U.S. Seizes Tons of Cocaine From Fishing Boat

U.S. authorities unloaded an 8.8-ton shipment of cocaine Sunday that was found on a rusty fishing boat off the coast of Mexico. It was the government’s fourth-largest such seizure ever.

A Navy destroyer with a Coast Guard law enforcement unit on board stopped the boat, with a crew of 10 men, 250 miles west of the resort city of Acapulco, and towed it to San Diego.

The Feb. 24 seizure capped what the Coast Guard called one of the most productive weeks of anti-drug patrols in its history.

In six days, the Coast Guard--from Miami to the Caribbean, and in the Pacific from Mexico to Washington state--seized 28,845 pounds of cocaine, about what it captured in all of 1996.

“We’ve never had a week like this where our border has been assaulted all the way from the Bahamas to Seattle,” Cmdr. Jim McPherson of the Coast Guard said.

On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta praised the anti-drug effort.

“Those engaged in drug trafficking are attempting to penetrate all of our borders,” he said near a Coast Guard pier, where the 8.8 tons of cocaine in large blocks were stacked neatly on wooden pallets.

The 10 men captured along with the Belize-flagged boat, the Forever My Friend, will face drug smuggling charges that carry a minimum 10-year sentence and a maximum of life in prison, U.S. Atty. Gregory Vega said. They were to appear today in federal court in San Diego.

Eight of the men are from Nicaragua, one is from El Salvador and one from Ukraine. The cocaine was hidden in a secret compartment, buried under ice and fresh fish, authorities said.

Agents wearing surgical masks, gloves and protective white jumpsuits spent Sunday morning unloading the blocks of cocaine from the Forever My Friend. Federal agents with automatic weapons at the ready guarded it on the pier.

The string of recent seizures reflects a general increase in the amount of cocaine seized at sea by the Coast Guard working with the Navy, the Customs Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies.

In 1999, the Coast Guard seized a record 55 tons of cocaine, which broke the previous high of 40.7 tons. Then in 2000, the agency captured 66 tons.

The Coast Guard estimates it catches only a small fraction of U.S.-bound cocaine, which is generally produced in Colombia and shipped either through the Caribbean or via the Pacific to Mexico to be smuggled overland into the United States.

“We’ve put a dent in it, but we certainly haven’t cut off the flow or driven the price of cocaine through the roof,” said Capt. Joseph Conroy, chief of the agency’s law enforcement division.

Navy ships on anti-drug patrols travel with Coast Guard contingents on board because the U.S. military is prohibited from conducting law enforcement activities. The Coast Guard, which is part of the Transportation Department, faces no such restriction.

Among the recent cocaine seizures were 5,154 pounds captured on a Canadian trawler off Seattle on Feb. 21 and 3,920 pounds on a small power boat north of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Feb. 25.

In all, 24 people were arrested from Feb. 21 to Feb. 27.