The crew of a Honolulu-based Coast Guard cutter has offloaded nearly 20, 000 pounds of cocaine it seized during a deployment in the Eastern Pacific as the U.S. ramps up drug war operations.
The CGC Kimball and its crew delivered the drugs, worth an estimated $214.3 million, to authorities in San Diego on Thursday. According to a news release, the haul was a result of six separate interdictions of suspected drug smuggling vessel interdictions and other operations off the coasts of Mexico and Central and South America from February through April.
The operation was part of a larger multiagency effort to combat Latin American drug cartels.
The Pacific has seen a dramatic influx in drug trafficking, with drugs moving from Latin America into the U.S. mainland on boats—and in some cases homemade “narco submarines ”—moving up routes in the Eastern Pacific. Increasingly, drugs are also being smuggled westward through routes spanning the Pacific islands and into Australia and Asia in what is being called the Pacific Drug Highway.
“The fight against drug cartels in the Eastern Pacific Ocean requires unity of effort in all phases, from detection, monitoring and interdictions to criminal prosecutions by international partners and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices in districts across the nation, ” the Coast Guard said in a statement after delivering the confiscated cocaine to San Diego. “The Coast Guard continues to increase operations to interdict, seize, and disrupt transshipment of cocaine and other bulk illicit drugs by sea. These drugs fuel and enable cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations to produce and traffic illegal fentanyl threatening the U.S.”
The Kimball is one of two Legend-class national security cutters based in Honolulu, which are considered among the Coast Guard’s largest and most advanced vessels. Those Hawaii-based vessels have been largely focused on operations in the Western and Northern Pacific, in part to monitor the activity of Chinese and Russian vessels.
The Coast Guard in recent years has bulked up efforts to combat illegal fishing in the Pacific, which began during Donald Trump’s first presidency when the Coast Guard declared it the No. 1 global security threat at sea, and ramped up significantly under the presidency of Joe Biden. In 2020 the Coast Guard’s then-commandant Adm. Karl Schultz said illegal fishing threatens the legitimate economies of coastal communities and can push people to turn to criminal enterprises when their fisheries become threatened and depleted.
The U.S. government spent untold billions of dollars on fighting drug trafficking since declaring the “war on drugs ” in 1971.
Despite decades of wide-ranging operations by law enforcement, intelligence agencies and military organizations around the globe, both drug trafficking and consumption have by many metrics only continued to increase. By some estimates there is now more cocaine being produced, smuggled and consumed than at any other point in history, and some analysts have declared we are living in the “golden age of cocaine.”
In the first week of his second presidency, Trump signed executive orders and declared a national emergency that among other things called on the Coast Guard to redouble operations to crack down on migrants and asylum seekers and chase down drug smugglers. The Trump administration also has moved to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and discussed the possibility of launching drone strikes and military special-operations raids against them as it seeks to further ramp up the war on drugs.
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