This book assumes the reader is aware that a war is going on—a different kind of war, a ‘new war’, but not brand new. It might have been going for over a hundred years, forty, or thirty—it depends on what you consider a declaration of war. In this war, the enemy is not easily identifiable or traceable; no territory is conquered or claimed (Feldman, 2004). Few shots are fired as one side mostly aims to remain unnoticed and avoid confrontation while, for the other, discovering the movements of their enemy and showing up on time are usually enough. There have been, of course, moments of intense violence as a result of the confrontation between drug traffickers and the State, but violence is not as widespread as media tend to portray, for the use of violence is the easiest way to attract the attention of the public and State agencies, eliminating the secrecy smugglers need to conduct their activities. This war takes place on the limits of cultivable land, where poor farmers grow some varieties of plants in the family Erythroxylaceae, and when ‘laboratories’ are destroyed, deep in the jungles, where pasta de coca is converted into cocaine salts. It is fought by stopping the chemicals needed to turn the coca leaves into cocaine: cement, gasoline, and acids. But if the process is completed, and pasta de coca is transformed into cocaine, packaged, and shipped, state agencies will try to discover the movement of said drug to the ‘gathering places’ and seize it. Airports are another battlefield; although luggage is x-rayed and travellers are profiled, drug smugglers will use suitcases, objects, and even people’s bodies to try to avoid the detection of cocaine (sometimes just few grams, sometimes several kilos). Cocaine often finds its way into ports, where containers are sifted, classified as suspicious and non-suspicious, inspected, and opened. However, it would be impossible to inspect all the ‘suspicious’ cargo—what does a suspicious container look like anyway? The air is yet another battleground, where small airplanes are used to transport cocaine (Felbab-Brown, 2005) and air forces are deployed to force suspicious aircrafts to land or destroy them. If illicit drugs reach the sea, it is because they are ready to be loaded into fishing boats, yachts, go-fast boats, trawlers, or narcosubmarines. Navies and Coast Guard units are assigned the task of stopping the flows at any stage of the journey. Furthermore, the tactics of the War on Drugs (WoD) vary widely: man hunting, interdiction, air fumigations, and incarceration. Nevertheless, although governments have spent billions of US dollars on a multitude of efforts aimed at disrupting and dismantling the drug market, the flows of illicit drugs continue to thrive.
Plenty of works have examined the illicit drug market. This book aims to go beyond prevalent quantitative studies and interpretations that portray asymmetrical views of drug trafficking by presenting a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the binary interdiction/evasion that incorporates the practices and technologies deployed by drug smugglers and their counterparts. The binary interdiction/evasion is composed of the practices, artefacts, plans, and actions of the law enforcement agencies (LEAs) working to stop the flow of illicit drugs, as well as smugglers’ plans, devices, actions, and strategies to evade state control.
Colombians have been involved in the illicit traffic of cocaine and played multiple roles in the process since the early years of prohibition. Initially acting as couriers during the 1950s, they later took over the traffic of cocaine, by purchasing pasta de coca or cocaine salts from Peruvian and Bolivian coca farmers, to concentrate on production and transport, in the so-called cartels era since the mid-1980s and early 1990s (Gootenberg, 2008). Cocaine traffic has had cultural, economic, and institutional effects in Colombia (Melo, 1998). Influenced by US Government’s policies to control illicit drugs, specifically those developed since the 1980s (which led to a militarisation of operations against drug smugglers), and adopting a particularly hard-line strategy during the Uribe administration (2002–2010) (Tickner, 2015), the Colombian Government established the Antinarcotics Police, provided the Air Force with resources to control smugglers using air methods, and promoted the use of the Navy to carry out Maritime Interdiction Operations (MIOs) to stop the flow of illicit drugs at sea. The connection between left-wing guerrillas and illicit drug revenues, summarised under the umbrella of narcoterrorism, further pushed the development of policies leading to the deployment of military solutions to the problem of illicit drugs. Embracing this view, the Colombian and US Governments signed and established the Plan Colombia in 2000. When adopted, the Plan Colombia guaranteed resources for the expansion of the military forces which were justified with the aim of containing narcoterrorism. The perception that smugglers were making intensive use of maritime routes had already led the Colombian Government to boost the role of the Navy with the allocation of resources, which resulted in the creation of the Coast Guard Unit in 1994. Since then, central attention has been devoted to the problem of the use of maritime routes for illicit drug trafficking. The Colombian Navy has focused on strengthening maritime control using a combination of technical solutions (e.g., radars, Information and Communication Technologies, boats, and aircraft support) that are seen as the ‘right’ technology, which is in line with the approach taken by law enforcement and with militarised solutions to the problem of illicit drugs.
Since the early 1990s, the Colombian Navy has played an increasingly important role in strategies to control the smuggling of illicit drugs focused on the interdiction of the flows of cocaine. The militarisation of the efforts in the WoD is materialised in the interdiction approach, based on the idea that the seizure of illicit drugs and the capture of transporters will make traffickers give up on their intention to smuggle their cargo and thus they will abandon the drug business altogether. According to this approach, interdiction is the most cost-effective of all forms of control. Transport costs of illicit smuggling are calculated to be up to 40% of the total costs of the drug business and, therefore, they produce most (of the) revenue (Echeverry, 2004; Kawell, 2001; López Restrepo, 1997; MejÃa & Restrepo, 2008; Thoumi, 2005). Despite the steady militarisation of the WoD since the early 1980s, illicit drugs are still produced, and smugglers continue to move their illicit cargo.
