Cocaine seizures skyrocket off Latin America’s Pacific coast

The U.S. Coast Guard 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, officials said Monday.

Coast Guard personnel aboard Stratton have seized more than 33,000 pounds of cocaine worth more than $540 million wholesale since May. It was the biggest single offload of narcotics in Coast Guard history and the result of 23 separate confrontations with drug smugglers in the Pacific, officials said.

Officials credited the record seizure, in part, to the Coast Guard’s Western Hemisphere Strategy, which, among other goals, sought to crack down on transnational crime groups vying for control of trafficking routes off the coast of many Latin American countries.

Over the past decade or so, submarines have become a lucrative way to smuggle drugs from Central America into the U.S.

In this image obtained from the US Coast Guard on August 6, 2015, crew from the Coast Guard Cutter Stratton intercept a self-Propelled Semi Submersible in the Eastern Pacific, on July 18, 2015.

Traffickers have been increasingly turning to the high seas to get their loads to U.S. markets, and skirt the tightened security on land at the U.S.-Mexico border. The bundles covering the deck equated to about 33m lines of cocaine or 336m hits of crack, according to DEA estimates.

Johnsons said the operation also reflected the importance of cooperation between the variety of national and global agencies involved in battling maritime drug-smuggling operations.

On Monday, tons of drugs on wooden pallets were offloaded from the Stratton, a 418-foor cutter that had just returned from a 116-day deployment.

The seizure was the largest recorded semi-submersible interdiction in Coast Guard history.

Cutters like Stratton routinely conduct operations from South America to the Arctic where their unmatched combination of range, speed, and ability to operate in extreme weather provides the mission flexibility necessary to conduct counter-narcotics, homeland security, and alien migrant interdiction operations, domestic fisheries protection, search and rescue, and other Coast Guard missions at great distances from shore keeping threats far from the U.S. mainland.