The rise of the cocaine submarine

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, on the hunt for narco subs.

0:18Last month, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of miles from the Portuguese coast, police spotted a barely visible vessel, camouflaged against the sea. About 40 feet long, its nose bobbing through the waves this curious looking sort of submarine was carrying a crew of four men Four men, and it turns out, tons and tons of cocaine We're talking about almost nine tons, which we think is a European record and it's certainly the largest quantity of cocaine ever seized by Portuguese authorities And this seizure would cost the smugglers dearly. The estimated value of the cocaine aboard that sub is around 600 million euros.

1:05So an enormous amount and very, very valuable. The police took around 300 bales of cocaine. But the rest? At some point, the narco sub started to go down. And it took about 35 bales of the cocaine with it to the bottom of the Atlantic, somewhere off the Azores.

1:31Sam Jones is The Guardian's Madrid correspondent, and he's been following the twisty journey of a drug seizure that has been held as a major victory by law enforcement agencies working together from the US, UK and Portugal. The last few years have seen more busts like this, but nobody knows quite how much cocaine is already in circulation, how much more is coming in, and what the cartels will try next.

2:03From The Guardian, I'm Narsheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, the narco subs carrying record quantities of cocaine across the Atlantic Ocean.

2:18Sam Jones, you're The Guardian's correspondent in Madrid, And you're talking to us today about this quite complex operation, really astonishing amount of cocaine found in a really unusual vessel, which has been called a narco sub. Can you tell me if this was a one off? It's far from a one off. I mean, we have to go back a couple of decades if you want to get into the sort of basic history of narco subs or semi submersibles, as they're properly known. So if we go back to about 2006, that's when we find the first of these subs in European waters. And this is off the coast of Galicia, northwest Spain, a very well-known smuggling area for decades.

2:57The sub they find in 2006 is unladen. It had been used on some practice runs. Right. And it was a very primitive affair. It was literally kind of built in someone's shed, not the kind of thing you want to go for a joyride in. The big pivotal moment in all this is November 2019. This is when Spanish police, once again off the coast of Galicia, find the first fully laden narco sub in European waters. And this is a 21 and a half metre long fibreglass sub laden with three tons of cocaine, piloted by a Spanish guy, a guy from Galicia, and crewed by two Ecuadorians. They had left Brazil, got close to the coast of Spain.

3:39They tried to offload the cargo. and in desperation they decided the best thing to do would be to scuttle. And scuttling means just abandoning it? Letting it sink, basically, still with the drugs inside. And I spoke to a local journalist on a paper called La Voz de Galicia and he got a tip off from the police and he hurried down there and he saw the outline of the ship and he thought, this is another level of European drug trafficking. We know that since the late 80s they've been used by drug cartels in South America and in the Caribbean. That was long known to be one of the methods of transportation But it's not until 2019 when the first narco sub is found in European waters still containing its load of cocaine, in this case, three tonnes.

4:19You interviewed a Spanish police chief about this last year. And I wonder if you can tell me what kind of detail did he give or what did he say about these operations? Back in December last year, I spoke to Alberto Morales, who is the head of the Central Narcotics Brigade of the Policía Nacional. He had some very interesting things to say. Although we know that this has been a phenomenon for many, many years now, sightings and seizures are still pretty rare. So over the past decades, probably only 10 narcosubs have been probably logged. Despite how rare these sightings are, Morales said there had been an uptick in recent years.

4:53There's more intelligence that narcosubs are becoming one of the more popular forms. How else are these drugs getting to Europe? They can be taken over by bigger boats or by yachts, decent sized vessels. But when I was talking to Alberto Morales, the Policía Nacional's drugs lead, he said that what they're seeing recently over the past couple of years is an uptick in narco subuse and in container ships. It was only a couple of weeks ago the Spanish police, Morales' squad in particular, intercepted a boat off the Canaries where they found nine tonnes of cocaine buried in packages in a consignment of salt.

5:29and you can see in the videos the officers literally digging to get at the drugs.

5:37Those sailboats, those yachts are not being used so much. It's more narco subs and it is also, you know, still container ships with the cartels being very creative about how they package and hide the drugs inside those ships. Sam, they're called subs but they're not actually submarines. What exactly is a configuration of one? What do they look like? they look almost like big pointy speed boats but with a big cargo hold because obviously you want to get as much cocaine on them as possible to make the journey worthwhile you also need room to engines and you also need a lot of fuel about 20 000 liters and they're low profile if you saw one sailing you would sort of just see a bit of it and you would see maybe a little bit of the cabin where the driver is steering from they're not traveling underneath the surface of the water as proper submarines do.

6:26But obviously the name is very evocative, very alluring. It's narco-sub. And that stuck, even though it's not technically true.

