WASHINGTON — A U.S. agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration shot a man to death in Honduras during a raid on a drug-smuggling operation early Saturday, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Honduras said on Sunday. The man who was killed had been reaching for his weapon, the official said, and the U.S. agent fired in self-defense.

The shooting brought further attention to the growing U.S. involvement in counternarcotics operations in Central America. Commando-style squads of DEA agents have been working with local security forces in several countries and have been present at several firefights in Honduras in which people died in the past 15 months.

The latest episode, however, is the first in which the U.S. government has said that a U.S. agent, rather than a Honduran police officer, had killed a suspect. The shooting underscored the sensitive issues of national sovereignty raised by the growing U.S. participation in the operations.

The U.S. government tracked a plane suspected of smuggling drugs from South America as it landed at an airstrip early Saturday near the village of Brus Laguna, in Honduras near its northern coast, said Stephen Posivak, the spokesman for the embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in a phone interview.

A surveillance aircraft observed about 40 people unloading cargo and taking it to a nearby staging site in the woods. Four State Department helicopters, carrying both Honduran police officers and members of the DEA's Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — a commando-style squad commonly referred to as FAST — went to the site and intercepted the shipment. They arrested four people and recovered several weapons and about 360 kilograms of cocaine.

During the operation, Posivak said, the government agents told a group suspected of smuggling to surrender. Four of the suspects did so and were arrested, but a fifth reached for a holstered weapon. The U.S. agent shot him before he could fire.

Dawn Dearden, a spokeswoman for the DEA, said that the DEA agent was allowed to fire under the rules of engagement for such operations that were established by an agreement between the U.S. and Honduran governments.

Last month, a similar raid near Ahuas ended in a gunfight on a river in which four people were killed, leading to a dispute over whether they were involved in drug smuggling or were bystanders.