Drug smugglers are portrayed by the media as highly dynamic, and the illicit drug market in a continuous flux; as a result, several metaphors have been used to describe this phenomenon. For instance, the ‘balloon effect’ is an analogy used to illustrate the way enforcement in one region pushes all or parts of the illicit traffic from one region to another, that is, interdiction results in geographical displacement of the actions of smugglers (Bagley, 2012; Jesperson, 2018; MejÃa & Posada, 2008). Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) map trends and trajectories and use a retrospective accumulation of data and localised views as evidence for prospective thinking. Whenever a significant trend is ‘discovered’, policies, resources, and strategies of law enforcement agencies and military organisations are reconfigured, which involves the procurement and implementation of new artefacts or repurposing existing ones. Thwarting smuggling efforts is said to force smugglers to search for new means of transportation (Decker & Townsend Chapman, 2008). In fact, due to efforts to control the aerial transport of cocaine, the maritime transport of illicit drugs is currently considered the main method used by drug smugglers; however, 25 years ago, that was hardly the case.
In 1993, in a short document entitled ‘The Illicit Drug Situation in Colombia’ (Drug Enforcement Administration, 1993), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) considered the maritime traffic to be of little importance and mostly a Caribbean problem. By the late 1990s, it was reported that the vast majority of drugs smuggled from Colombia were transported using maritime routes, and a large percentage departed from ungoverned areas on the Pacific Coast. Consequently, the Colombian Navy got involved in Maritime Interdiction Operations (MIOs) to thwart drug smugglers’ efforts. MIOs are key actions in which competing complex socio-technical systems display their tools/knowledge, which creates conditions that help the two sides of the binary to co-evolve and enables interactions that affect the ecosystem in which they act. The Colombian Navy does not simply respond to smugglers’ threats; organisational politics also shape this organisation. Furthermore, smugglers do not only seek to overcome LEAs’ capabilities but to compete with other groups. Therefore, there is more going on than just a race between the two sides, something that neither current studies of criminal networks nor theories of co-evolution thoroughly explain. The objective of this book is to shed light on a set of critical actions undertaken by the Navy to stop smugglers and by smugglers to escape state control. The design, building, and sailing of narcosubs and the practice of Maritime Interdiction Operations offer such opportunity.
Forty miles from Buenaventura lies what the Colombian Navy personnel have nicknamed the ‘Narcosubmarine Graveyard’. The graveyard is inside of the main naval base in the Colombian Pacific, the Bahia Malaga base, close to the city of Buenaventura. The Navy base was built during the late 1980s and is somehow in the middle of the maritime routes from Ecuador to Panama. Humidity is close to 90%, it rains almost every day of the year. The ‘graveyard’ is testimony of the many encounters between the drug smugglers and the Navy. The narcosubs appeared in the law enforcement and military radar during the early 1990s, but were taken as odd occurrences. Three weirdly shaped artefacts were captured in the Caribbean coast, and then some rumours about the so-called Cali Cartel dealings with the ‘Russian Mob’ to buy a proper submarine. But it was not until mid of the 2000s that the narcosubs began to be fully utilised by drug smugglers to transport drugs. Such artefacts were nevertheless closer to traditional fishing vessels than cold war era soviet submarines. Narcosubmarines, drug subs, narco semisubmersible, self-propelled semisubmersible, or simply narcosubs, are maritime custom-made vessels, mostly built in the tropical jungle in makeshift shipyards, combining different kinds of knowledge and utilised principally by Colombian drug smugglers with the purpose of smuggling illicit drugs into the US market.
The Bahia Malaga narcosub graveyard is a museum and a storage; it is also a memorial place where spoils of war are a constant reminder of past success. There, narcosubs captured by the Navy are displayed forming a row as if they were planning to sail a last voyage; it is a reminder of the capabilities of the Navy but also of the ingenuity of drug smugglers. The graveyard is the place where the smugglers’ innovations die, but where the War on Drugs is very much alive. There, the narcosubs are taken care of, painted, and placed on pedestals. It welcomes visitors, members of police, or military forces from other countries, and even social researchers; in such occasions, layouts are place indicating several features of the vessel, place of capture with coordinates, name of the operation in which it was captured, type of vessel, which are quickly removed once the visit is over. The existence of the narcosub graveyard indicates the central role played by those vessels in the Navy construction of its enemy. There narcosubs are not just a means of moving drugs, narcosubs are an enemy fleet. But narcosubs are also ‘water coffins’ as the local nickname goes. To sail a narcosub may lead to three main outcomes: to succeed and return with a year’s earning; to be captured by the Colombian Navy or any other law enforcement or military en route, and spend years behind bars; or, because the narcosubs might sink, death.
Narcosubs are complex, newsworthy pieces of technology. The narcosubs, as well as other technologies deployed in the WoD, are also metaphor of the dynamics of the encounters between the two sides of the binary interdiction/evasion. There is constant change, but also a sense of stagnation, of immobility. Narcosubs are part of a complex socio-technical system populated by a multitude of other forms of transport of illicit drugs, as well as the technologies and practices deployed by various LEAs and military. While researching for this book, the Colombian Navy discovered the use of fishing satellites buoys as a way to coordinate the logistics of delivery of drugs in open sea. The buoys have been used by drug smugglers to leave the cargo adrift in open sea to be recovered later. The buoys are fitted by drug smugglers with a georeferentiation device. The use of buoys implies a logistic chai...