6:44Tom Phillips, you're The Guardian's Latin America correspondent. And I have seen a video of you attempting to origami your way into one of these captured narco subs on shore. Can you tell me just what's it like inside one? First of all, they're actually very tricky to get into. You have to squeeze through into the cockpit.

7:11This is a semi-submersible narco submarine that the Brazilian police and Navy found a few weeks ago. and into I suppose what you'd call the kind of wheelhouse of this semi-submersible which is just a very crudely made wooden structure inside a fiberglass vessel and it is extremely claustrophobic it's so cramped it's so hot I've been in here for 30 seconds and I'm already dripping with sweat I know these things have been compared to floating coffins I felt it was like a floating dungeon it was just like being underground the whole of this vessel would be under the water with just the top sticking out and you could just imagine the fumes coming from the back and the wooden bunk beds which were perhaps five feet or something like that long so goodness knows how you get a night's sleep i got out after i don't know four or five minutes i could not imagine spending two three weeks in one of those things my god it's so hot i couldn't stay in here for an hour

8:14and you've sort of described it as being quite a crude structure but can you tell me a bit more about how they're made? Obviously, they take on these huge journeys. So the one I was allowed to visit was about 60 foot, about 18 metres long. This one had been seized in a place called the Marajor Island, right at the end where the Amazon River enters the Atlantic Ocean. I was told it would have travelled at about 16 kilometres per hour. And it is basically built out of fibre glass, wood on the inside, concrete to weigh it down. So it goes beneath the water level, most of it. The cargo wasn't heavy enough.

8:49I suppose not. And the two or three or four men who would have been inside. The top section is painted blue or grey so as to disguise it. But yeah, it felt very, very rudimentary for something that was going on such a dangerous and long mission. One of the really shocking things also was that the navigation system was so basic. There was, as you got into the cockpit, a little compass, basically. Oh, gosh. And then beyond that, just a small air conditioning unit, the likes of which I have in my office here. I remember saying to the police officer who was showing me around that I couldn't imagine going across the bay in Rio or the River Thames in this thing, let alone going from the northeastern tip of the Brazilian Amazon all the way to Europe.

9:34I'm just mind-bendingly dangerous. And tell me about that journey. What would it be like for the crew? We found inside this vessel a big bladder for drinking water. But apart from that, there weren't very many creature comforts. These people will be living off cans of spam, hot dogs, sardines, some biscuits and not very much else for three weeks. And I just kept imagining the storms. You're moving in and out of shipping lanes. So the risk of being run over by a much bigger vessel, the risk of being caught, the risk of sinking. The biggest risk, one of the police officers I spoke to said, was actually asphyxiation because there's an inboard motor within the vessel and the fumes were being pumped out through these very rickety looking exhaust pipes.

10:22So many, many risks. And, you know, I've covered drug trafficking in Latin America for a long time. I've seen a lot of exploitation of young disenfranchised men who get involved in the drug gangs, become foot soldiers, carry rifles, lose their lives, battling the police, die horribly at very young ages and are paid very, very little money. this was i think even more dramatic because the disparity between the amount of money that a cargo on one of these vessels is worth and the amount that one of the sailors on board it would receive they're paid we think something like four five six thousand pounds for one trip that compares to the police officer who showed me around this narco sub told me that its cargo five or six tonnes of cocaine could net the smugglers between 200 and 250 million dollars.

11:15Oh my god you think they could afford to pay a bit more. Right and this recent haul off the coast of Portugal was even larger so we're talking about you know hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars and people who are so desperate that they are risking their lives for a pittance. So revealing about the exploitative nature of the drug industry the difference between that absolute fortune being made and the mansions and the fast boats and the jet planes and the life of luxury that those running this trade are making and the utter you know almost slavery like conditions that the people who are actually ferrying the drugs are forced to live in and the dangers they're exposed to.

12:04As you've described incredibly cramped dangerous I guess stinking conditions for these crew members. Can you tell me a bit more about why and how the people who manned them would have been selected by the bosses? Those who have been caught recently have come from impoverished remote fishing communities. They have often expertise in ship building or in sailing fishing. And I think that sort of skill set and those economic realities are what has made, for example, the Brazilian Amazon one of the main construction hubs. You can build these vessels discreetly in these clandestine shipyards hidden in the jungle in a region that is larger than the EU, where hopefully the Brazilian police will not be able to find out.

