NEW YORK: The US coastguard has seized more cocaine off Latin America’s Pacific coast over the past 10 months than in the previous three years combined as it rebounds from budget cuts and combats smugglers increasingly moving drugs on the high seas, according to officials.
The agency has seized 119,000lb (54,000kg) of cocaine worth more than $1.8bn so far this year, Admiral Paul Zukunft said before crews used a crane to move dozens of massive drug bundles off a coastguard vessel in San Diego.
Coastguard officials said they could not say whether the increase in seizures signals a spike in cocaine use by Americans. Zukunft attributed the increase to the coastguard’s greater presence on the water after having to pull back its boats two years ago to meet automatic funding cuts.
The coastguard, which is the only US military branch able to make drug arrests hundreds of miles (kilometers) offshore, had cut its operating costs by 25% in 2013. Based on their intelligence reports at the time, about 90% of illegal drug loads being tracked by authorities on the high seas were getting through because no boats were available to target them, Zukunft said.
Washington has since restored the coastguard’s budget and also moved more resources to the Pacific waters off Latin America. Despite that, crews aided by the US navy and allied nations can only intercept about 30% of drug shipments they are tracking, Zukunft said.
Traffickers have increasingly turned to the wide-open ocean over the past decade because it is much more difficult to patrol than land routes.
Crews took 66,000lb (30,000kg) of cocaine off the Stratton, a 418ft (127-meter) national security cutter. The bundles covering the deck equated to about 33m lines of cocaine or 336m hits of crack, according to DEA estimates.
“Every one of these bricks of cocaine is destined for the United States,” Zukunft said, adding that about 900,000lb (408,000kg) of cocaine is consumed in the US each year.
Most of the drugs were taken from small, fast boats known as pangas but some were found aboard makeshift submarines. Officials have arrested 215 suspect smugglers so far this year.
