When the British Royal Navy recently intercepted a Colombian narco-submarine off the Caribbean coast, it was just the latest sign of a truly alarming shift in drug trafficking. In March 2023, the Spanish Guardia Civil seized this alleged narco-submarine off Illa de Arousa in Galicia, Spain. This incident occurred concurrently with those events. Cocaine prices are experiencing an unprecedented plunge, remaining only a few hundred dollars per kilo today. Consequently, traffickers are opting to reuse custom-built vessels or narco-subs rather than sink them after a single use.
Alberto Morales, at the time the head of the central narcotics brigade of the Spanish Policía Nacional, offered a telling remark. In the last 20 years, the U.S. government has recorded a whopping ten narco-subs. Most importantly, he pointed out that the real number of these vessels is almost certainly much higher than official counts suggest. Morales said that it’s obvious that there are way more than 10. He illustrated the difficulty in which Spain’s law enforcement is struggling to patrol the entire Spanish coastline.
In the past, narco-subs were primarily built for one-way journeys from South America to Europe. After each cargo run, traffickers would leave these vessels behind. This practice unfortunately produced something like a “narco-sub graveyard” between the Azores and the Canary Islands. The price of constructing a narco-sub is rapidly increasing, now approaching costs of €600,000 (£524,000). Unchecked, drug traffickers have little incentive to not discard their vessels so easily. “Logically speaking, we can’t detect everything that reaches the Spanish coast as we have 8,000km of coastline,” Morales explained.
The surge in narco-sub activity has been especially acute during the last two years. According to Spanish police officials, the number of drug traffickers who attempt to use sailboats for transport has sharply decreased. Now, these transnational criminals would much rather make use of semi submersible submarines and merchant vessels. Spanish customs officers seized 123 tonnes of cocaine in 2022 alone, a significant increase from 58 tonnes in 2021. Unfortunately, the trend continued this year. In September, in an operation dubbed Tarzan, Spanish authorities arrested 14 people and intercepted 3.65 tonnes of cocaine, reportedly brought to Galicia by a narco-sub.
Morales highlighted that drug trafficking techniques were in constant change and progress. “Right now, [the organisations] have two basic methods which are merchant ships and semi-submersibles, which allow them to do their transporting at any time of year,” he said. The Spanish Policía Nacional has dismantled more amphetamine, methamphetamine, and MDMA laboratories in the past two years than in the previous 18 years combined.
The tracking and interception of these semi-submersible submarines remain a Herculean task for law enforcement agencies. Our authorities were first to apprehend these vessels hauling tons of illicit cocaine. A few weeks ago, they intercepted 6.5 tons that was on its way to the Iberian Peninsula. Even with these constant efforts, Morales admitted narco-subs are hard to find and almost impossible to locate every one that’s operational throughout the world. “We don’t have a location; we don’t even have any numbers,” he mentioned, further indicating the limitations of current detection capabilities.
Similarly, law enforcement can know where these vessels are operating. Recovering them is still a huge challenge, as they’re typically working deep in the ocean’s most adverse environments. Even if we somehow managed to do it, it would be next to impossible to recover the subs. The extent of the waters makes it just as devastatingly difficult. It’s just habitat for them to hang out, to find cover, and for food to attach to them.