http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/08/01/2340943/feds-seize-drug-sub-with-75-tons.htmlFeds seize drug sub with 7.5 tons of cocaine off Honduran coast
The Coast Guard, with the help of FBI dive teams, recovered 7.5 tons of cocaine from a drug sub off the coast of Honduras, marking the first interdiction and seizure of its kind in the Caribbean.
BY JAY WEAVER
JWEAVER@MIAMIHERALD.COM
A U.S. Coast Guard C-130 first spotted the knife-shaped craft skimming along the blue-green Caribbean waters off the coast of Honduras.
The crew notified a U.S. Customs and Border Protection airplane, which flew down for a closer look, confirming everyone’s suspicions: It was a drug sub.
Boston-based Coast Guard Cutter Seneca soon stopped the “self-propelled semi-submersible” -- the first interdiction of such a sub in the Caribbean -- and detained the five crew members, who managed to sink the vessel with almost all of the 7.5 tons of cocaine loaded inside.
But Coast Guard, FBI and Honduran Navy divers, using sonar equipment, searched for almost two weeks since the mid-July event and found the submarine last Tuesday. It was floating about 50 feet below the surface and 16 nautical miles off shore near the Nicaraguan border, marking the feds’ first underwater removal of drugs from such a sub. The load’s value: $180 million.
“Working on a buoy deck is dangerous enough,” said Lt. Cmdr. Peter Niles, of the Charleston, S.C.-based Coast Guard Cutter Oak, which located the semi-submersible craft. “But this unique mission involved blending dive operations, boat operations and deck operations at the same time.”
The five sub crew members, who were allegedly transporting the cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, were stopped by the Coast Guard as they tried to escape in a yellow life raft. The defendants, from Colombia and Honduras, are awaiting detention hearings Friday in Tampa federal court on charges of possessing cocaine with intent to distribute it in the United States.
Semi-submersible crafts are typically built in the jungles of Colombia by paramilitary rebel groups, which have deployed them in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean to transport cocaine to Mexico for distribution in the United States since the mid-‘90s, authorities say.
They’re less than 100 feet long — built of fiberglass and wood to evade radar detection — and can carry up to five crew members and 10 tons of drugs for thousands of miles. They have a small tower in the middle so the crew can look out, steering the subs with the aid of a GPS.
Traffickers design the crafts to sink rapidly when law enforcement officials attempt to stop them.
The vessels are responsible for transporting nearly one-third of all cocaine in the region.
“Our goal is to interdict cocaine at sea when it is still concentrated in large loads before those drugs can be broken into small loads and smuggled across our border with Mexico,” said Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, headquartered in Miami.
Honduras’ chief of the armed forces, Gen. Rene Osorio, called the July 13 Coast Guard interdiction and seizure “the biggest blow to drug trafficking” in his country’s history.
Coast Guard interdictions of semi-submersibles are more common in the Pacific Ocean along the Central American coast.
Earlier this year, the Seattle Times reported on the Cutter Midgett, which interdicted a narco sub and arrested a four-man crew hundreds of miles off the coast of Costa Rica.
The craft was crammed with 6.6 tons of cocaine, valued at $138 million.
The Coast Guard crew sank the sub with most of the drugs on board.
Drug traffickers have long come up with creative ways to smuggle cocaine, heroin and marijuana into the United States.
In 2006, federal authorities charged a Colombian ring with using dogs as drug “mules’’ — going well beyond the longtime practice of having couriers swallow drug-filled condoms. The Drug Enforcement Administration found six Labrador retrievers implanted with three kilos of liquid heroin packets in Medellín, ready to be shipped on a commercial flight into the United States by way of Miami.
The same cartel also concealed heroin in body creams and aerosol cans, or pressed the drug into bead shapes which were sewn into the lining of purses and luggage.
The pioneers of such innovative methods for shipping drugs were Colombian kingpins Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez-Orejuela, brothers who revolutionized the drug trade in the ‘90s when their Cali cartel accounted for 80 percent of the cocaine on U.S. streets.
Among the brothers’ more inventive means to conceal multi-ton cocaine shipments: hollow concrete fence posts stuffed with the coke.
The brothers are serving 30-year prison sentences.
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