Prosecutor Investigating U.S. Boat Strikes and Claims of Torture Was Murdered in EcuadorNew evidence has emerged of U.S. Coast Guard activity in the aftermath of two strikes, further corroborating survivor testimony.
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Para leer esta historia en español, haga clic aquí. QUITO, Ecuador—Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack. Upon arriving at the crime scene, officers say they found five 9mm shell casings and Bravo’s injured driver, but no sign of the police detail that had been assigned to protect her. The Police Directorate, which operates entirely under the executive branch, has launched a probe to determine if there’d been an internal security breach. Bravo is the 26th member of Ecuador’s justice system to be assassinated since 2020 and the second individual investigating state crimes murdered that week. Besides her usual caseload of homicide and organized crime, Bravo had been working the Fiorella, Negra Francisca, and Don Maca cases—a series of drone attacks on civilian fishing ships exposed by Drop Site in April. Two of the boat’s crews returned home and reported being abducted, blindfolded, and starved for eight days by American gunmen in U.S. military uniforms aboard a U.S.-flagged patrol ship, before being abandoned in El Salvador. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances endorsed the calls for an investigation, demanding that the U.S. provide information on the whereabouts of the eight still-missing men and any involvement in the matter by April 27. To date, the United States has not responded. Under Ecuador’s right-wing president Daniel Noboa—a Miami-born billionaire often characterized as a “U.S.-backed dictator”—the country has become a central testing ground for Operation Southern Spear, Washington’s extrajudicial bombing campaign purporting to target “narco-terrorists,” which has killed 221 people to date. There is no evidence that many of the victims, including those in Bravo’s investigation, had engaged in drug trafficking. “I can’t make any assertion regarding it being a political assassination, but evidently, when a prosecutor is killed it’s because of the investigation they’re conducting,” Fernando Bastias, a renowned human rights attorney with Ecuador’s CDH and member of the Geneva-based World Organization Against Torture, told Drop Site, “That’s something we’ve learned from our experience in Ecuador.” A source inside the Manta police department, who knew Bravo personally, told Drop Site that the Ecuadorian prosecutor was under pressure from her superiors at the Attorney General’s office to treat the U.S. attacks as exclusively “cases of disappearance.” The source, who asked for anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said Bravo was told to close all lines of inquiry after 36 of the 44 missing men were found—despite arriving with severe injuries, including 70% vision loss and feet torn to flesh and bone, which medical experts found consistent with their accounts of explosions and torture. A senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, Nathalye Cotrino Villarreal, who interviewed Bravo as part of her investigation into the three vessels, similarly recalled Bravo facing “internal challenges within the institution itself to advance the investigation.” Villarreal said the prosecutor repeatedly sought cooperation from other branches responsible for the ship’s rescue, including the Manta Port Captaincy, but “none responded to her requests for information.” During the Negra Francisca bombing, Darwin Pico-Flores, an eyewitness aboard a nearby boat, told Drop Site he called the Manta Port Captaincy to request emergency assistance. Nobody came. In April, as part of its first investigation into the incident, Drop Site called the port seeking comment. Officials hung up after learning the call was from journalists. As of their last meeting on May 8, Cotrino Villarreal told Drop Site, Bravo “was still in the initial stages of inquiry and investigation.” Bastias said Bravo “was investigating a country [United States] that has been positioned in the media as an ally against crime. That investigation has not advanced at all, and that stems from an intention to avoid getting into trouble or problems with anyone.” The source inside the Manta Police Department said that, given this lack of cooperation from partner agencies, Bravo had asked for advice on how to pursue new sources for evidence. In the days leading up to her death, Bravo was relocated to the Attorney General’s office in Montecristi, a neighboring municipality. Her caseload changed after the transfer and she was no longer in charge of investigating the three boat attacks. Drop Site attempted to reach Bravo’s replacement for comment but he had been explicitly instructed not to speak to the press. After weeks of attempts to reach the Attorney General’s office for comment, they told Drop Site the investigation was sealed and they could not comment on why Bravo was relocated. Inside Ecuador’s U.S.