Pubdate: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA) Copyright: 2014 Associated Press Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1 Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388 SMUGGLERS EXTEND REACH ALONG PACIFIC (AP) - 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 to a size comparable to the state of Montana 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. Mexico's Sinaloa cartel has been loading marijuana bales onto 50-foot vessels as far south as the Mexican port of Mazatlan - where its leader, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, was captured early Saturday - and running them up the Pacific coast to the U.S., as far as Northern California. It's unclear if Guzman's arrest will hinder the maritime runs. 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 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. As a result, 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, said the Coast Guard's top officer, Adm. Robert Papp. U.S. authorities stopped some 194,000 pounds of cocaine last fiscal year - more than 40,000 pounds less than in 2012, according to Coast Guard statistics. Marijuana seizures dipped between 2012 and 2013 from 124,000 pounds to 81,000 pounds. The Coast Guard oversees 95,000 miles of coastline and 4.5 million square miles of maritime territory. Rear Adm. Karl Schultz said the tiny Coast Guard is doing its best to optimize its resources but the challenge is "like a police cruiser in Cleveland responding to something in Atlanta." Smugglers driving three-engine boats have been landing along remote coasts of Northern California, reaching as far as Santa Cruz. That's a shift from the one-engine drug skiffs seen landing for years in San Diego County. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom