Mexico seizes drug submarine in Pacific - AP

Mexico's navy seized a homemade submarine carrying a drug shipment off the Pacific coast on Wednesday and arrested its four-man crew.

Similar vessels carrying cocaine have been discovered off Colombia and Central America, but navy spokesman Capt. Benjamin Mar said the seizure is a first for Mexico.

[Slimey]

I wonder if smuggler captains make their crews field day?

[yeah]

we all live in a yellow submairne.

[Smar Tass]

Home-built submarines?

Clear out the garage I've got an idea for Dad and son project!

[Downtown Hopkins]

Give them an "A" for creatvity" and an "F" for getting caught. Instead of higher & higher, they got lower & lower.

[Slimey]

Downtown Hopkins wrote:

Give them an "A" for creatvity" and an "F" for getting caught. Instead of higher & higher, they got lower & lower.

Should've gone deeper & deeper...

[Downtown Hopkins]

Run silent, run deep. This sounds like a Brad Pitt movie. Have him toss out some Spanish phrases.

[THE DUDE]

How do they deliver their payload, shoot it out the torpedo tubes?

[Richard USA]

They should just bought a Russian Sub, instead of building one!

[Ozzie]

in a octopuses garden in the shade.

puff puff pass....

[notme]

A drugmarine?

[NM Backpacker]

but then they would have just sunk and drowned.

Richard USA wrote:

They should just bought a Russian Sub, instead of building one!

[Ivan]

Richard USA wrote:

They should just bought a Russian Sub, instead of building one!

Drug submarine found in Colombia

Thursday, 7 September, 2000, 18:40 GMT 19:40 UK

Police in Colombia say they have found a half-built submarine in a warehouse in a suburb of the capital Bogota.
Police chief General Luis Ernesto Gilibert said Russian documents were found alongside the partially-completed vessel.

He said the 30 metre (100ft) vessel would have been capable of carrying huge quantities of cocaine or heroin.

He speculated that, once completed, the submarine would have been disassembled and taken by lorry to to Colombia's Pacific or Caribbean coast.

When police raided the warehouse in the suburb of Facatativa they found the building equipped with closed-circuit cameras but devoid of people.

High quality

Instead there was the startling sight of a sophisticated submarine under construction.

"It was between 30% and 40% complete and had its engine room ready," General Gilibert said.

"The technology is advanced and the workmanship of high quality."

The Russian documents at the site led police to speculate that the Russian mafia or Russian technicians were involved in its construction.

Bogota is landlocked and lies 2,250 metres (7,500 ft) above sea level, but is a source of high-quality building materials - which may explain why it was chosen as a submarine boatyard.

Submarines have been used by Columbian drug smugglers before - in 1997 two mini-subs were seized off the Caribbean port of Santa Marta.

Huge

But this submarine is a much bigger vessel.

"In 32 years I've never seen anything like this," said Leo Arreguin, the US Drug Enforcement Administration director in Colombia.

"This is huge. We're talking about being able to load up to 200 tonnes of cocaine in this submarine."

Mr Arreguin said documents discovered at the site showed that two Americans may also have been involved, but did not elaborate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/915059.st...

[Ivan]

drug smuggling submarines

In 2006 and 2007 a new method of smuggling emerged, surface skimming, semi-submersible, home-made submarines were captured from Thailand to Spain to Colombia. In 2008 the number spotted has already reached the 2007 count. These craft often had sophisticated electronics for evading capture. To get some idea of the logistical scale of these things, a 100ft long Russian designed submarine was captured in Colombia’s capital, Bogota, 7,500 ft above sea level.

(Go to Link to see 10 pictures of Drug Submarines)

http://www.oobject.com/category/drug-smugglin...

[Ivan]

FEDS: Drug Lords Attempted to Buy Russian Submarine

6/26/98

The Los Angeles Times reports this week (6/21) that Ludwig Fainberg, owner of two Miami nightclubs, was acting as a broker between Russian organized crime figures and South American drug traffickers. The deals that Fainberg allegedly attempted to put together would have netted the drug organizations a Soviet Tango class submarine to be used to ship cocaine into the U.S. Fainberg went so far as to arrange a meeting with a retired Russian naval officer and a tour of a secret Russian navy base for the purpose of selecting the sub.

The Times reports that U.S. authorities say the case is illustrative of the forming alliances between powerful organized crime organizations in Russia and South American drug traffickers. This partnership would combine access to vast Cold War military assets with the drug trade that has all but inundated the U.S. despite the best efforts of prohibitionists.

http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/047/s...

[Ivan]

Colombian drug cartels take underwater route

By Chris Kraul
November 06, 2007

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 late last month were two 55-foot-long fiberglass vessels, one ready for launch, the other about 70% 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 5 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 a crew of four, he added.

Over the last 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 America, each loaded with 3 to 5 tons of cocaine.

The seizures point to 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 such crudely built submarines.

“There could be 5 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 become increasingly sophisticated, evolving from huge tubes 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 operations by Colombian and U.S. anti-drug forces, experts here say.

The subs were probably 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 from Colombia, which produces about 90% of the drug consumed in the United States.

Proponents insist that the campaign is producing concrete results. They cite a 24% increase in cocaine street prices 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,” the office’s director, John P. Walters, wrote in a letter to Rep. J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.).

Improved surveillance and intelligence have led to spectacular busts this year, including the seizure 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.

(Continued)

[Ivan]

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 increase, as in past instances, may prove only temporary.

John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, a watchdog organization, said a 45% price increase in early 2002 was quickly reversed as suppliers adjusted.

Walsh and others say counter-narcotics 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 lucrative 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 multinational 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. Atty. Joseph Ruddy, who heads Operation Panama Express, a Tampa, Fla.-based task force. The task force’s interdictions have resulted in more than 1,100 drug traffickers being convicted since 2000.

The boats seized Oct. 28 are submarine-like, but officials here say a more accurate description is “self-propelled semi-submersible” craft because they do not 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 involving a narco-submarine, police in September 2000 raided a warehouse near Bogota, the capital, and found a 100-foot-long submarine 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 Russian submarine.

The know-how to build crude “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 website, psubs.org , and hold 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 crew members of a submersible detained this year after their 55-foot vessel sank off 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.”

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/06/world...

[Wake up USA]

Slimey wrote:

I wonder if smuggler captains make their crews field day?

Maybe they should have headed for Singapore where they could have had a little ROPEYARN SUNDAY.

[Iron Ranger]

Don't do drugs, of course.

I'm surprised that those southern countries even care about illegal drugs. That is heartening that they DO care!

[Slimey]

Iron Ranger wrote:

Don't do drugs, of course.
I'm surprised that those southern countries even care about illegal drugs. That is heartening that they DO care!

Give people enough money, weapons, etc, and they'll care about anything you want.

[dr wino]

we all live in a cocaine submarine
cocaine submarine
cocaine submarine