In too deep: the epic, doomed journey of Europe’s first narco-submarine
Twenty-eight months after it began in a clandestine shipyard deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one of the more unlikely criminal voyages of all time came to an end on Tuesday with the seven sentences handed down by a court in north-west Spain.
Agustín Álvarez, a 31-year-old former Spanish amateur boxing champion, was jailed for 11 years for piloting a semi-submersible “narco-submarine” carrying 3,068kg of cocaine worth an estimated €123m (£104m) across the Atlantic. His two crewmates, Ecuadorian cousins Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba and Pedro Roberto Delgado Manzaba, received the same sentence, while four Spaniards who conspired with Álvarez to help guide the sub ashore were jailed for between seven and nine years.
Not surprisingly, the case, a wildly improbable but true saga involving the Colombian Gulf Clan cartel, a bespoke 21.5 metre-long fibreglass boat christened Che, a pair of telltale pants and several miraculous escapes during the 27-day, 3,500-mile odyssey from Brazil to Spain, has made headlines around the world since the vessel was scuttled in a Galician cove on 24 November 2019.
A little over two years later, the story of the first fully laden drug “sub” detected in European waters has given rise to a new “sub-genre” of Galician narco-chronicles.
Last month, Javier Romero, a Voz de Galicia journalist who specialises in drug crime, published Operation Black Tide, a meticulously researched, 313-page account of the the epic yet doomed enterprise. At the end of February, a drama inspired by the case, also titled Operation Black Tide, will begin on Amazon Prime Video. The fictional series will be followed in March by a four-part documentary on the same platform, called, inevitably, Operation Black Tide: The Suicidal Journey.
Romero remembers rushing down to see the boat that Sunday morning after a police source tipped him off about its discovery. He arrived at the Ría de Aldán beach, where, coincidentally, both he and Álvarez had spent their childhood summers, to see the sunken outline of Che, its grey prow emerging half a metre above the water.
“One day, a narco-sub appeared on our coast – the first in Europe,” says the reporter. “How is that not going to grab your attention? It was just another level of drug trafficking.”
At the time, however, neither Romero nor the police knew much about the craft and its crew. The vessel’s arrival in Galicia had been a hastily improvised “plan C” put together as fuel ran out and after two previous attempts to rendezvous with cartel boats off the coast of the Iberian peninsula had fallen through.
In desperation, and exhausted after a crossing that had lasted very nearly twice as long as planned, Álvarez turned to three childhood friends from his home town of Vigo in the hope they would help bring him, his crew and the cocaine to safety. But neither the rescue, nor its subsequent rewards, were ever to materialise.
An international police operation involving the UK National Crime Agency and officers from Spanish, Portuguese and US agencies meant the authorities were waiting for Che’s arrival in Galicia. The South American cousins – who could barely swim – were arrested shortly after the boat was scuttled, while Álvarez was arrested after hiding in a nearby abandoned house for five days.
Romero, who spent two years researching the case and talking to police and to some of those who knew the convicted men, eventually pieced together the fateful voyage. He learned that Álvarez had been the cartel’s second choice of captain. Their first – another Galician – had travelled to Brazil to examine the €1m craft but turned down the job after deciding it was a suicide mission.
Álvarez and the Ecuadorians had fewer qualms. After leaving their Amazon base, the three spent almost a month squeezed into a dark and stinking cabin behind three tonnes of cocaine and 20,000 litres of fuel. Food was energy bars, rice, biscuits and sardines; the toilet a plastic bag.
“From then on,” writes Romero, “it was nothing but constant noise, suspicion, more darkness, stenches, possible betrayals, pain, leaks, damp, grease, fear, cold sweats and communications that either failed to arrive or were perhaps intercepted.”
Even today, Romero can’t fathom how the trio endured those 27 Stygian days and survived three storms, a near miss with a huge ship, and the attentions of police boats and helicopters.
The book doesn’t stint on details about Álvarez’s boxing career, about semi-submersible specifications, and about how investigators concluded the secret shipyard was somewhere near the Brazilian city of Macapá after finding a pair of pants and a receipt with the name of a local shop among Luis Tomás Benítez Manzaba’s belongings.
But its focus is on Álvarez and his three friends, one of whom called on his father for help, and on how friendships formed in a schoolyard eventually led to a prison yard.
As Romero puts it, the story is not just about sicarios(hitmen), superstition and submarines: “It’s about how these kids – apart from Agustín [Álvarez], who accepted a lot of money for his part – have fucked up their lives.”
Today, all seven are behind bars and Che itself is on show at the National Police Academy museum in Ávila, which, by accident or design, is pretty much as far inland as one can go in Spain.
Romero has seen the sub for himself and is all too familiar with its dark belly.
“It’s awful,” he says. “It’s claustrophobic; it’s unspeakable. It just shows how little the drug organisations care about their own people. It’s cruel. It’s just a deathtrap.”
The reporter tried to interview Álvarez but his request was declined. Since his arrest, and for obvious reasons, the former boxer’s lips have remained as tightly sealed as the 153 bales of cocaine he brought across the Atlantic.
But should they ever meet, Romero knows what his questions would be.
“I’d ask him to tell me more about those 27 days and what they were like. How did he feel in the jungle when he saw the submarine and inspected it? Did he feel safe? Or did he feel that climbing inside it would be madness?”