Drug smugglers change supply routes to evade US warships

This 40-pound aluminum container, which was packed with brown guava pulp, was used to smuggle cocaine, and intercepted in Newark. Dominican investigators say that Colombian drug cartels have routinely shipped cocaine by high-speed motorboats to the Dominican Republic, where it is repackaged at a factory into cans of guava paste. (Ruby Washington/New York Times)

By FRANCES ROBLES

When the United States military launched an airstrike on a speedboat as it approached the southern shore of the Dominican Republic last month, killing three people on board, Dominican authorities said more than 375 packages of cocaine went flying into the Caribbean Sea.

Dozens of them had red packaging with a brand name clearly labeled in black and white capital letters, MEN, according to photos distributed by the Dominican anti-narcotics agency.

The 1,000 kilos of cocaine recovered from the wreckage were added to the nearly 19,000 kilos of drugs the Dominican Republic’s anti-narcotics agency had already captured since January, in what had been a record-setting year of narcotics seizures at sea before U.S. warships moved into the region.

The Trump administration, claiming to battle drug-trafficking cartels it labels terrorists, has been destroying speedboats in the Caribbean, shining a fresh light on a decades-old industry responsible for bringing tons of cocaine into the United States each year.

Long known as a popular corridor for moving people, drugs and guns, the Caribbean is no longer the dominant route it was in the 1980s, when television shows like “Miami Vice’’ captured the way Colombian drug cartels shipped and flew illicit products to South Florida.

But as enforcement strategies changed throughout the years, the region has periodically reemerged as a popular channel for moving illicit goods, increasingly to Europe, where the demand for cocaine, and the price, is higher.

Despite the Trump administration’s portrayal of the Caribbean and Venezuela as a rampant conduit for drugs killing Americans, the vast majority of maritime drug trafficking bound for the United States actually occurs on the Pacific, U.S. and U.N. data show.

Still, experts say, the Caribbean continues to be an important hub for the trafficking of Colombian cocaine, with some of it passing through Venezuela, though it plays no role in the movement of fentanyl, which had been President Donald Trump’s chief concern before the strikes on the boats began.

With the Trump administration cracking down on the U.S. southern border and flooding the Caribbean with military assets, drug traffickers are finding different ways to push drugs from Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, to various markets, experts and law enforcement officials say.

Traffickers typically move narcotics from Colombia to Caribbean countries, including Trinidad, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, where they are repackaged and prepared for shipment elsewhere. Depending on the crime organization, the drugs may island-hop some more before being put on fast boats or hidden in container ships bound for their final destination.

Some smugglers are increasingly using cargo vessels in the Caribbean to hide contraband, experts say, which makes it particularly difficult to detect because the drugs are mixed in with legal goods, such as produce.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Trump administration’s crackdown in the region has led to a sudden surge in the number of illegal air flights from South America dropping bales of drugs at sea, to be picked by larger vessels, according to a senior anti-narcotics official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean, the presence of patrolling U.S. warships has had varying effects.

In the Dominican Republic, the number of drug boats spotted at sea has declined dramatically, said a senior government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In Jamaica, anti-narcotics officials say drug dealers are moving drugs in smaller quantities to lessen their loss if their loads are confiscated.

“We are seeing changes in modus operandi,” said Patrae Rowe, who heads the Firearms and Narcotics Investigation Division of the Jamaica Constabulary Force. “More covert means are being used to transship drugs,” he said, like hiding drugs in food shipments.

This much is clear: the world has never been awash in so much cocaine. The U.S. Coast Guard seized nearly 175,000 kilos, or about 193 tons, of cocaine on the high seas in the fiscal year that ended in September, more than double the amount seized the year before. A third of that — about 64 tons — was in the Caribbean.

The Coast Guard, whose practice generally is to intercept drug-smuggling vessels, confiscate contraband and detain suspects, stressed that much of its enforcement remains in the Pacific, and declined to comment further for this article.

In the 1980s, the Caribbean was the main route for drug trafficking into the United States. Colombian cartels run by powerful drug lords like Pablo Escobar ran sophisticated trafficking organizations that controlled everything from the growth of the coca plant to the fast boats used to deliver cocaine to Miami.

That dynamic changed about 20 years ago, when the industry shifted to largely moving cocaine by land into the United States through Mexico. Counternarcotics measures in Mexico pushed some of that cocaine trafficking back to the Caribbean in the past decade, experts said.

With so much cocaine being produced and demand increasing around the world, traffickers looked to pricier markets overseas, giving the Caribbean an increased role in moving drugs to places such as Rotterdam, Europe’s busiest port, and even farther, to Australia and South Africa.

Cartels have also shifted strategy by dividing tasks such as growing, storage and transportation among interconnected organizations so no one cartel controls the entire operation, making dismantling smuggling networks more difficult.

Local drug lords in Trinidad, for example, have been tasked with logistics and security, said the anti-narcotics official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The official said that with eight U.S. Navy warships in the Caribbean, the authorities had detected far more unauthorized flights leaving from Colombia to Caribbean islands. While in the past there might have been five illegal flights in a single morning, now there are 15, he said.

The drugs are often dropped from the planes at sea, to be picked up by a yacht or commercial shipping vessel, the official said, since U.S. forces are not attacking vessels that large.

Bales of cocaine that washed up on shore in recent weeks in Trinidad and other islands were packaged with rope and hooks, suggesting that they were intended to be hauled out of the water, he said.

Several large packages of cocaine were discovered in recent weeks in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, including a few wrapped in white tarps listing vitamin ingredients that were labeled “Industria Colombiana.”

Lilian Bobea, a sociologist at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts who studies the illegal drug industry, said increased pressure from the United States on Mexico and increased consumption “is making the Caribbean very relevant again.”

The price of a kilo, or 2.2 pounds, of cocaine in the Caribbean region, is about $3,000. Early indications suggest that the Trump administration’s military buildup in the region is pushing the price up, but the full effect will not be seen for several months, experts said.

Still, experts say, U.S. warships will likely do little to dent what is an extraordinarily lucrative market.

“There is an overproduction of cocaine in the producing countries,” said Alberto Arean Varela, a regional coordinator for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “There’s more to smuggle.”

“We cannot stop using drugs,’’ he added.