Dramatic Coast Guard video spotlights one front in war on drug trafficking

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) — The Coast Guard released dramatic bodycam video Thursday showing officers pursuing and boarding a semi-submersible drug-smuggling vessel in international waters to seize thousands of pounds of illegal narcotics, a small victory in a war against drug trafficking that experts say is far from over.

The vessel was first spotted from the air on June 18, and the Coast Guard Cutter Munro dispatched two smaller boats to intercept it. According to ABC News, the submersible was traveling at 10 miles per hour hundreds of miles from the Ecuador/Colombia border when it was caught. Coast Guard officers found five people and around 17,000 pounds of cocaine on board.

The Munro docked in San Diego Thursday carrying 39,000 pounds of cocaine from 14 separate seizures made in the eastern Pacific Ocean between May and July. Coast Guard officials say the operations will lead to the prosecution of 55 alleged drug smugglers in the U.S. or in their home countries.

Vice President Mike Pence was on hand to watch the Munro offload the $569 million haul, praising the officers’ “courageous service.” President Donald Trump shared the video of the June 18 bust on Twitter, commenting, “Do you believe this kind of bravery? Amazing seizure.”

"This is as satisfying as it gets. It's the largest [bust] in the Coast Guard since 2015," Capt. Jim Estramonte, commanding officer of the Munro, told ABC News. "The crew is ecstatic, everyone plays a part in it, not just the folks on deck doing the boarding. We ran at our highest speed to get there all day. It was an all-hands-on-deck evolution, and the crew worked their tails off to get there."

This type of “narco sub” has become a common tactic for Central American drug smugglers in recent years. They are difficult to see from above and capable of hiding from radar in the waves, and they are relatively inexpensive to build, deploy, and then abandon when the journey is complete.

“We’re only catching a fraction of the drugs. For every narco sub you see, there are many, many more that made it through,” said Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

According to David Murray, co-director of the Center for Substance Abuse Policy Research at the Hudson Institute, smugglers send out drugs by land, by sea, and by air counting on some of the shipments inevitably making it to their destination.

“Imagine a hornets’ nest down in Colombia. They send out the hornets by any means possible,” Murray said.

Coast Guard officials say they are capable of identifying about 85% of the drug smuggling activity in the eastern Pacific, but they only have the resources to interdict about a quarter of those vessels. Many shipments are still making it to the shores of Central America and up into the U.S.

“Most of the time, all you can do is say, ‘There they are, here they come,’” Murray said.

Michael Levine, a former Drug Enforcement Administration who has since become a vocal critic of the war on drugs, said the fact that there are still so many drug shipments out there to interdict suggests U.S. anti-drug policies are failing.

“It’s not working and, having dealt face-to-face with the toughest drug dealers in the world, they’re not impressed by this,” said Levine, author of “The Big White Lie” and “Deep Cover.” “They factor in a loss. This is just a loss of merchandise.”

The seizures in the Pacific represent just one front in the struggle against transnational criminal organizations. U.S. law enforcement agencies and allies are also combating these drug traffickers in the Caribbean Basin, along the nation’s southern border, and at ports inside the country.

The DEA called Mexican cartels “the greatest criminal threat to the United States” in its 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment. U.S. foreign aid to Mexico includes more than $100 million for anti-narcotics efforts, but cartel violence has driven Mexico’s homicide rate to new heights.

Last fall, the Department of Justice announced an inter-agency task force targeting five transnational criminal organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel, MS-13, and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generation. CJNG has only been around for about a decade, but it has secured control of trafficking routes along the border and at sea. The Treasury Department has declared it one of the world’s “most prolific and violent drug trafficking organizations.”

In 2017, 93% of cocaine seized in the U.S. mainland originated in Colombia, which produced 921 metric tons of the drug that year, according to the DEA. At least 84% of the cocaine leaving South America transited through the eastern Pacific Ocean, with most of it heading to Mexico.