12:52How easy is it for law enforcement to spot and stop these narco subs? I think extraordinarily difficult. And that is why we know so little about them. Goodness knows how many of these things have simply sunk and the crews have been lost forever and died at sea and we just know nothing about it there is supposedly a narco submarine graveyard somewhere close to the assortis where these vessels have been scuttled or sunk after they've been used but no one's ever been able to get divers down to see how many submarines there are there what we do know is that they are not just going as they once did from south america through the caribbean towards the us and they're not just going actually anymore, even from South America to Europe.

13:35They have also been found off the west coast of Africa and moving from Colombia's west coast towards New Zealand. $700 million worth of cocaine managed to slip through the Pacific Islands. Which is an even more mind-blowingly long journey. And Tom, what would be the other more traditional route of drug smuggling from Latin America to Europe? Well, many, many, many sort of ingenious methods have been used over the years, of course, you know, using drug mules and planes to carry smaller quantities. Container ships have been more recently a very, very important piece of this puzzle, I think, continue to be.

14:11Or even using what in Portuguese they call parasitas, like parasites, which are these sort of magnets. They employ divers to go underwater, stick these big magnets filled with cocaine to the bottom of container ships and then smuggle them that way. There are other kinds of submarines that are used. Some of them are fully submersible that can dive deep going underwater. And there are also things known as torpedoes, which are fully submersible contraptions that can be towed by larger vessels to their destination. Just really ingenious and creative. I mean, I'm just thinking also, I remember reading about entire doors made of cocaine or statues posing as souvenirs, which then would be chipped and dissolved and all the rest of it.

14:52You see it all. You see, yeah, I mean, it dissolved into towels, into food, into paint, into people's clothing on a much smaller scale. But here we are talking about tons and tons of drugs.

15:12Coming up, from narco subs to the cocaine water drone.

15:31Sam, how much is the industry worth in Europe? It's a huge amount. The quantity of cocaine seized in 2022 was about 58 tonnes. then the following year went up to 118 tonnes, 20, 24, 123 tonnes. So we're talking billions and billions. And in a recent report, Europol actually warned about this huge increase. These groups are really harnessing technology. Europol think that there are already probably some unmanned semi-submersibles capable of crossing the Atlantic. About four years ago, the Spanish police found two underwater drones, which had been built to carry about 200 kilograms of hashish over from North Africa.

16:13So the technology, as we know, is constantly evolving. Law enforcement agencies are really having to race to keep up. Why has there been this increase in drug seizures? Well, we know that the market is oversaturated. Production is huge. And a lot of that is obviously finding its way over here. And that leads to increased competition amongst the different gangs and cartels. But as we know, when you've got too much supply, the price is going to come down. In recent years, the price of a kilogram of cocaine has come down from its half, basically, to about 15 ,000 euros, 13 ,000 pounds. And this is having interesting kind of knockback effects.

16:50They're starting to see the cartels reusing the narco subs. These things cost 600 ,000, a million euros to build. Relative to the cost of the cargo, the cost of the sub is really small. But the margins are decreasing because cocaine prices are falling. So instead of sinking them, they're setting up these refueling platforms in the Atlantic, which suggests that they're feeling the pinch. There is economic pressure because there's so much oversaturation. And so this most recent interception where nine tons of cocaine was seized, Does that even make a dent in how much gets to Europe? I mean, how much cocaine essentially is Europe shoveling up its nose?

17:31You know, as I told you, 2024, Spanish police seize about 123 tonnes of cocaine. So if you get an interception of six and a half tonnes, as we saw last year, or nine tonnes, as we've seen more recently by Portuguese police, that's quite a dent. Over recent last few weeks and months, there have been a series of very high profile busts, high volume seizures as well. It does feel that things are going quite well with these high profile bus for the Spanish and Portuguese authorities at the moment, but it's impossible to have a complete picture of the total quantity.

18:15Tom, the fact that these cartels are going to such extreme lengths now with even more narco subs, the fact that the vessels are being reused and not abandoned and scuttled as they once were, some of them going as far as Australia. What does it tell us about the drug trade in 2026 and the ongoing war on drugs and whether law enforcement can ever actually win? I think it's another very powerful piece of evidence that the war on drugs has been an utter failure and will continue to fail as long as the economic incentives are so big and the social economic conditions on the ground in places like South America force people to get engaged in this trade.

18:54I mean, it's tragic and more evidence that a major rethink of drug policy is needed here and around the world. Tom, thank you for your time. Thank you. That was Tom Phillips, The Guardian's Latin America correspondent and Sam Jones, The Guardian's Madrid correspondent. My thanks to both of them. You can read their reporting on this story and much more all at theguardian.com. And that's it for today. This episode was presented by me, Nashi Nikbal. It was produced by Ned Carter-Miles. Sound design is by Rudy Zagadlo. The executive producer was Sammy Kent. We'll be back again this afternoon with the latest.

19:40This is The Guardian.