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#4369: Caribbean drug smugglers turn to small freighters (fwd)
From:nozier@tradewind.net
WIRE:06/23/2000 10:23:00 ET
Caribbean drug smugglers turn to small freighters
MIAMI (Reuters) - Small, rusting freighters from Haiti are chugging up
the narrow, winding Miami River into the heart of this city, often
empty of any cargo except stashes of cocaine welded deep inside their
hulls.Avoiding the bustling seaport to dock instead at quiet boatyards
on the river,they wait sometimes for weeks for the chance to
unload their contraband. In a drugs war of constantly changing fronts,
the river has become increasingly active. The trend also highlights
Haiti's position as a key staging post for narcotics smuggled from
producer nation Colombia to consumers in the United States. Customs
agents in Miami have found cocaine shipments on board Haitian
freighters more than a dozen times since February, seizing them before
they could be unloaded. They have confiscated more than 7,000 pounds of
cocaine off boats that sailed to Miami from Haiti in the last nine
months, three times the amount seized in all the previous year,
according to U.S. Customs Service spokesman Zach Mann. "It's a niche
that the traffickers have found they like,"Brent Eaton, Miami spokesman
for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), said.
Several factors make the Haiti-Miami route attractive to smugglers,
federal agents said. Haiti's poverty and political chaos make it easy
for traffickers to send cocaine into remote Haitian coastal areas by
speedboat and single-engine planes. "The airdrops take place in a
matter of minutes," said Mike Vigil, special agent in charge of the
DEA's Caribbean field division in Puerto Rico. "Even if you
can track them, there's very little response capability in Haiti."
Haitian police lack communications, training,resources and staff.
Haiti's poor roads make it difficult to reach drop sites. "What happens
when the drugs get there? Nothing," Mann said. "There is no capacity to
combat airborne smuggling and very little capability to combat
maritime smuggling. It's become a playground for the cartels.
Additionally, increased U.S. vigilance has choked air routes from
South America and land routes from Mexico, forcing smugglers to
increasingly haul their cargo to the United States via Caribbean
shipping lanes. Once in Haiti the cocaine is trucked overland, either to
the Dominican Republic, where traffickers send it across the Mona
Passage into the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, or to northern Haiti,
especially the Cap Haitien area, and loaded onto Miami-bound
freighters, Vigil said. Federal agents believe much of the cocaine
slips into the United States in sealed cargo containers hidden
among legal goods. Massive freighters unload 650,000 truck-sized
containers a year at the Port of Miami alone. But the small coastal
freighters that ply the Caribbean are plentiful, cheap and increasingly
favored by smugglers.There are plenty of places to hide the drugs, Mann
said. After welding hidden compartments into place,smugglers sand them
down and pour acid over the welds to make them look old. Often the
compartments are covered with bilge water. Once investigators in Miami
find the compartments,they must sometimes hire marine engineers or put
the ships into dry dock to open the keels. It is time-consuming and
costly work. The seized ships are sold at auction, typically without
objection from owners whose identities are hidden behind shell
corporations. Crewmen are interviewed and usually deported back to
Haiti while agents try to find out who put the drugs aboard and who
was to retrieve them. "The people in the boats as a rule, the crewmen,
don't have a clue," Eaton said. Those not seized can sit on the Miami
River for weeks as the crew fills them with old mattresses,
bicycles,plastic water jugs and other U.S. castoffs welcome in Haiti.
Stolen cars,weapons and dirty cash also make the return trip,
investigators said."These guys think they can wait us out," said
Mann."There's no urgency to unload anything. We don't have the manpower
to surveil them seven days a week for weeks on end."