Cartel Narco Boats Are Hammering the West Coast

And they're bringing a lot more than drugs. It's a shift in North American smuggling that hit US Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne, who died earlier this month after being thrown overboard when a 30-foot vessel working in the service of a Mexican cartel slammed into Horne's small counternarcotics boat. Tragic as it is, Horne's death bears a certain momentousness: He is the first Coast Guard member killed by drug runners since Prohibition. He was 34.

The significance is threefold. This sort of thing is obviously quite rare, for one. As such, the incident, which took place off the coast of southern California, can reasonably be viewed as the result of an uptick in sheer brazenness as cartels vie for all the untold mega profits and cultural cachet that come along with new smuggling routes. And with that, of course, comes the desperate ingenuity of cartels' fast-adapting seaborne smugglecraft.

Because boats. Yes, cartels are employing semi-submersible narco subs of increasing sophistication, as Motherboard saw first hand a few years back. But raw, open-hulled boats are still in favor with cartels, namely the Sinaloa, who are moving away from janky, 20-some-odd foot fishing boats to watercraft often double that size, and occasionally outfitted with multiple engines that shuttle drugs north from the Baja, under darkness, as far as 300 miles up the California coast.

The cartels are actually taking to these new fast boats in increasing numbers. (The Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, says this is proof positive that efforts to grind land-based smuggling to a halt are working.) "Episodes involving smugglers off the California coast have increased fourfold since 2008," the New York Times reports, "with more than 200 smuggling vessels spotted by American law enforcement agencies during the last fiscal year." Intercepted weed, meanwhile, was up four times over the year prior.

Customs and Border Protection P-3 aerial footage of a high-speed, open-ocean Coast Guard pursuit of drug runners. The chase ends in a collision between the two boats, and the smuggler boat becoming beached

It's an uptick that Bill Brown, sheriff of Santa Barbara County, came to terms with earlier this year when happening upon a 45-foot cartel boat that washed ashore near Santa Barbara, some 100 miles north of Los Angeles. The boat had four engines, according to Brown, who said his entire fleet would've been outpaced, if it had come to it. He put the cost of the vessel at around $100,000. The estimated payload? 10 tons.

“They ended up just abandoning it,” Brown told the Times. “It shows the amount of money they are making bringing drugs up here.”

But profits in the drugs game rely heavily on well-oiled relay- and relief-points along smuggling corridors, which may explain an expanding fleet of ships whose sole purpose is to refuel mule boats. In fact, the boat that torpedoed itself into Horne's boat was one of these refuelers. They're as technically pimped-out as their product-heavy counterparts. Just last year, the Times reports, authorities in San Diego found one of these gas boats. Its on-board GPS led them to a crop of fuel drums planted on buoys about 50 miles offshore.

You almost have to wonder, at this point, why there aren't more drone-style maritime smugglecraft being launched by crime syndicates from below the border. Cartels are known to set unmanned dune buggies, strapped with mediocre weed and high-grade Central American cocaine, bumbling quietly into the cholla to Point B, to safe houses and pick-up spots in remote Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico. Trafficking at sea is booming, having grown into an "elaborate, highly lucrative and increasingly dangerous operation, as smugglers venture farther out to sea and farther north along the coast," the Times adds. So why aren't we seeing more high-seas drug drones?

In a word, people. Human trafficking is way up across most Mexican cartels, who are operating more and more as full-fledged crime syndicates, and not solely as drug gangs.

One of the great ironies of the unmanned revolution, then, is that the so-called Triple D rationale--using autonomous robots to carry out all our dull, dirty, and/or dangerous tasks--has really no place, at least right now, in the maritime drugs trade. The new drug boats slamming the West Coast simply can't go unmanned because they're packed full of people who pay far steeper prices to get snuck into the States by water, rather than by land. (It's worth noting that at least a half-dozen people hitching rides on smuggling boats have died since 2008, in stark contrast to Horne, the first US Coast Guard member to die, remember, since Prohibition.) Many more emigrants, presumably, have gone unaccounted for, likely drowned further out at sea after capsizing or sinking.

But if the cartels aren't droning on, the authorities probably are. Freedom of Information Act documents recently released by MuckRock state that the San Diego County sheriff has not only been courting a number of local drone contractors, including one company featured in our latest documentary, Drone On, but decidedly tight-lipped over who it may be purchasing surveillance drones from, and for what purposes. Whether the San Diego sheriff's department is taking to spy drones with increasing aplomb as means to sniff out cartel boats is anyone's guess.

That would certainly makes sense, though. A commander with the sherrif's department, David Myers, explained to the Times that funds from a federal grant that had been aiding his department apprehend ocean-faring drug runners, their product and human cargo alike have been slashed year after year beginning in 2009. What's more, that shrinking coffer now must be spread among a great number of counties. Looking to multipurpose, storm-ready, homegrown spy tech fit for both land and sea could be a cost efficient way of pinching off cartel landing spots.

"The ocean is wide open, but the key is they have to land somewhere,” Myers said. “It would be easy for us to deny them a place to land if we were ever able to apply the same resources to the coast as we have along the land.”

Until then, Horne's legacy--and the legacy countless people looking for work, and with no ties whatsoever to the bloody awful drug war--will remain obscured by waves.

Top: Cartel fast boat and drugs abandoned on remote California beach (via) 

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