The commander of Ecuador’s coast guard gazed at thesubmarine that had been used to carry drugs with a defeated look in his eyes, exhausted from endless interdiction efforts that seem to go nowhere, his sailors risking their lives while the cocaine keeps flowing.
Drug smugglers, he said, were always many steps ahead.
The Ecuadorean Navy has two submarines in its fleet. And the cartels? No one really knows, but definitely many more.
Over the past 15 years, Ecuador has captured about a dozen fully and semi-submersible vessels. The American authorities say they believe just a tiny fraction of such vessels have been intercepted worldwide.
We were in the sprawling naval base along waterfront of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s most populous city, looking at drug-trafficking ships seized by the navy, some with the help of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. It was a graveyard of sun-baked fishing boats, semi-submersible vessels and one hulking metal submarine.
The array of vessels was a testament to the savviness of the cartels as they come up with ways to transport drugs around the world.
The U.S. military last week attacked a semi-submersible vessel in the Caribbean that it claimed was ferrying cocaine. Two people were killed, but there were two survivors, including an Ecuadorean man who was repatriated.
The strike is part of the Trump administration’s campaign to destroy vessels it claims are smuggling drugs. (On Wednesday, it said it had struck a boat off the coast of Colombia, the first time such an attack had taken place in the Pacific.)
Many experts say the U.S. shrikes violate international law.
Rickety fishing vessels and speedboats still carry significant amounts of cocaine from South America to the United States, but semi-submersible vessels emerged in the 1990s as a way to try to evade U.S. authorities.
Typically, most of the boat sits below the water’s surface with a fiberglass cockpit just above to allow for navigation. The boats usually have a crew of up to four, are roughly 50 feet long and can hold two tons of cocaine, the Ecuadorean Navy says.
The Ecuadorean coast guard estimated that one semi-submersible it seized had cost about $1 million to build. A ton of cocaine, by comparison, can fetch about $25 million in the United States.
By the mid-2000s, navies across South America began to see full-fledged submarines, like the hulking, 30-yard-long vessel sitting at the navy base in Guayaquil. It was found in 2010, cost about $2 million to build and could carry up to 10 tons of cocaine, the coast guard commander said,
After some law enforcement forces began using thermal imaging cameras to detect vessels underwater, drug traffickers began covering them in lead and equipped them with cooling devices to help obscure their heat signatures, according to Insight Crime, a research organization.
The power and range of the submarines has also grown over the years. At first, they were able to smuggle drugs only from South America to Central America. Now, they can traverse the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and reach as far as Europe, Africa and Australia, traveling several thousand miles without refueling.
Ecuador has become a major player in the global drug trade. Some 70 percent of the world’s cocaine flows through the country. It is not a production hub, but Ecuador borders Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, and Guayaquil’s busy ports, which send bananas, fish and shrimp to the world, provide a lucrative opportunity for cartels.
Ecuador’s coast and the Pacific in general is where most of the world’s cocaine flows, not the Caribbean, U.S. and U.N. data shows. Cocaine has also fueled a surge in violence there, turning Ecuador from Latin America’s safest country to one of the most dangerous.
As I interviewed the coast guard commander — whose name The New York Times is withholding for security reasons — fireworks went off in the near distance.
“They do that every time a shipment reaches its destination,” he said with a sigh, referring to the gang that controls the neighborhood bordering the base.
A modest brick wall topped with floppy barbed wire was the only thing separating Ecuador’s largest navy base from the sprawling impoverished neighborhood, which is controlled by Los Lobos, one of the country’s most powerful drug trafficking groups. The gang works closely with Mexican cartels and Albanian and Italian organized crime groups to smuggle cocaine across the world, U.S., European and Ecuadorean officials say.
Last month Los Lobos was designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department.
I asked the coast guard commander if he was nervous being next door to the very enemy his forces were fighting, if he ever worries that members of Los Lobos would scale the walls to attack his sailors or sabotage their equipment.
“Sometimes,” he said, shrugging it off with a ‘well-what-can-you-do?’ look on his face.
José María León Cabrera contributed reporting from Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City.
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