- The amount of cocaine seized by the US Coast Guard declined slightly in 2019 from the previous fiscal year, marking the second straight year of declines.
- But major busts on the high seas remain a regular occurrence.
- The 2019 fiscal year ended and the 2020 fiscal year began with busts of "narco subs," stealthy vessels that carry multiton loads of the drug.
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After several years of increases, Coast Guard seizures of cocaine at sea declined slightly during fiscal year 2019, but that fiscal year ended and the 2020 fiscal year, which began on October 1 and runs to September 30, 2020, began with major busts.
During the 2018 fiscal year, Coast Guard personnel removed 207,907.6 kilograms, or 208 metric tons, of cocaine worth an estimated $6.14 billion, Chief Warrant Officer Barry Lane said in an email.
The amount of cocaine removed by the Coast Guard is the sum of all cocaine physically seized by Coast Guard personnel and all cocaine lost by smugglers due to Coast Guard actions, according to a Homeland Security Department Inspector General report for fiscal year 2018.
The amount of cocaine lost by smugglers is at times "an intelligence-based estimate of the quantity of cocaine onboard a given vessel that is burned, jettisoned, or scuttled in an attempt to destroy evidence when Coast Guard presence is detected," according to the report.
The 2019 total is the second year of decline, following the 209.6 metric tons seized in 2018, according to the Inspector General report. The 223.8 metric tons seized in 2017 was up from 201.3 metric tons in 2016 and 144.8 metric tons in 2015.
Narco subs
The Coast Guard has led efforts to intercept narcotics coming to the US by sea from South and Central America, working with partners in the region through Operation Martillo, which involves ships and aircraft scouring the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
High-seas busts happen regularly, yielding not only drugs and drug smugglers but also intelligence on the groups behind the shipments.
In July, the Coast Guard's newest cutter, Midgett, caught a "narco sub" carrying 2,100 pounds of cocaine and three crew in the Eastern Pacific Ocean as the cutter made its first trip to its homeport in Hawaii.
"Narco sub" is often used as a catch-all term, sometimes describing true submarines or semi-submersibles but usually referring to low-profile vessels.
They are all typically hard to spot in the open ocean, but the Coast Guard has seen a resurgence of them.
In September, Coast Guard cutter Valiant tracked down another narco sub in the eastern Pacific, pursuing the 40-foot vessel over night and into the early morning. It was stopped with 12,000 pounds of cocaine aboard, but Coast Guard personnel were only able to offload about 1,100 pounds because of concerns about its stability.
The Valiant's seizure closed that fiscal year, and the crew of the cutter Harriet Lane opened the current one with another, stopping a semi-submersible smuggling vessel in the Eastern Pacific on October 23 and seizing about 5,000 pounds of cocaine.
Boarding teams from the Harriet Lane got to the smuggling vessel just before midnight, taking control of it before four suspected smugglers aboard could sink it using scuttling valves.
'A mission enabler'
Coast Guard officials have pointed to narco subs as a sign of smugglers' ability to adapt to pressure.
The service has pursued what Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz has called a "push-out-the-border strategy," sending ships into the Pacific to bust drugs at the point in the smuggling process when the loads are the largest.
But Schultz and other officials have cautioned that the service can see more than it can catch.
In the eastern Pacific, where about 85% of the cocaine smuggling between South America and the US takes place, the Coast Guard has "visibility on about 85% of that activity," Schultz told Business Insider in November 2018. "Because of the capacity - the number of ships, the number of aircraft - [we act on] about 25% to 30% of that."
Stopping drugs, as well as the Coast Guard's other missions, are opportunities to employ new technology, Schultz said in October.
"That counter-drug mission, where you're trying to surveil the eastern Pacific Ocean ... you can take the entire United States and turn it on a 45-degree axis and drop it there, it's the equivalent of patrolling North America with five or six police cars out of Columbus," Schultz said during an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"You've got to bring some technologies in ... We've fielded small unmanned systems, the Scan Eagle, on the back of our national-security cutters," Schultz added. "We haven't fielded them all out yet, but hopefully by the end of next year every national-security cutter will have a Scan Eagle. That's a mission enabler."