The southwest border is the main entry point for cocaine smuggled into the U.S., and most seizures occur at ports of entry and border patrol checkpoints. Mexican cartels were the primary source of cocaine trafficked into the U.S. in 2017, distributing it through U.S.-based criminal organizations and street gangs once it was across the border.

Mexican cartels are also responsible for most of the heroin trafficked in the U.S. More than 90% of seized heroin analyzed by the DEA in 2017 was produced in Mexico. Mexican poppy production hit a record high, with potential pure heroin production totaling 111 metric tons.

Jaeson Jones, a former Texas Department of Public Safety official, warned the cartels have become more violent than ever and have expanded their reach on a global scale.

"I think that’s kind of the untold story to the rest of America about what we’re seeing down here on the southwest border and how they have gone through quantum leaps in capabilities and then how they have spread around the world," Jones said in an interview with Sinclair’s Lara Logan last month.

Paradoxically, the more aggressive the U.S. gets in fighting traffickers, the harder they become to catch. Stepping up enforcement in the Caribbean Basin sent them over to the Pacific. Limiting their ability to transport drugs by boat just led them to rely on submarines and torpedoes.

“It’s the hydra effect,” Tree said. “You cut off one head, two more appear.”

Also, Tree noted, as it gets harder to evade border security and travel into the U.S., traffickers are able to charge more for their effort because of the risks they take. That makes growing and transporting drugs more profitable, which encourages traffickers to grow and sell more of them.

“It does not make us safer if we constantly incentivize drug traffickers to find newer and more efficient ways to penetrate our border security,” he said.

Despite occasional high-profile successes like the Munro sub seizure, experts say the U.S. must reassess its anti-trafficking efforts, though they differ on what a more effective approach looks like.

"When are we going to focus on the new priority of the 21st century? It’s the Mexican cartels. Once we designate them as terrorists, once we then turn around and start bringing our military down here to support border patrol between the ports of entry -- to hold the line as opposed to an investigative approach -- we will start winning again," Jones said.

Murray placed blame for the current crisis largely on the Obama administration, which shifted resources to treatment and prevention rather than enforcement and suspended drug control programs that had been effective, including the aerial spraying of glyphosate on coca crops in Colombia.

“Drug control really unraveled,” he said. “[President Obama] did not focus on drug supply... We did things that basically blindfolded ourselves and handicapped ourselves.”

However, the solution is not as simple as reverting to the policies Murray says worked in the past. Circumstances on the ground in Central and South America have grown more complicated, and governments the U.S. used to work with have weakened.

Colombia’s government adopted a less confrontational approach toward the cartels, and neighboring Venezuela is teetering on the brink of collapse. Violence in the Northern Triangle has sent record numbers of Central Americans fleeing north to seek asylum in the U.S.

Murray advocates a comprehensive approach of rebuilding those partnerships, resuming aerial spraying of Colombian coca crops, shutting down drug flights out of Venezuela, and securing the southern border while also maintaining domestic treatment and prevention programs.

“You’ve got to hit the hornets’ nest too,” he said. “You can’t just wait until the hornets hit the beach.”

Tree cautioned that an aggressive enforcement effort could backfire, pushing traffickers toward greater efficiency.

“An over-reliance on law enforcement produces indirect consequences,” he said. “You build up a rapid Darwinian evolution of the drug trade... The people we capture are the ones who are dumb enough to get caught.”

According to Levine, the U.S. missed a chance to take down the infrastructure of the drug trafficking network in South America decades ago. He claims two DEA operations he participated aimed at doing that were aborted because the CIA and State Department intervened.

“This means nothing to the drug traffickers,” Levine said of the Coast Guard seizures. “If they could take this and indict or close down the actual infrastructure, that would mean something.”

Vice President Pence would disagree, casting the Munro’s work as inspiring and essential.

“Never doubt that your work is more important than ever before,” he told Coast Guard members Thursday. “Rescuing Americans from the scourge of drug abuse and rescuing those in peril on the seas is an essential calling of the modern United States Coast Guard.”