– ‘Nightmare scenario’ –
Not content with building fully submersible drug boats, the analyst said cartels are likely working on the next step in the smuggling arms race: autonomous underwater vehicles that don’t need a crew, are guided by GPS and can stay underwater for almost their entire routes.
“That’s the nightmare scenario,” he said.
The analyst works for an international taskforce based in Key West, where 15 nations partner with the United States military and Coast Guard to track and intercept drug shipments.
The so-called Joint Interagency Taskforce South (JIATFS) plays a crucial role in breaking up the $88 billion per year cocaine business and stopping other illicit shipments, some of which are used to generate funding for terror groups in countries across the world.
JIATFS tracks drug movements across vast swaths of ocean around Central and South America and successfully intercepts an estimated 25 percent of cocaine shipments.
Countries including France, Britain and the Netherlands are contributing naval vessels to the mission and help seize illicit shipments and arrest crews, some of whom are prosecuted in the United States, while others are sent elsewhere including their home nations in South America.
The penalty for drug running is between seven and 14 years in US federal prison, officials said.
Still, there’s no shortage of men willing to spend days at a time on a cramped, dangerous and foul-smelling narco-sub, the analyst said.
The captain of such vessels can earn as much as $75,000 for a single run. Money is plentiful for the cartels – the boats themselves can cost about $1 million to build, but that is just a tiny fraction of their cargo’s value.
Though drug subs are now used routinely, catching additional Bigfoots has proven tricky, as crews scuttle the vessels the moment they are spotted.
“Then they just float around on a dinghy until we pick them up,” the analyst said.
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