U.S., Mexico Teaming Up in Pacific Against Drug Smugglers

As commander of a decorated Mexican navy gunboat, Capt. Ignacio Lopez has seen it all. Bombardments. Secret missions. Ambushes of enemy vessels.

Pretty heady stuff, especially since his navy hasn’t faced military combat since World War II.

These days, Enemy No. 1 for Lopez, 44, is the fishing vessels and “Miami Vice”-type speedboats hauling tons of Colombian cocaine through the eastern Pacific. This is becoming the route of choice for drug smugglers and a source of alarm for U.S. and Mexican anti-narcotics forces.

In a rare, unsung success story in the drug war, the Mexican navy is working closely with its onetime enemy, U.S. forces, to seize the vessels before their cargo reaches American users. But, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on equipment and patrols, the anti-drug forces are struggling to keep up with the traffickers.

The U.S. and Mexico “have the best marine interdiction program in the world right now,” said one key U.S. official involved in the anti-drug effort, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But they [traffickers] are still sending multi-ton shipments.”

The rise of the Pacific route underlines the cat-and-mouse nature of the drug interdiction program spearheaded by the U.S. government, and the difficulty in achieving any long-term victories.

Success Breeds a New Challenge

U.S. and Mexican officials say they are a victim of their own success: They have cracked down so hard on the Caribbean, the traditional cocaine route, that the smugglers have moved, and now ply an area that is far harder to monitor.

“The result is a much more vexing problem than the one we started with,” said Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies drug and migrant smuggling.

The drug vessels began frequenting the Pacific about three years ago, as authorities were turning up the heat on radar-dodging speedboats in the Caribbean. Lopez, the Mexican navy captain, recalls that one of his first drug missions was seizing contraband from a “bombardment”--a shower of plastic-wrapped bundles of cocaine from a small plane off Acapulco in August 1997.

Since then, the traffickers’ operations have grown bigger and bolder. Mexican shrimp and shark boats stuffed with tons of cocaine now sail the Pacific, blending easily into the large fishing fleet, officials say. Speedboats also act as cocaine couriers, darting between fishing craft that serve as floating gas stations. The drug, say U.S. officials, is eventually sneaked into poorly policed Mexican ports or dumped on isolated beaches, then trucked to the U.S. border.

For anti-drug forces, this is a brave new water world. The gentle Caribbean is dotted with islands that form “choke points” for ship traffic and are relatively easy to monitor. The Pacific, in contrast, is a watery Wild West.

“It’s open ocean. It’s just huge,” said Flynn. “Where do you put a vessel? Where do you conduct your patrols?”

U.S. and Mexican forces say they are beginning to score victories against the traffickers.

In the past year, the Coast Guard has captured nearly 63 tons of cocaine, far surpassing its previous record, 55 tons, set the year before. Tellingly, 82% of the recent seizures were in the Pacific, compared with 38% for 1999.

For its part, Mexico’s navy seized a record 25 tons of cocaine in 1999, most of it on three ships in the Pacific. So far this year, the navy has captured only about 10 tons; officials say traffickers may be moving farther offshore. The Mexican navy patrols up to 200 nautical miles from the country’s coast, an area regarded as its territorial waters. The U.S. Coast Guard, often assisted by the U.S. Navy, acts in international waters.

The hefty seizures in the Pacific are due in part to stepped-up patrols and new U.S. high-tech detection equipment. But there is another factor: a change in the Mexican navy’s long-standing reluctance to work with its U.S. counterparts.

Lopez and his gunship, the C-83 Jesus Gonzalez Ortega, symbolize the new spirit of cooperation.

Just consider a bust by Lopez’s vessel in January. Acting on U.S. information, the 226-foot-long gunboat sped toward a suspect shrimp boat, the Valeria, in Mexican waters south of the port city of Lazaro Cardenas. It was nearly midnight when the Ortega pulled up, its lights off, its inspection team clutching submachine guns in preparation for the boarding, Lopez said.

Suddenly, the navy ship switched on its lights. From the deck, Lopez soon spotted an unnerving site: a thick column of black smoke rising from the shrimp boat.

“They were nervous. They knew they were breaking the law. So they set fire to the fishing boat,” he recalled. The vessel, he feared, could blow up.

But with the aid of a nearby U.S. Coast Guard vessel, the Mexican navy extinguished the fire and detained the crew as it tried to flee on a rubber dinghy. Authorities found about three tons of cocaine on the Valeria, bringing the total seized by the Ortega to 25 tons since 1997.

“When our operations coincide with those of the U.S. Coast Guard or Navy, they are always very willing to support the Mexican navy. It’s mutual,” Lopez said.

That’s hardly been the case in the past, U.S. officials say. Some drug boats would escape pursuit by ducking into Mexico’s territorial waters. Communication was poor between the U.S. and Mexican forces, and the Mexican navy was ill-equipped, say officials from both countries.

Overcoming Longtime Wariness

The biggest barrier, though, wasn’t technical but ideological. Mexico’s armed forces have been wary of their U.S. counterparts since the Mexican-American War, which forced the country to give up half its territory in 1848. Even today, Mexican naval officers will only admit to “coincidental” operations with the U.S. Coast Guard. They blanch at the other, bolder “C-word”--cooperation.

But as the two countries have strengthened their economic and political ties, the Mexican army and navy have gingerly increased their collaboration with U.S. forces. Today, even grizzled U.S. anti-drug veterans are impressed by the Mexican navy’s results. So far, they say, this is a rare Mexican anti-drug effort that isn’t hobbled by corruption.

“Between the U.S. response and the Mexican response, it’s a force-multiplying effect,” said Coast Guard Capt. Jeffrey Hathaway, executive director for the U.S. Interdiction Coordination Staff in Washington. “You more than double your capacity to eventually catch and contain narco-smugglers.”

Still, the anti-drug forces face an uphill battle.

That’s clear with a look at the Mexican navy’s fleet. Drug smugglers can drop millions on new ships with powerful motors and fancy equipment. Lopez’s vessel, the Mexican navy’s top cocaine-catcher, is a World War II relic purchased from the U.S. Navy 20 years ago.

Things were even worse when Navy Secretary Jose Ramon Lorenzo Franco took over six years ago, at the start of President Ernesto Zedillo’s administration. In a rare interview with the Mexican newspaper El Financiero in May, Lorenzo Franco said he discovered that the Navy had 160 ships, “but only 30, or at the most 40, were in service.”

“You couldn’t send these ships out 200 miles, or send them into a bit of bad weather, because their size and condition weren’t apt for this type of sea.”

The navy has embarked on an ambitious program to update ships like Lopez’s 58-year-old Ortega. It is also building eight $35-million gunboats equipped with armored helicopters and speedboats to chase drug smugglers.

U.S. officials say they will eventually find ways to stop the traffic in the Pacific, much as they earlier frustrated traffickers using planes or sending speedboats through the Caribbean.

“The narco-traffickers know that, because of the long maritime distances involved, they’re ultimately more vulnerable to interdiction [in the Pacific],” Hathaway said. The difficulty for the thinly stretched anti-drug operation is pinpointing which ships are carrying the drugs.

Even if authorities win that battle, they might not win the war.

“It’s an elastic traffic,” said Vice Adm. Jose Orozco Peralta, commander of the Mexican navy’s fourth region in Manzanillo, and Lopez’s boss. “If you stop them in the Pacific, they go to the Caribbean.”