Seafaring Drug Smugglers Challenge Coast Guard in US-Mexico Waters Julie Watson and Elliot Spagat - Associated Press
go to original February 24, 2014

A drug smuggling boat was found at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz in October 2013. (David Polzine/KSBW.com)

SAN DIEGO - While security has tightened at the U.S. border, drug smugglers are increasingly turning to the high seas.

The area where boats were seized off California and the northwest coast of Mexico tripled during the 2013 fiscal year, which ended in September. Off South America, traffickers over the years have been traversing territory so big the continental United States could be dropped inside of it.

Meanwhile, budget cuts have hit one of the lead U.S. law enforcement agencies on international waters - the Coast Guard, the only U.S. military service able to make drug arrests hundreds of miles (kilometers) offshore. To meet automatic federal budget cuts, it reduced its operating costs by 25 percent in 2013. It also lost help from U.S. Navy ships on drug missions off Latin America that were decommissioned and not replaced because of cutbacks, or sent elsewhere because of Washington's new military focus.

Only a third of suspected drug smuggling boats or aircraft out of South America that were tracked by U.S. intelligence in cocaine-trafficking corridors in the Pacific and Caribbean were stopped last year, the Coast Guard's top officer, Adm. Robert Papp, told The Associated Press.

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