January 17, 2013: On January 8th the Colombian Navy captured its
first drug smuggling submersible vessel of the year. This one
was 18 meters (56 feet) long and capable of carrying over four
tons of cocaine. It had been abandoned at sea and was towed back
by a Colombian Navy ship to try and find out what happened. Last
year the Colombians captured eight of these. Naval forces from
the United States and other nations along the Pacific coast and
the Caribbean caught even more. But the detection system, run
mainly by the United States, locates a lot more of these cocaine
subs than there are warships available to run them all down. For
two decades the United States has used a special interagency
(Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, State, and Defense)
and international (over a dozen nations participate)
intelligence sharing/analysis operation (Joint Interagency Task
Force-South) to track drug smuggling from South America. For the
last decade the task force has become quite expert at tracking
the submarines