I don't mean to be "that guy", but how do we even know the sailors on these boats aren't just some fishermen working for the cartels because they have a guy at his shack with a gun on his mother and siblings or kids? Or, even worse, what if they aren't working for cartels at all? Just went out to try to fish.
I'm not sure what our endgame is here, but just eyeballing this from the outside it looks like we're doing surgery with chainsaws instead of scalpels.
And all that assumes that our government is actually trying to help. Our end goal could be something else entirely? It's all just mystifying right now? I'm not sure anyone could give a coherent explanation of the why's, and I'm just about certain that no one could give a rational explanation of the how.