Portuguese Navy Carries Out Long Range Drug Bust in Mid-Atlantic

 

Portugal's navy has seized a drug trafficking semi-submersible in the mid-Atlantic, far off the coast of Lisbon. 

The Portuguese Navy (Marinha) detected the suspect vessel using its surveillance assets and worked in conjunction with the Judicial Police to plan an intercept. In an example of the significant scale required to mount such an operation, it dispatched a patrol vessel with more than 70 military personnel and sailed a total distance of about 1,500 nautical miles. 

Early in the morning of October 29, the team reached the intercept location and boarded the suspect vessel. They found more than 1,700 kilos of cocaine aboard, enough to fetch somewhere in the range of $30 million on the EU wholesale market. The semisubmersible itself - an improvised vessel intended for a one-way journey - was not robust enough to be towed back for investigation, and it sank. 

It was the second interdiction of a semisubmersible drug boat that the Marinha has carried out this year. The first was another ultra-long-distance bust at a range of about 1,200 nautical miles off Lisbon's shores, and resulted in a major haul of six tonnes of cocaine. 

European law enforcement may well see additional pressure from transatlantic cocaine traffickers due to the Trump administration's airstrike campaign, which has introduced the threat of lethal force into the calculations of cartels and drug vessel crewmembers. Organized crime experts predict that more volume will now be routed towards the EU via established routes, like the growing Brazil-West Africa-Europe trade lane. This may have the effect of further depressing already-declining cocaine prices in Europe, making the drug dangerously accessible to a broader range of users.