Submersible vessels are latest weapon in drug trafficking
Xinhua/Sipa Press/Via Newscom
OUT OF COMMISSION: Colombian Navy photo shows a seized submarine for transporting drugs at Caribbean Coast in Guajira province, north of Colombia. The 20-metre-long and 5-metre-wide submarine made by drug sellers could transport 10 tons of drugs every trip.
CALI, COLOMBIA -- It was on a routine patrol that the Colombian Coast Guard stumbled upon an eerie outpost amid the mangroves: a mini-shipyard where suspected drug traffickers were building submarines.
Perched on a makeshift wooden dry dock in late October were two 55-foot-long fiberglass vessels, one ready for launch, the other about 70 percent complete. Each was outfitted with a 350-horsepower Cummins diesel engine and enough fuel capacity to reach the coast of Central America or Mexico, hundreds of miles to the north.
The vessels had cargo space that could fit five tons of cocaine, a senior officer with the Colombian Coast Guard's Pacific command said in an interview. The design featured tubing for air, crude conning towers and cramped bunk space for crews of four, he added.
Over the past two years, Colombian authorities and the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy have seized 13 submarine-like vessels outfitted for drug running. The five seized by American authorities were en route to Mexico or Central American, each loaded with three to five tons of cocaine.
The captures point up a security threat that goes beyond drug trafficking. Many law enforcement officials are concerned that U.S. ports and shorelines could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks using precisely such crudely built submarines.
"There could be five tons of anything on board these things," said a senior U.S. military official involved in the war on drugs.
Added a senior official with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Colombia: "Any viable method to covertly transport large quantities of illicit drugs over long distances such as these (vessels) could conceivably be employed to transport other prohibited materials."
The boats have grown increasingly sophisticated, evolving from huge cylindrical tubes that were built to be towed by fishing or cargo boats, to self-propelled vessels with ballast systems and communications equipment that leave no wake or radar profile as they glide just below the ocean surface.
The recent discovery in the Pacific Coast estuary about 25 miles south of the port city of Buenaventura reflects drug traffickers' growing use of such boats in the face of stepped-up counternarcotics operations by Colombian and U.S. anti-drug forces, experts here say.
The subs probably were commissioned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in whose zone of influence the "shipyard" was situated, according to the officer, who asked not to be identified for security reasons. The FARC is thought to be Colombia's most powerful drug-trafficking organization.
Military officials here and in the United States say the war on drugs, financed by billions of dollars in U.S. aid, is forcing drug runners to undertake ever more ingenious methods of transporting cocaine up from Colombia, which produces about 90 percent of the drug consumed in the United States.
Proponents insist that the campaign is producing results. They cite a 24 percent increase in cocaine street prices earlier this year as reported by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The price bump was caused by the "disruption of cocaine flow," director John P. Walters wrote in a letter to Rep. J. Dennis Hastert,(R-Ill.).
Improved surveillance and intelligence has led to spectacular busts this year, including the capture last Tuesday in Manzanillo, Mexico, of 23 tons of cocaine hidden in a freight container aboard a Hong Kong-flagged vessel that had stopped in Buenaventura.
The bust "is going to have even more serious impact on cocaine price and purity levels here in the United States," a senior U.S. congressional aide said Friday.
Meanwhile, critics of the war on drugs warn that the price bump, as in past instances, might prove only temporary. John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, a watchdog organization, said a 45 percent price increase in early 2002 was reversed quickly as suppliers adjusted.
Walsh and others say counternarcotics efforts in Colombia should focus less on interdiction and more on economic alternatives for coca farmers and others caught up in the industry.
In any event, the ever-changing tactics of Colombian drug traffickers targeting the U.S. market reflect a constant cat and mouse game.
"When we adjust to them, they adjust to us," said Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, commander of the Key West, Fla.,-based Joint Interagency Task Force South, a multi national force set up to interdict oceangoing drug shipments. "Their reaction to our greater surveillance and increased interdictions has been these self-propelled submersibles."
Are drug cartels resorting to submarines out of "desperation or just diversification? It's a combination of the two, with the greater emphasis on the former," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Ruddy, who heads Operation Panama Express, a Tampa, Fla.,-based task force that has convicted more than 1,100 drug traffickers since 2000.
The boats captured Oct. 28 are submarinelike, but officials here say a more accurate description is "self-propelled semi-submersible" craft as they are built to cruise just below the ocean surface but not to dive and resurface like a true submarine.
Submarines are not new to drug trafficking, only more numerous, if the increase in seizures is any indication.
In what was the most spectacular bust yet involving a narco-submarine, police in September 2000 raided a warehouse near Bogota, the capital, and found a 100-foot-long submarine under construction that was being built according to Russian plans.
The sub was thought to be a joint venture by Colombian and Russian drug Mafias and would have been capable of carrying 10 tons of cocaine per trip had it been completed. Annual Colombian cocaine production is now estimated at 500 to 800 tons.
In 1995, police broke up a deal in which Colombia's Cali cartel had planned to buy a fully functioning Russian submarine.
The technology to build crude homemade "submersibles" is readily available on the Internet and in back issues of Popular Mechanics magazine . Hobbyists in the United States have formed the Personal Submersibles Organization; they conduct chats on the group's Web site, psubs.org, and hold regular annual meetings.
But the vessels found on Colombia's Pacific shores last week were built for anything but recreation and certainly not by hobbyists.
