If you had seen this on Miami Vice, you probably wouldn’t have believed it, but drug smugglers from Guatemala and El Salvador increasingly are turning to homemade submarines in an effort to evade U.S. authorities, particularly the Coast Guard. This doesn’t always work, as evidenced by the picture above of the Coast Guard boarding a narco-sub in the Pacific. Indeed, the Coast Guard seized six narco-subs just last year, all filled with cocaine. And the subs are vastly outnumbered by fishing boats and speedboats (which the smugglers call pangas) in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.
The Coast Guard’s problem is that its fleet is aging (many ships are more than 50 years old), its mission is being expanded (to include not only anti-drug efforts but also intelligence and counterterrorism, as well as offering life-saving protection for mariners in distress), and its budget has been flat for years. Now, President Trump’s budget would cut the Coast Guard by 2.4 percent.
In this New York Times story, Admiral Paul F. Zukunft, the Coast Guard Commandant, says he doesn’t have the resources to catch all the smugglers the Coast Guard knows about. “Just last year.” he said, “we had intelligence on nearly 580 possible shipments, but we couldn’t go intercept them because we didn’t have the ships or planes.” Meanwhile, smuggling activity is becoming stronger. “Drug traffickers simply have more boats and crafts than we have ships and planes to catch them,” he said.
For more, see The Times story here. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/us/politics/coast-guard-faces-challenges-at-sea-and-at-the-budget-office.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=9&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0
