí’s small ports and fishing harbours, The Telegraph counted the burnt-out hulls of more than half a dozen fishing boats allegedly set ablaze by the gangs as a warning to others.

Sometimes the punishment is deadlier still. In December 2024, the Patricia Lynn, carrying as many as 21 fishermen, sailed from Manta after its captain refused an order to transport cocaine, according to Capt Guerrero. About 30 miles offshore, gang members boarded the vessel, locked the crew below deck and scuttled it, drowning everyone on board.

LEFT: Wendy Dayana Mero Bailan, daughter of Josa Norberto Mero Quijije, who was among the eight crewmen who disappeared when the Fiorella vanished at sea RIGHT: Maria Auxiliadora Cueva holds photographs of her missing son, Jefferson, who she says has been wrongly branded a drug dealer | Credit: Eduardo Soteras for The Telegraph No one has been brought to justice. In June this year, Gloria Cedeño, a prosecutor investigating the sinking, was shot dead with her sister as she walked to her car outside Manta’s courthouse.

“The fishermen are not criminals,” Capt Guerrero said. “But they have been exploited to carry drugs and they are under pressure because they are great sailors with perfect knowledge of these waters. They operate in fear. They know that if they say no, they are putting their families in danger.”That is the essence of the fishermen’s dilemma. For now, like the rest of Ecuadorian society, they fear the gangs more than the Americans. Unless that culture of terror can be broken — something unlikely to be achieved by military means alone — victory in Mr Trump’s less fashionable war seems as remote as a rapid end to his grander venture in the Middle East.