The plummeting price of cocaine is forcing
drug-traffickers to reuse the “narco-submarines” they would previously have
scuttled once the custom-built vessels had completed their cargo runs from South
America to Europe, according to a senior Spanish police officer.
While semi-submersible vehicles have been used regularly in Colombia and other
parts of South and Central America since the 1980s, they were not detected in
European waters until 2006, when an abandoned sub was found in an estuary in the
north-west Spanish region of Galicia.
Since then, 10 such subs have been spotted or seized by Spanish police. Until
recently, the boats, which cost about €600,000 (£524,000) to build, were used
for one-way trips.
But with massive cocaine production leading to market saturation – wholesale
prices have halved to €15,000 (£13,000) a kilo over the past few years –
drug-traffickers can no longer afford to consign their vehicles to a “narco-sub
graveyard” between the Azores and the Canary Islands.
“These semi-submersibles used to head to the area around the Canaries on one-way
voyages and they’d then be sunk,” said Alberto Morales, the head of the central
narcotics brigade of the Spanish Policía Nacional.
“Back then, the cost of the merchandise in comparison with the cost of the
vessel still made doing that very worthwhile – they’d be carrying three or four
tonnes minimum, so operating that way was very profitable. But what’s happened
lately is that the price of the merchandise is really, really low, so the
organisations have, logically, had a rethink.
“Rather than sink them, what they do now is unload the merchandise and set up a
refuelling platform at sea so that the semi-submersibles can head back to the
countries they came from and make as many journeys as possible.”
Spanish police and customs officers seized 123 tonnes of cocaine last year, up
from 118 tonnes in 2023 and 58 tonnes in 2022. In September this year, the
Policía Nacional arrested 14 people and seized 3.65 tonnes of cocaine allegedly
brought to Galicia by narco-sub.
Morales said police had noticed an uptick in narco-sub activity over the past
two years and a decrease in the use of sailboats to bring drugs to Spain.
“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 added that while 10 narco-subs had been logged over the past two decades, the
true number in operation was likely to be higher. “Obviously there will have
been more than 10,” said Morales. “Logically speaking, we can’t detect
everything that reaches the Spanish coast as we have 8,000km of coastline.”
He also said although multiple people had confirmed the existence of the
“narco-sub graveyard” in the eastern Atlantic, details were scarce.
“We don’t have a location; we don’t even have any numbers,” he said. “And even
if we did, it would be almost impossible to recover the [subs] because of the
depth of the waters. It’s something for the fish to enjoy.”
The increasing use and reuse of narco-subs is not the only recent trend to have
attracted the attention of Morales and his colleagues.
Officers from the brigade’s synthetic drugs and precursors department say they
have dismantled more amphetamine, methamphetamine and MDMA laboratories in Spain
over the past two years than in the previous 18.
Two labs were raided and put out of business in 2023, followed by six in 2024
and another three so far this year. Drug seizures from those facilities have
included more than five tonnes of MDMA, 450kg of amphetamine sulphate and 27kg
of methamphetamine.
Although the overwhelming majority of synthetic drug manufacture has
historically taken place in the Netherlands – where police dismantle about 100
clandestine labs a year – gangs are continuing to branch out across Europe.
Officers in the department believe production has outgrown the cramped
geographical confines of the Netherlands and spread to countries such as Spain,
France and Germany where there is more room to make the drugs and dispose of the
waste materials, and where ingredients and drugs are easier to move around.
“There are laboratories all over the place – especially in rural areas where
there aren’t many people and where things are better from a security point of
view,” said one senior officer.
He added that as well as paying some locals to keep an eye out for strangers and
police, the drug gangs also used drones to watch over their operations.
“We’ve been pretty surprised by the synthetic drugs phenomenon because of the
numbers of the laboratories we’re dismantling and because of the nature of some
of these laboratories,” he said. “These are large-scale production
laboratories.”
Falling price of cocaine forces drug traffickers to
reuse narco-submarines, say Spanish police
MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities announced their largest
methamphetamine seizure ever late Wednesday: 15 tons, found in pure powder form
at a ranch outside Guadalajara. It was about 13 million doses worth $4 billion —
more than double the size of all meth seizures at the Mexican border in 2011.
But while the authorities proudly showed off the seizure to local reporters, the
sheer size of the find set off alarm among experts and officials from the United
States and the United Nations. It was a sign, they said, of just how organized,
efficient at manufacturing and brazen Mexico’s traffickers had become even after
expanded efforts to dismantle their industry.
“The big thing it shows is the sheer capacity that these superlabs have in
Mexico,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“When we see one lab with the capability to produce such a mass tonnage of meth,
it begs a question: What else is out there?”
Methamphetamine is difficult to produce in large quantities. Unlike marijuana,
which can be grown almost anywhere, meth requires international connections to
suppliers of precursor chemicals, which are tightly regulated in the United
States and Mexico, as well as manufacturers with a degree of chemistry
expertise.
The Sinaloa cartel is believed to be Mexico’s main producer, partly because it
has a reputation for being the world’s most multinational and sophisticated
cartel. And some experts say that the seizure, along with increased seizures of
meth, cocaine and marijuana at the Mexican border, suggests that Sinaloa is
producing more than ever before, despite five years of increased Mexican and
American efforts to defeat the Mexican cartels.
“Sinaloa has been hit hard in the past four to six months, but they are clearly
operating at a volume they were not able to do 5 or 10 years ago,” said David
Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.
With methamphetamine, he added: “There is really not much competition. They are
probably the only ones with the organizational and logistical capacity to move
this kind of product.”
United Nations figures suggest that the supply of meth in the United States has
been growing, with seizures at the Mexican border increasing 87 percent in 2011.
At the same time, demand in the United States has been falling. According to the
2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number of Americans 12 and
older who said they had used methamphetamine in the past 12 months declined 46
percent from 2002 to 2010, to 954,000 from an estimated 1.8 million.
But just as Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers are increasingly focused on
the market in Europe, experts said that the meth not sent to the United States
might be heading to other parts of the world. Sinaloa’s tentacles have been
found on nearly every continent.
Over all, experts said, meth appears to be providing an increasingly important
revenue stream for the cartel, and the seizure this week is likely to have
little long-term impact.
“It’s important to keep the seizure in perspective,” said Eric Olson, a security
expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “It’s huge.
Eye-popping. But seizures, even huge ones, don’t generally change the demand for
the drug in the long run. If a seizure of this magnitude raises the street
price, consumption may go down for a time, but it is only a matter of time until
the market adjusts and the supply comes back up.”