-backed military regime, the Attorney General’s office has become an increasingly opaque and politicized institution. “It’s already a major obstacle for prosecutors to investigate local state agents. Now imagine international state agents,” Bastias said. “The Executive Branch has implemented a series of legal frameworks that leave these foreign state agents immune from prosecution,” he added, referring to the diplomatic immunity granted to all U.S. military and Department of Defense personnel through President Noboa’s 22 martial law decrees. The Pentagon, Coast Guard, and U.S. Southern Command have all denied any knowledge or responsibility of the boat incidents. After Drop Site published photo evidence of the Negra Francisca bombing, U.S. lawmakers questioned U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth during a congressional hearing. On June 13, the day before Bravo’s murder, Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and Bill Keating (D-Mass.) published a letter to Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Head of the U.S. Coast Guard, Kevin Lunday, demanding a full audit of U.S. government involvement in the attacks. Despite the deadline of July 10, none of the agencies have issued a public response. Keating’s press secretary Lauren McDermott told Drop Site that his office had received a reply from Rubio’s office, but none from the Department of War or Coast Guard. She did not disclose the contents of the response. The survivors who returned home, and the families of those who didn’t, still have not received any answers, telling Drop Site “authorities shut the door in our face.” Maria, the wife of one of the fishermen, tells Drop Site her mother-in-law died awaiting her son’s return, saying she was struggling with severe depression and stopped in the weeks leading up to her death. Despite both governments’ efforts to stonewall the investigation, evidence continues to emerge supporting the fishermen’s accounts of abduction, airstrikes, and torture. Drop Site obtained exclusive video of U.S. Coast Guard activity in the vicinity of the Negra Francisca bombing, open-source intelligence that corroborates the Negra Francisca’s testimonies, and police interviews with eyewitnesses that confirm the U.S. involvement alleged by survivors and documented by Drop Site. With the help of Airwars OSINT analyst and former U.S. Marine Corps member Tomi McCluskey, Drop Site accessed additional NASA thermal imagery consistent with the Negra Francisca bombing and vessel tracking data placing U.S. Coast Guard activity along the route the fishermen say they were taken after the strike. 
Video obtained by Drop Site showing alleged Coast Guard activity near the Negra Francisca strike. Political Lawfare Under Ecuador’s U.S.-Backed Military RegimeNoboa, who governs by military curfews and mass starvation of political prisoners, has gone to great lengths to become Trump’s strongest partner in South America. Since taking office, he brushed aside Ecuador’s constitutional ban on U.S. military presence—ratified by 60% of voters as recently as November 2025—which was originally introduced almost 20 years ago precisely due to a history of U.S. military sinking boats off the coast of Manta. Additionally, his administration authorized the first FBI office on Ecuadorian soil, assisted a U.S. Embassy effort to falsely frame members of Colombia’s left-wing government ahead of elections, and collaborated with the U.S. in the bombing of innocent civilian farmworkers along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border—all in the name of combatting drug trafficking. Notably, boats from Noboa’s family shipping corporation were caught trafficking ₤26 million of cocaine—a detail that has not deterred the State Department from naming him a key partner in Trump’s War on Drugs. Last month, The Guardian reported that a whistleblower who was investigating Noboa’s ties to drug trafficking was murdered. Still, Noboa remains a member in good standing of Trump’s Shield of the Americas. The Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, as the Shield is also known, functions as both a military and a highly political alliance, having openly intervened to prop up U.S. interests in Bolivia as President Rodrigo Paz faced off with anti-austery protests. A local prosecutor charging U.S. forces with extrajudicial bombings and torture of Ecuadorian civilians would undermine the alliance and damage Ecuador-U.S. relations. Other government officials investigating U.S.-Ecuadorian criminal collusion received death threats. Mónica Palacios, a National Assembly lawmaker representing Ecuadorians living in the United States, who announced plans to bring the Fiorella boat case before the United Nations, faced months of political lawfare after exposing a U.S.-Ecuadorian government embezzlement scandal. Last Friday, Palacios said she received death threats against herself and her one-year-old son, along with footage of the outside of her New York home. She directly blamed President Noboa, saying the threats were retaliation for her investigation into U.S.-Ecuadorian corruption. “There is a direct persecution of judges and prosecutors who, within the scope of their duties, make decisions that are not entirely aligned with what the Executive Branch wants and end up being sanctioned,” Bastias, the human rights attorney, said. “On the other hand, there is also the risk stemming from the context of criminality.” Regardless, he asserted, Bravo’s death “has a lot to do with what the state does or does not do, because so far there haven’t been any effective security mechanisms for the justice system’s civil servants. The responsibility lies in having failed to ensure protection.”