The Colombian Coast Guard official said a submersible crew detained this year after their 55-foot vessel sank of the coast of Tumaco, Colombia, told police that they viewed the craft as a death trap but were lured by the $2,000 payment the drug magnates promised to pay them to guide the vessel to Central America.
Asked to describe the men detained, the coast guard official merely said: "Crazy."
Perched on a makeshift wooden dry dock in late October were two 55-foot-long fiberglass vessels, one ready for launch, the other about 70 percent complete. Each was outfitted with a 350-horsepower Cummins diesel engine and enough fuel capacity to reach the coast of Central America or Mexico, hundreds of miles to the north.
The vessels had cargo space that could fit five tons of cocaine, a senior officer with the Colombian Coast Guard's Pacific command said in an interview. The design featured tubing for air, crude conning towers and cramped bunk space for crews of four, he added.
Over the past two years, Colombian authorities and the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy have seized 13 submarine-like vessels outfitted for drug running. The five seized by American authorities were en route to Mexico or Central American, each loaded with three to five tons of cocaine.
The captures point up a security threat that goes beyond drug trafficking. Many law enforcement officials are concerned that U.S. ports and shorelines could be vulnerable to terrorist attacks using precisely such crudely built submarines.
"There could be five tons of anything on board these things," said a senior U.S. military official involved in the war on drugs.
Added a senior official with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Colombia: "Any viable method to covertly transport large quantities of illicit drugs over long distances such as these (vessels) could conceivably be employed to transport other prohibited materials."
The boats have grown increasingly sophisticated, evolving from huge cylindrical tubes that were built to be towed by fishing or cargo boats, to self-propelled vessels with ballast systems and communications equipment that leave no wake or radar profile as they glide just below the ocean surface.
The recent discovery in the Pacific Coast estuary about 25 miles south of the port city of Buenaventura reflects drug traffickers' growing use of such boats in the face of stepped-up counternarcotics operations by Colombian and U.S. anti-drug forces, experts here say.
The subs probably were commissioned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, in whose zone of influence the "shipyard" was situated, according to the officer, who asked not to be identified for security reasons. The FARC is thought to be Colombia's most powerful drug-trafficking organization.
Military officials here and in the United States say the war on drugs, financed by billions of dollars in U.S. aid, is forcing drug runners to undertake ever more ingenious methods of transporting cocaine up from Colombia, which produces about 90 percent of the drug consumed in the United States.
Proponents insist that the campaign is producing results. They cite a 24 percent increase in cocaine street prices earlier this year as reported by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The price bump was caused by the "disruption of cocaine flow," director John P. Walters wrote in a letter to Rep. J. Dennis Hastert,(R-Ill.).
Improved surveillance and intelligence has led to spectacular busts this year, including the capture last Tuesday in Manzanillo, Mexico, of 23 tons of cocaine hidden in a freight container aboard a Hong Kong-flagged vessel that had stopped in Buenaventura.
The bust "is going to have even more serious impact on cocaine price and purity levels here in the United States," a senior U.S. congressional aide said Friday.
Meanwhile, critics of the war on drugs warn that the price bump, as in past instances, might prove only temporary. John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, a watchdog organization, said a 45 percent price increase in early 2002 was reversed quickly as suppliers adjusted.
Walsh and others say counternarcotics efforts in Colombia should focus less on interdiction and more on economic alternatives for coca farmers and others caught up in the industry.
In any event, the ever-changing tactics of Colombian drug traffickers targeting the U.S. market reflect a constant cat and mouse game.
"When we adjust to them, they adjust to us," said Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, commander of the Key West, Fla.,-based Joint Interagency Task Force South, a multi national force set up to interdict oceangoing drug shipments. "Their reaction to our greater surveillance and increased interdictions has been these self-propelled submersibles."
Are drug cartels resorting to submarines out of "desperation or just diversification? It's a combination of the two, with the greater emphasis on the former," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Ruddy, who heads Operation Panama Express, a Tampa, Fla.,-based task force that has convicted more than 1,100 drug traffickers since 2000.
The boats captured Oct. 28 are submarinelike, but officials here say a more accurate description is "self-propelled semi-submersible" craft as they are built to cruise just below the ocean surface but not to dive and resurface like a true submarine.
Submarines are not new to drug trafficking, only more numerous, if the increase in seizures is any indication.
In what was the most spectacular bust yet involving a narco-submarine, police in September 2000 raided a warehouse near Bogota, the capital, and found a 100-foot-long submarine under construction that was being built according to Russian plans.
The sub was thought to be a joint venture by Colombian and Russian drug Mafias and would have been capable of carrying 10 tons of cocaine per trip had it been completed. Annual Colombian cocaine production is now estimated at 500 to 800 tons.
In 1995, police broke up a deal in which Colombia's Cali cartel had planned to buy a fully functioning Russian submarine.
The technology to build crude homemade "submersibles" is readily available on the Internet and in back issues of Popular Mechanics magazine . Hobbyists in the United States have formed the Personal Submersibles Organization; they conduct chats on the group's Web site, psubs.org, and hold regular annual meetings.
But the vessels found on Colombia's Pacific shores last week were built for anything but recreation and certainly not by hobbyists.
The Colombian Coast Guard official said a submersible crew detained this year after their 55-foot vessel sank of the coast of Tumaco, Colombia, told police that they viewed the craft as a death trap but were lured by the $2,000 payment the drug magnates promised to pay them to guide the vessel to Central America.
Asked to describe the men detained, the coast guard official merely said: "Crazy."
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