U.S. Fires on Ship Believed Carrying Drugs Off Mexico

A U.S. Coast Guard cutter blasted away at a suspected drug-smuggling ship with 130 rounds of cannon fire and 600 rounds of machine-gun fire for more than two hours Wednesday, but the Panamanian freighter with a Cuban crew managed to continue on course and escape into Mexican waters.

The prolonged assault, the most extensive on a foreign vessel in the U.S. war on drugs, occurred with the permission of the new government of Panama and despite warning by the Cuban government that the crew would fight back.

Late Wednesday, the 250-foot freighter H. V. Hermann was at anchor and seeking permission to dock in the port of Tampico, and the Mexican government said it had begun an “exhaustive search” of the vessel that could take up to 24 hours.

The Coast Guard barrage with M-60 machine guns and a 20-millimeter deck-mounted cannon was launched in international waters at 5:10 a.m. after the ship’s captain rebuffed for more than a day repeated Coast Guard requests to board the vessel. The attack, which would otherwise have been prohibited under international law, was authorized by the Panamanian government in its first such action since it was installed by the United States on Dec. 20.

The Panamanian freighter appeared to have been only slightly disabled in the 2 1/2-hour barrage. Coast Guardsmen on board the 110-foot cutter Chincoteague aimed hundreds of shots at the freighter’s engine room and rudder post before the freighter crossed into Mexican territorial waters, Coast Guard officials said. No one was injured in the attack, and the freighter did not return fire.

The ferocity and duration of the bombardment made the assault the most extensive by far since the Coast Guard took on its drug interdiction role in 1980, according to agency records. In that role, heavy firepower has been employed by the Coast Guard fewer than 20 times in the last decade, and in most of those cases only warning shots were fired, agency officials said.

Only once before had the Coast Guard fired more than 150 shots at a suspected drug ship--during a successful 1982 attempt to board a Colombian fishing boat that was carrying 20 tons of marijuana.

The latest confrontation began when the patrolling cutter began to stalk the freighter off the Yucatan Peninsula early Tuesday, amid a backdrop of tension between the United States and Cuba. Cuba claimed jurisdiction over the vessel on grounds that it had set sail from the Cuban port of Moa with a Cuban crew and cargo.

Just after 3 a.m. Wednesday, the Cuban government dispatched a formal warning that the vessel’s captain, Diego Sanchez, had been instructed to resist a U.S. effort to board the vessel and that both captain and crew were ready to fight, Coast Guard spokesmen said.

The official Cuban press agency, Prensa Latina, reported that the crew members had “readied themselves . . . with machetes, knives, axes and other tools” to prevent a U.S. boarding. However, the Coast Guard spokesmen said that during the bombardment, there was no evidence of active resistance by the Cubans.

In an interview, Cuban Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Ramon Sanchez-Parodi condemned the U.S. assault as “tantamount to an act of piracy.” But U.S. officials defended the action, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III declared: “It was not an attack and a provocation. It was a legal law enforcement activity.”

A Coast Guard spokesman, Capt. Randall Peterson, said the United States has no evidence that the Panamanian freighter was carrying drugs but that the Coast Guard cutter became suspicious because it “fit the profile” of the kind of ship commonly used in narcotics smuggling.

Although the Panamanian government on Tuesday quickly approved the U.S. requests to board and then to fire at the vessel, the Coast Guard and State Department decided jointly to put off action until early Wednesday in hopes of defusing Cuba’s concerns, U.S. officials said.

At the outset of the daybreak assault, the officials said that the Coast Guard cutter fired 25 cannon rounds over the bow of the Panamanian freighter from close range, but the ship refused to stop.

The cutter next fired about 30 rounds at the engine compartment, and when that failed to produce a result, aimed the cannon at the ship’s rear rudder rod in hopes of disrupting the vessel’s steering system. At the same time, other gunners opened fire with what Petty Officer Bob Morehead--on duty in a New Orleans operations center during the assault--said was a total of 600 rounds of M-60 machine-gun fire.

Coast Guard officials said they believed that the vast majority of the shots hit the Panamanian vessel and said this was the first time in their memory that such a furious assault had not persuaded a suspected drug-running ship to stop.

Other military experts, however, noted that the 20-millimeter cannon is designed for use as an anti-aircraft gun and said its shells and the machine-gun fire may well have had little effect on the freighter.

Times staff writer Don Shannon contributed to this article.