Cocaine seizures at sea set record
It’s Coast Guard’s 2nd in row
The Coast Guard for the second consecutive year has set a record for cocaine seizures at sea, an effort that admirals are linking to border security.
Coast Guard officials planned to highlight the record Wednesday alongside Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a San Diego event to offload 50,550 pounds of cocaine and a smaller amount of heroin from the USCGC Stratton, a 418-foot cutter that is one of several vessels involved in recent operations. The drugs were confiscated by four Coast Guard cutters and the Navy destroyer USS Chaffee in the eastern Pacific Ocean, a longtime trafficking route from South and Central America.
Overall, the Coast Guard had seized more than 455,000 pounds of cocaine through Sept. 11 in the fiscal year that will end Oct. 1, breaking the record of 443,790 pounds set last year. About 85 percent of that comes from the eastern Pacific, officials said. The Coast Guard has detained at least 681 suspected smugglers in those operations, up from 585 last year and 503 in 2015.
Adm. Paul Zukunft, the Coast Guard commandant, said in an interview that large offloads of drugs are starting to become “just another day in the service.” The amount of cocaine on the high seas has exploded since the Colombian government eased the aerial eradication of coca plants through spraying in 2016 as part of a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a rebel group it had warred with it for 52 years.
“We have seen a dramatic increase in cultivation and production,” Zukunft said. “This is almost exclusively coming out of Colombia. They’ll either ship it out of Colombia, or just to the south, Ecuador, and then land it in Central America. About 40 percent of these loads are being landed in Mexico, but its ultimate destination is the United States.”
Cocaine interdiction is mostly a separate operation from efforts to stop the U.S. opium epidemic. While most cocaine shipments spend at least some time at sea after originating in South America, heroin is heavily grown in Mexico and smuggled into the United States through other means.
The Coast Guard has pressed for additional funding as it looks to build eight large cutters for service in the open ocean, 25 offshore patrol cutters for intermediate operations and 58 fast-response cutters for missions near shore to replace an aging fleet of about 90 ships, according to a Congressional Research Service report released in August.
A March draft of President Donald Trump’s budget called for the service to take a $1.3 billion budget cut, to $7.8 billion, in 2018 to help fund the president’s proposed border wall. The Coast Guard eventually secured level funding after Republicans and Democrats protested Trump’s request, but Zukunft acknowledged that the experience has caused him to become more vocal in advocating for the Coast Guard as a part of border security.
The Coast Guard gathers information to stop drug shipments through a variety of means, including tips from the Justice Department and surveillance flights flown by the U.S. military and Department of Homeland Security. In all cases, the goal is to stop shipments of drugs long before they reach the U.S. border, rather than at it.
“I look at a border wall as a goal-line defense, if you will. But what’s your offensive strategy?” Zukunft said, alluding to interdiction efforts. “And this, to us, is a very offensive strategy. The fact is that we have awareness of these drug movements and actually are attacking because we know where they’re at, and just don’t have enough attackers. The border really is your last-stop measure.”
Trump twice visited with the Coast Guard after its hurricane relief efforts, first during Harvey in Texas and then in Florida after Irma.
“If you talk about branding?” Trump said, marveling this month at rescue efforts in bad weather. “No brand has improved more than the United States Coast Guard.”
But the service says it’s still shorthanded at sea. Vice Adm. Fred Midgette, the commander of Coast Guard forces in the Pacific, said that each of the service’s vessels in the region deploys with a team that has law enforcement authority and a fast-pursuit boat, but there aren’t always enough armed helicopters available to deploy.
“If you did the math and you gave me about five times as many cutters as we have out here, we’d be doing pretty well,” said Midgette, who oversees 10 now, including some that deploy off the coast of Alaska. “I can’t send them all to the drug war.”
Rep. Duncan Hunter, R.-Calif., an early supporter of Trump who nonetheless organized lawmakers this year against the proposed Coast Guard budget cut, said he believes that Trump was not aware of the service’s role in drug interdiction, and “that’s why the whole thing got reversed when it was publicized.”
Hunter said he will press for additional funding in future budgets.
Zukunft and Midgette acknowledged that there are limits to what the service can do to stop drugs, citing the demand in the U.S.
“A campaign has numerous lines of effort, and one of those is that we have a behavioral health problem in the United States,” he said. “We are the No. 1 consuming country in the world, and that’s something I am not proud of as a U.S. citizen.”
For now, Zukunft argued, the Coast Guard provides a “tremendous return on investment” in dealing with the problem.