Ecuador and Colombia seize two narcotic submarines with nearly four tons of cocaine

The navies of Colombia and Ecuador announced on Sunday the confiscation in their respective maritime zones of two semi-submersibles loaded with almost four tons of cocaine.

The episode highlights the scale and modus operandi that drug trafficking groups employ to bring their illegal trade to the United States and Europe.

The first of the seizures occurred last Saturday, when Ecuadorian maritime authorities carried out the capture a 15 meter long narcotic submarine and four engines about 60 kilometers off the coast of the province of Esmeraldas, in the north of the country.

It carried 161 large packages wrapped in jute bags 3.2 tons of cocaineThe Armed Forces made this known in a statement. The shipment is valued at around $50 million, they added.

In the operation, coordinated with the Colombian navy, Three Colombian citizens arrested. In a video broadcast on the social network account, the arrested people, identified as Arlin G., José C. and Víctor O., as well as the seized cargo, were handed over to the police.

In November 2023, a similar vessel with a cargo of five tons of drugs was seized in a maritime area of ​​the Galapagos, and in 2022 another with two tons was seized in the same location.

One day later, The Colombian Navy has reported the seizure of the “first semi-submarine of the year” in that country. It is a gray narco-submarine, 15 meters long, which was intercepted in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, near the port of Buenaventura, in the western part of the country. with a load of 795 kilos of cocaine. The three people who were part of the crew were arrested, Bogotá said.

A United Nations report indicates that 2022 was a record year for drug harvests in Colombia. The cultivation of the coca leaf in that country, the raw material for the production of cocaine, increased by 13% to 230,000 hectares of crops.

Although it does not produce cocaine, Ecuador, one of 11 countries along with El Salvador, Haiti and Liberia that have officially adopted the dollar as legal tender, It is one of the main drug trafficking corridors on the continent and functions as a collection and transit point for cocaine coming from Colombia.

US currency facilitates illegal trade because, being in common use and legalized in Ecuador, it speeds up money transfers and makes laundering or laundering large sums less complicated.

The kidnappings of the two ships occur in the context of violence generated by drug trafficking gangs has risen to unknown levels in Ecuador.

Last week, President Daniel Noboa declared a state of emergency and ordered the deployment of soldiers to fight drug gangs after several incidents that occurred in several prisons in the country, with kidnappings and murders of officials, as well as the escape of one of the country’s main criminal bosses, José Adolfo Macias.Villamar, alias Fito , who was serving 34 years in prison for murder and drug trafficking.

His family, refugees in Argentina, were deported on Friday by the authorities in Buenos Aires.

After that event, car fires and explosive attacks were recorded. The situation shocked the country when on January 9 a group of hooded men broke into a live broadcast of the TC television channel in the city of Guayaquil, in the south-east of the country, threatening the staff with weapons.

Subsequently, drug traffickers shot and killed prosecutor César Sánchez, one of the magistrates in charge of the “Metastasis” case.which investigates a network of complicity with drug traffickers that includes judges, police officers and high-ranking state officials.

Twenty organizations spread terror in Ecuador and impose their power from prisons, in retaliation for the government’s firm policy to counter the onslaught of drug trafficking.

The use of narco-submarines to remove drugs from production areas and bring them to consumption areas, in the United States and Europe, It’s not something new. These ships began to be used in the late 1990s. Some are capable of crossing the Atlantic and have replaced high-speed boats as states improved their detection capabilities.

The United States captured its first drug-trafficking submarine in 2006, 145 kilometers west of Costa Rica. In 2008 it reported detecting ten a month. Colombia’s western coast is full of rivers that run through the jungle and flow into the Pacific Ocean, facilitating the construction of clandestine shipyards that are difficult to discover but have easy access to the sea. The type of narcotic submarines confiscated so far have cost a million dollars.

In 2000, Colombia seized a metal-hulled submarine in a warehouse under construction with the help of Russian naval engineers.

Once completed, it would have measured approximately 32 meters in length, with 15 tons of load capacity, a range of 3,800 kilometers and the ability to dive to 100 meters deep.

Sources: AFP, AP and Clarín agencies