The military branch has seized 119,000 pounds of cocaine worth more than $1.8 billion so far this year, Adm. Paul Zukunft said before crews used a crane to move dozens of massive drug bundles off a Coast Guard vessel in San Diego.
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They are mostly submerged, often with only a cockpit and exhaust pipe visible above water and are particularly hard to detect and interdict, the Coast Guard said.
The U.S. Coast Guard says cocaine seizures off Latin America’s Pacific coast have soared in 2015 to their highest levels in five years.
The 32 tons of pure uncut cocaine aboard the Stratton would have been sufficient to supply road gross sales of the drug roughly equal to 33 million “strains” for snorting, in response to the D.R. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Coast Guard drug interdiction accounts for almost 52 percent of all U.S. government seizures of cocaine each year. The underworld competition has led to record-high homicide rates in Central and South America, as well as in the Caribbean.
Crews Monday took 30,000 kilograms of cocaine off the Stratton, a 418-foot (127-meter) nationwide safety cutter. Two interceptions of self-propelled semi-submersible vessels in July yielded about a third of the seized cocaine, according to the Coast Guard.
The $1 billion worth of narcotics unloaded at the U.S. Naval Base San Diego marked the largest haul from a single Coast Guard mission, he said.
These types of operations are crucial because illegal drug networks are unsafe breeding grounds for all types of trafficking fueling violence and instability, officials said. The suspended smugglers were apprehended and will be prosecuted in federal courts across the nation.
If the Coast Guard catches it, a worker on the submarine can pull a lever that floods the interior so the evidence sinks, leaving the crew in the water.
The one dollar. 6 b in held benzoylmethylecgonine comes with Washington displaced the Coast Guard funds for its preceding level, after a 25 percentage interrupt costs in 2013. The past four months, said Homeland Security Secretary Jeh C. Johnson, have been “a huge success” for maritime anti-drug operations.
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Zukunft said more than 400 tonnes of cocaine is consumed in the United States each year.
