http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2848238.ece fibreglass submarines each had a conning tower and periscope, four bunk beds and room to carry five tons of cocaine which would fetch £50m in the United States. They were fitted with diesel engines, radar antennae to navigate the western coast-line and 20ft air tubes for when they were submerged.
Colombian police said the vessels were more sophisticated than 13 other submarines seized in the past two years and were substantial enough to reach Mexico or, if refuelled at sea, California – about two weeks’ sailing from Buenaventura.
“They’re learning fast,” said a drug enforcement official. “They used to work with Russians but now they import teams of Asian engineers who train local engineers whose families are held hostage until the job is done. We don’t know how many submarines are already at sea. We can only hope that many do not complete their missions.”
The submarines are the brain-child of Jorge Briceno Suarez, also known as Mono Jojoy, a veteran Farc commander wanted for killing missionaries and forcing children into the army. He justifies trading with US drug importers as “exporting suicide”.
http://www.anorak.co.uk/273581/strange-but-true/colombian-cocaine-smugglers-use-100ft-long-submarine-photos.html/The sub presents the use of advanced technology seen for the first time in this country, and its construction must have cost the narcotraffickers more than 4,000 million pesos, according to the Naval police of the Pacific.
The sub is 100ft long. There are others:
From the boat, Alonso could see one of the shipyards people had always gossiped about in Buenaventura, where submersibles are built out of fiberglass in the jungle, out in the open, to be used for transporting cocaine.
The only way to reliably locate the vessels is through thermal imaging performed by air surveillance crews. But the drug gangs quickly found a way to overcome this problem. They attached thick pipes to the hulls of the submersibles, allowing exhaust gases to be fed into the water, which cools the gases.
Life under the ocean waves:
Each of the men tried to sleep after his shift, but the stench and the noise on board made this impossible. They had to drink copious amounts of water to make up for the buckets of sweat constantly running off their bodies. Their main source of nourishment was condensed milk, the Peruvian “Leche Gloria” brand. The stench from fecal matter, which couldn’t be disposed of during the trip, soon became almost unbearable.
