It was only a matter of time. When Motherboard caught up with the so-called godfather of narco subs a few years back, the cartel’s seaborne coke craft were still only semi-submersible – impressive, yeah, but equally ramshackle and risky, with giveaway valves sucking in air to stoke the craft’s diesel engines. So now, in what may point to the kind of tit for tat blows between drug agents and capos that only seem to keep smuggle-craft in constant states of evolution and refinement (and drug war coffers cushy), is word that the cartels are taking their vessels a quarter-league deeper. The new narco subs are going entirely beneath the waves.This according to the New York Times in a report that says the U.S. has seized at least three varying models of the latest, most sophisticated iteration of the drug-trafficking sub, which is “capable of traveling completely underwater from South America to the coast of the United States”. This new class of fully-submersibles was cut to haul up to 10 tons of cocaine. All could cruise underwater, the Times adds, undetected from Ecuador to Los Angeles, say, by surfacing to re-charge their onboard diesel engine’s batteries under the cover of darkness. They’re catching on, unsurprisingly – the Coast Guard, DEA and other agencies have all witnessed a marked spike over the last year in narco sub traffic throughout the Caribbean. Until only recently, the craft were being sniffed out mainly along the West Coast, the Pacific Ocean being far less busy in terms of transnational drug running.The potential payoffs, of course, are staggering. With the global drug trade “expanding inexorably”, the fully-submersible sub option has cartels standing to gain gobs of cash, market, power, and prestige. So too does interdicting the U-boats, possibly with that growing fleet of aerial spy toys, have the Feds champing to sink the fish. Agents are jacked on the thrill of the chase. Submarines and semi-subs pregnant with bricks of el bronco blanco "are the Super Bowl of counternarcotics," Cmdr. Mark J. Fedor of the Coast Guard told the Times. "When you hear one is moving, you say: 'Wow. Game on.'"Major cocaine flows as of 2009 (via UNODC World Drug Report 2010)A far slower hunt was behind the Feds recently busting up a transatlantic cocaine triangle. Agents from Boston’s FBI office spent three years building the case, which ultimately found Sinaloa cartelsmen ambitiously routing a drug pipeline between Mexico, Europe, and New Hampshire. The triangle trade called for shipping between 1,000 and 3,000 kilos of coke "through this new drug distribution (chain) to Europe and eventually back to New Hampshire," according to New Hampshire U.S. Attorney John P. Kacavas. Authorities say they caught wind of the plan after investigators intercepted over 760 pounds of cocaine from suspects believed to be doing large test runs via cargo containers. (Remember those twenty frozen sharks stuffed with white pony seized in the southern Mexican state of Yucatan? Something like that.)"We've taken the approach that this is going to be death by 1,000 cuts," Kacavas said last week at a press conference in Concord, N.H. "This is one of those cuts."Does it matter? Triangular trade is nearly as old as trade itself. What’s to stop the cartels, who function nowadays as much as drug gangs as they do money-laundering, human-trafficking outfits, from sticking to that scheme over air, land or sea? The point isn’t that drug-agents caught up with the capos, however briefly. The point is that the cartels are willing to exploit the living daylight out of whatever technologies need be as their tentacles stretch further and further to every last remaining market. The new narco subs are just the latest manifestation of that drive.Until they become unmanned.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson
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