Nacro Subs

This story in the Houston Chronicle on the captured narco submarine in Ecuador last year is an interesting read.

The only narco submarine ever captured — a 73-foot-long camouflaged vessel capable of carrying at least 7 tons of cocaine while cruising stealthily beneath the ocean's surface — sits raised on concrete blocks in a South American seaport.

Its belly is caked with grime. Its hatch is open.

Many of its secrets are no more.

In the seven months since the game-changing discovery of the submarine, built by drug traffickers in a covert shipyard deep in the Ecuadorean jungle, naval experts from multiple countries have studied the vessel.

Their conclusion: It is the "real deal" — fully capable of making multiple journeys to North America.

"There is nothing amateur about it," said Jay Bergman, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's chief of the Andes region. "It is everything it is supposed to be. It is a bona fide long-range, fully submersible craft."

The article notes the submarine could submerge up to 50ft and make 20 knots for short periods of time on batteries. It is quite remarkable what can be built in the middle of a jungle these days.

The Other Side Speaks

A Colombian narco-submersible skipper talks to Der Spiegel:

At dawn, after traveling for several hours by car and motorboat, the group reached its destination: an island in the coastal mangrove thicket. From the boat, Alonso could see one of the shipyards people had always gossiped about in Buenaventura, where submersibles are built out of fiberglass in the jungle, out in the open, to be used for transporting cocaine.

The narcos had developed a reliable system. The boats are almost invisible from the water, and they don't appear on radar. The only way to reliably locate the vessels is through thermal imaging performed by air surveillance crews. But the drug gangs quickly found a way to overcome this problem. They attached thick pipes to the hulls of the submersibles, allowing exhaust gases to be fed into the water, which cools the gases. A third of the cocaine bound for the US market is now transported with submersibles.

"I was afraid when they showed me the boat," says Alonso. He knew his way around ships. On a ship, you could always go on deck and look at the sea. But now he was looking at a tiny, fragile submersible, and he could see how tight it would be inside. Ten tons of fuel, canned food and water in canisters were already stored in the hull -- and three-and-a-half tons of pure cocaine. The entire crew was ordered to get on board at nightfall.