Coast Guard hauls in record drug bust
The Coast Guard unloaded more than $1 billion worth of cocaine Monday at San Diego Naval Base – its largest-ever delivery of the narcotic – as federal officials announced a record-breaking year for seizures of illegal drugs intercepted far offshore from Latin America.
Over the past 10 months, the Coast Guard and partners from the Navy, federal law enforcement and allied nations teamed up to apprehend 215 suspected smugglers in the eastern Pacific Ocean and confiscate more than 119,000 pounds of cocaine. The estimated street value of the haul is about $1.8 billion.
The seizures this fiscal year are already the largest since 2009, with more drugs interdicted near Central and South America than the three previous years combined.
The crackdown coincides with a surge since September of Coast Guard vessels patrolling near the world’s cocaine-growing region of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
Tighter coordination among international stakeholders in the counter-drug campaign is another factor, as well as competition among cartels in Latin America and the Caribbean vying for control of maritime trafficking routes.
The power struggle has contributed to rising instability, record-high homicide rates in Central and South America and the flow of unaccompanied children heading to the U.S.-Mexico border, federal officials said.
Coast Guard sub seize
Crew members of the Alameda-based Stratton, a high-tech, long-range cutter commissioned in 2012, stopped at the San Diego base after a 4-month operation. They unloaded wooden pallets strapped with more than 66,000 pounds of pure cocaine, which amounts to about 33 million lines of cocaine or 336 million hits of crack, according to Drug Enforcement Agency estimates.
The drug was seized by personnel on Coast Guard and Navy vessels during dozens of interdictions off the coast of Central and South America that involved a variety of vessels, including fishing boats, pangas, and two drug-running submarines.
On July 18, for instance, a Navy maritime patrol aircraft helped the Stratton crew locate a 40-foot “self-propelled, semi-submersible vessel” carrying more than 16,000 pounds of cocaine. Such low-profile vessels, with just a cockpit and exhaust pipe visible above water, are extremely difficult to detect, according to the Coast Guard.
“Every one of these bricks of cocaine is destined for the United States. Four hundred metric tons is consumed in our country each year,” Adm. Paul Zukunft, commandant of the Coast Guard, said at a dockside news conference.
The impact of the seizures will be felt far beyond U.S. streets, however.
“The cultivation, trafficking and distribution of narcotics fuels violence and instability throughout the Western Hemisphere, leaving a path of destruction directly to the door step of the U.S. We must continue to make progress in our effort to combat transnational organized-crime networks to ensure safety and security in our hemisphere,” Zukunft said.
To circumvent tighter security at the U.S.-Mexico border, drug traffickers are increasingly taking to the ocean to reach U.S. markets. In response, the effort to roll back the tide of illicit drugs heading to American shores involves multiple agencies.
On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson praised the Stratton crew members for their performance during the operation.
“The mission also reflects an impressive level of cooperation between the U.S. Coast Guard, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the U.S., Canada and other partner nations,” he said in a statement.
In the eastern Pacific, where shipments of large, uncut bundles of cocaine are big business, a U.S. interagency task force participates in an international anti-drug mission called Operation Martillo, or Hammer.
Under its Western Hemisphere Strategy, the Coast Guard has increased U.S. and allied patrols along drug-transit zones in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Basin.
It regularly sends San Diego Coast Guard cutters and Navy frigates on three- and four-month patrols off the western coasts of Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica.
The United States’ Customs and Border Protection agency also operates in that area, where it began extended flights this year of the Guardian surveillance drone — a maritime version of the Predator made by General Atomics of San Diego.
Federal drug enforcement and Coast Guard officials declined to give names of individuals or cartels involved in the recent cocaine shipments that were busted.
But the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego has been working more closely with maritime agencies on prosecutions.
Laura Duffy, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, has said her office partners with districts in Florida and Puerto Rico to go after all smuggling cases with merit.
“Over the past year, this district has taken a stronger, more active interest in these eastern Pacific cases,” Duffy said in April, after another big drug bust. “As we see more smugglers taking to the seas … my office has also redoubled our efforts and increased the resources we are adding to this problem.”
Despite the Coast Guard’s record-breaking cocaine haul this year, there is still work to be done, Zukunft said.
“We can only act on 30 percent of known drug shipments in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean,” he said. “We must increase already hard-earned momentum to curb the rising tide of crime, violence and instability in our hemisphere.”