Diego Vintimilla Jarrín, formerly a lawmaker with Ecuador’s National Assembly and now a spokesperson for Ecuador’s Communist Party, similarly told Drop Site, “Noboa’s government is the most anti-sovereign agenda we have had since the start of democracy. I have no proof of who murdered the prosecutor but the fact that she was investigating certain elements and that they later ceased to seem important also says a lot about the underlying issues.” New Evidence Implicating U.S. EmergesThe Negra FranciscaThe U.S. maintains it never interacted with any of the three boats. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard told The Guardian that the agency’s only involvement in the events was deploying the USCGC Bertholf on a search-and-rescue mission after receiving a MAYDAY alert that the Negra Francisca was on fire, and ultimately found nothing. But tracking data of the Bertholf’s movements, provided exclusively to Drop Site by McCluskey, places the cutter near the Negra Francisca around the time of the bombing before turning off its signal—only to reappear off the shore of Costa Rica the same dates the Negra Francisca crew were taken into Central American waters and transferred to El Salvador’s Naval Command, with mangled limbs and major burn injuries from the attack. Hernán Flores, captain of the Negra Francisca, told Drop Site that Salvadoran officers specifically informed him that “U.S. personnel had called to coordinate the handoff.” The Coast Guard denied that it coordinated the handoff. “The Coast Guard did not play any role in the transfer of fishermen from the Negra Francisca Duarte II,” said a spokesperson.
The USCGC Bertholf departed the Galápagos military base at 4 p.m. on March 16 and stopped transmitting its location shortly afterwards. A day later, the Negra Francisca was bombed 170 miles away—a distance typically covered by boat in 3 to 10 hours. Drop Site asked the U.S. Coast Guard to account for the cutter’s activity after its signal went dark. The Coast Guard responded it “does not disclose cutter movements during law enforcement missions for operational security.” At 1:02 p.m. on March 17, NASA FIRMS registered a thermal anomaly consistent with an explosive fire, corroborating the time and location where Negra Francisca fishermen told Drop Site their ship was set ablaze by multi-drone strikes. The crew say they were then seized at gunpoint by English-speaking men with blond hair dressed in khaki fatigues with American flag patches stitched onto their sleeves—their descriptions match the uniforms pictured in U.S. Southern Command press releases. Aboard the U.S.-flagged patrol ship, the gunmen allegedly held them hostage, sank their bombed boat, placed hoods over their heads, beat some of the fishermen, and withheld food for eight days as they transported them to Central America.
