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An international operation has captured 225 tonnes of cocaine in the span of just 45 days, including a massive bust by the Colombian Navy that confirmed a new ultra-long-distance smuggling route.<\/p>\n
The Colombian Navy intercepted one semisub off the coast of Clipperton Island and found five tonnes of cocaine on board – an abnormally large amount – along with a fuel supply sufficient for a trans-Pacific transit. The smuggling vessel was headed for Australia, about 10,000 miles away. <\/p>\n
"Initially, these boats were used mainly to take the drugs out of the country and move them off the coast of Colombia and then transfer them to ships," a security official told AFP. "It has been found that these semi-submersibles, sometimes even submersibles, are now increasingly sophisticated, with very fine engineering."<\/p>\n
Australia is a valuable market, and the profit margins could pay for the extra effort: Australians consume more cocaine per capita – and pay more per dose – than almost any other nation. According to Colombian security sources, the wholesale price per kilo of cocaine delivered to Australia can run up to $240,000, about three times the price of pure gold. <\/p>\n
Australia is so far away from the producing regions in South America that the goods are normally smuggled via shipping container. The journey is a long and dangerous one for the roughly-built semisubmersibles used by Colombian smugglers; these handmade boats are normally used on a short northbound trade lane to Central America. <\/p>\n
The service intercepted five more narco-subs over the span of the 45-day operation. Altogether, the 62 nations participating in Operation Orion netted 225 tonnes of cocaine – nearly 10 percent of annual global production – along with 1,175 tonnes of other drugs, primarily marijuana. Colombian authorities alone arrested 400 people in connection with the seizures. <\/p>\n
The international sweep uncovered new details on the linkages between organized crime groups in the cocaine industry. The business has become decentralized, and it no longer resembles the vertically-integrated cartels of yesteryear, said Vice-Adm. Orlando Enrique Grisales. Instead, different groups specialize in different parts of the value chain – like production, transport, security, or vessel construction – and they conduct business with each other to complete each shipment.<\/p>\n
maritime-executive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An international operation has captured 225 tonnes of cocaine in the span of just 45 days, including a massive bust by the Colombian Navy that confirmed a new ultra-long-distance smuggling route. The Colombian Navy intercepted one semisub off the coast of Clipperton Island and found five tonnes of cocaine on board – an abnormally …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[3956,2476,1148,12506,4278],"class_list":["post-52429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-catches","tag-cocaine","tag-international","tag-sweep","tag-tonnes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/52430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}