Pubdate: Thu, 30 September 1999
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 1999 The Washington Post Company
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Author: Roberto Suro, Washington Post Staff Writer

COAST GUARD TACTICS BOOST DRUG SEIZURES

Over the past year, the U.S. Coast Guard has confiscated a record 56 tons of
cocaine as it struggled against the latest trick in the smuggling trade, an
armada of small, high-powered vessels that race across the Caribbean on a
daily basis, officials will announce today.

The new contraband carriers, called "Go-Fast" boats by the Coast Guard,
account for 85 percent of all the illicit maritime cocaine traffic--about
400 tons a year--into the United States, according to government
intelligence estimates. Long, thin and low to the water, the boats can
manage 40 to 50 knots, twice the top speed of a typical Coast Guard cutter.

In recent months, the Coast Guard has sent helicopters with sharpshooters to
fire high-caliber bullets at the engines of fleeing vessels. The result,
officials said, has been four seizures totaling 6,640 pounds of cocaine and
marijuana.

Those new operations, along with several large seizures earlier in the year
that stemmed from an intelligence breakthrough, pushed the Coast Guard's
total cocaine haul for fiscal 1999 to nearly 112,000 pounds, compared with
about 83,000 pounds the year before, officials said.

"We made significant investments in intelligence assets that improved our
ability to detect where smugglers are departing from, the way points they
use and their destinations," said Adm. James M. Loy, commandant of the Coast
Guard. The money for those assets--primarily upgraded radar and
infrared-sensing equipment--came from $270 million in supplemental funds
appropriated for Coast Guard drug interdiction efforts last year.

In addition, the seizure in January of the Cannes, a cargo ship carrying
more than 5 tons of cocaine between Trinidad and Houston, provided
information about a major smuggling network and led to the seizure of three
other ships carrying more than 10 tons of cocaine, officials said.

Loy, who became commandant in May 1998, said the greatest challenge was in
the southern Caribbean, where traffickers used to move cocaine easily by
boat from Colombia to way stations in Mexico, Central America, Haiti and the
Dominican Republic. There, drugs were repackaged and shipped to the United
States.

"We were getting beaten badly in the transit zone a year ago because the
Go-Fasts were simply outrunning us," Loy said. They can travel from Colombia
to Haiti, for example, in just 20 hours.

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