The USCGC Bertholf’s signal resurfaced in Costa Rican waters on March 22 near the Golfito Port, approximately 450 nautical miles from El Salvador’s waters. It turned off its transponder and did not reactivate it until March 24, 24 hours after El Salvador’s Coast Guard publicly announced having had the Negra Francisca fishermen in their custody. As part of our first investigation, Drop Site reached out to 11 government personnel in El Salvador. All of them refused to go on the record, citing a media gag order. There is precedent for the Bertholf transferring victims of U.S. airstrikes to Central American authorities, with Costa Rican outlets reporting it delivered the remains of two deceased and one injured survivor to Costa Rica’s Port of Golfito around the same time. Costa Rica’s nautical inspector Wilber Urroz Guido said he had no information on the cutter’s movements but that it was authorized to act under a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Costa Rica—similar to agreements the U.S. maintains with Ecuador and El Salvador. Eyewitness testimony also casts doubt on the U.S. Coast Guard’s version of events. Video footage shared exclusively with Drop Site by Darwin Flores-Pico, an eyewitness to the attack and nephew of the Negra Francisca’s captain, shows a U.S. Coast Guard cutter patrolling the waters where the bombing occurred. 
Video obtained by Drop Site showing alleged Coast Guard activity near the Negra Francisca strike. Darwin said he was fishing nearby on March 17, aboard his boat the Solavil, when he spotted smoke rising in the distance around 2 p.m. While making repeated attempts to reach the Negra Francisca’s crew by radio, he spotted an American aircraft circling above. It wasn’t until hours later that he learned by radio signal that the Negra Francisca was in flames and rushed to make his way to the scene, finding the vessel consumed by fire and no sign of survivors. He recovered two scorched emergency skiffs, took photo evidence of the fire, then called the Port of Manta to ask for help. Nobody came. Darwin decided to begin his journey back to the port to get emergency assistance and, as he was leaving the scene of the fire, red and green lights descended upon the Negra Francisca. Fearing for his safety, he steered his boat away from the site.
The following afternoon, Darwin told Drop Site his boat was boarded by the U.S. Coast Guard, which detained and questioned the crew for nearly 12 hours via a Spanish translator with a Puerto Rican accent. He said Coast Guard personnel confirmed the red and green lights were from their patrol and acknowledged reaching the site of the Negra Francisca the previous night, but refused to elaborate on anything they’d found. Instead, they questioned the fishermen about whether they’d seen anything and why Darwin had salvaged the skiffs. After telling the Coast Guard officials that the Negra Francisca was his uncle’s boat, Darwin says they abruptly stopped questioning him and began communicating by radio in English with colleagues aboard the nearby cutter shown in the video. “Since we were the only people who saw everything, we were afraid they might do something to us,” Darwin said. He felt the U.S. Coast Guard showed little interest in helping him locate his family and instead seemed more focused on “making sure we weren’t witnesses to anything.” McCluskey says the multi-drone tactic—described by all three boats—reflects a U.S. doctrine. He argues it’s unlikely that other regional powers, from neighboring countries to organized crime groups, would have the budget or access for such technology. There is no known precedent of cartels using “eye-in-the-sky” surveillance drones deep in maritime territory, though the Coast Guard has also denied operating armed drones in Ecuadorian waters. Furthermore, the decision to keep the survivors alive, albeit involving testimonies of torture, and the efforts and expenses to transport them, is far more reflective of a Department of Defense protocol—-designed to avoid international legal ramifications—than any organized crime group would typically care to practice. “If it was cartels, you would’ve never found them,” McCluskey said. “There would be no survivors to talk to, there would be no stories.” The FiorellaThe Fiorella was struck off the coast of the Galápagos on January 20; all eight fishermen aboard remain missing. The day before the vessel vanished, the captain’s wife received a call from her husband on an emergency line, warning that U.S. aircraft were orbiting overhead. Drop Site obtained police interview transcripts from two eyewitnesses, Christian Flores and Dimas Ignacio Álvarez, who corroborated seeing the Fiorella engulfed in smoke and surrounded by American assets. The two men were members of the Fiorella crew but had been out setting a long line on a nearby raft for several hours when the vessel went up in smoke. In their police statements, Flores and Álvarez described two U.S. aircraft flying over the Fiorella on January 18; multiple grey American drones and a U.S.-flagged patrol ship circling the vessel on January 19; and, on January 20—the day their crewmates disappeared—the large U.S.-flagged patrol ship near the smoke. From a distance, they could not make out the personnel aboard the ship, but their accounts echo those of the Negra Francisca crew, who said they were taken hostage by armed Americans aboard a U.S.-flagged patrol vessel. The witnesses’ descriptions also match aircraft and equipment featured in public posts by U.S. Southern Command. 
Transcripts of police interviews with the eyewitnesses, obtained exclusively by Drop Site News. Originals in Spanish, translated copies in English.
After spotting the smoke, the two fishermen said they heard their crewmates calling the captain over the radio in distress. They were never seen again. The attorney representing the two survivors of the Fiorella, Juan Avila, told Drop Site that the slain prosecutor, Alexandra Bravo, was in fact his niece. The Coast Guard told Drop Site it “has no record of involvement with La Fiorella.” Bravo Is No AnomalyThe absence of an assigned police detail when Bravo was murdered bears similarities to the 2023 assassination of frontrunner presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. A congressional commission determined that Villavicencio’s police detail was insufficient, that he had been unconventionally escorted through an exposed street-level exit contrary to standard protocol, and that the armored vehicle designated to protect Villavicencio on the campaign trail had been left by his security team in another city that day. These breaches made him particularly vulnerable when assailants approached and shot him on the sidewalk as he was leaving a meeting with other government officials. Villavicencio’s death cleared the way for now-President Daniel Noboa’s campaign—which had been polling at 3%—to surge to victory. In an interview with Señal Colombia, National Assembly legislator and member of Villavicencio’s party, Gisella Molina, who was with him and injured during the assassination, suggested government officials had prior knowledge of the plot. During the 2024 murder investigation, Drop Site published private messages from then–Attorney General Diana Salazar revealing a plot to implicate former democratic socialist President Correa’s party in Villavicencio’s assassination, amid close collaboration with the U.S. ambassador. The state later concluded that the Los Lobos cartel carried out Villavicencio’s murder and alleged that former members of Correa’s party were the masterminds. Prosecutors assert that Los Lobos killed Villavicencio for exposing their criminal network. While Villavicencio campaigned on eradicating the cartel economy, Ecuador under Noboa—accused of offering organized crime bosses immunity in exchange for electoral support—has risen as the top distribution hub for 70% of the world’s cocaine. Immediately following Bravo’s death, the Attorney General issued a public statement attributing her murder to retaliation against prosecutors combating organized crime. When asked why authorities had linked the killing to organized crime and whether investigators had uncovered any information about Bravo’s missing police protection detail, the Attorney General’s office told Drop Site the investigation is under seal and declined to comment. Though the attorney general has yet to present evidence to support their claim, Bravo lamented to the Human Rights Watch that “danger was always present” in her work. “She said that being a prosecutor in a context of organized crime was complex and risky, but she did not provide any further details,” Cotrino Villarreal told Drop Site. Manta sits at the epicenter of Ecuador’s organized crime crisis, as the small South American country becomes the most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere. Bravo was also responsible for looking into the unsolved 2024 disappearance of the Patricia Lynn ship and its 21 crew members. Bravo is the second person associated with the Patricia Lynn case to be assassinated. The first was the mother-in-law of one of the disappeared fishermen who became the spokesperson for the victims’ families and organized marches demanding answers for their missing relatives. María Chóez was fatally shot by two armed assailants while operating her street food stand in downtown Manta. Cotrino Villarreal says the sinking of the Patricia Lynn boat in Ecuadorian waters, “served as a precedent in all these ship-related matters.” “If Ecuador had a framework of trust in its institutions, one might think [Bravo’s murder] was an ordinary crime,” Vintimilla Jarrin, the former lawmaker, said. “But given the systematic violence against judges, prosecutors, and lawyers, there isn’t much room to give them the benefit of the doubt. Twenty-six murdered members of the justice system is a shocking number. And of course, this entire crisis has been fostered by an agenda driven directly by government authorities; the ones who benefit from organized crime are the large power groups.”
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