The USCG says cocaine worth more than $239 million will never make it to the streets of San Diego.
In November, this large recovery allegedly happened off the coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America by two U.S. Coast Guard ships. The seizures ranged from 44 pounds to more than 5,500 pounds.
The largest offload was over 5,500 lbs, and Coast Guard Cutter Waesche handled it on November 20. Its discovery took place on a self-propelled semi-submersible, also known as a narco-submarine.
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Captain Robert Mohr, the commanding officer of the Waesche, said:
“Our last interdiction of a semi-submersible vessel was noteworthy since it was the first semi-submersible interdicted in the Eastern Pacific in over three years.”
Coast Guard Cutter Waesche is a 418-foot-long National Security Cutter. It is a ship that supports maritime homeland security and defense missions. The cutter is one of eight of its class the Coast Guard operates. Its home port is located in Alameda, California.
Furthermore, the crew on Coast Guard Cutter Waesche seized about 14,350 pounds of cocaine in four separate incidents between November 7 and November 20, according to the USCG.
Coast Guard Active is a smaller ship for law enforcement and search and rescue teams. The medium endurance cutter, about 210 feet long, recovered nearly 4,000 lbs. of cocaine from two of the six operations.
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Crews on the Coast Guard Cutter Active discovered about 3,869 pounds of cocaine between November 23 and November 24.
However, according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they confiscated over 40 tons of cocaine in 2023. This makes it the third most seized drug after Marijuana and Methamphetamines.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California Tara McGrath has expressed gratitude towards the Coast Guard for its assistance in the fight against drug cartels in the state.
According to McGrath, “The significance of keeping this much cocaine from reaching our shores and streets is, no doubt, life-changing. Without these 9 tons of cocaine on American streets, fewer people will have access to this toxic poison, and hundreds of millions of dollars will not make it into cartel coffers.”
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Moreover, statistics from the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2020 have put the average sentence for powder cocaine trafficking at five and a half years.
The recently offloaded cocaine is one of the biggest seizures in recent years. Another example of a large seizure was the one from 2019. According to reports, the haul, which was fifteen thousand kilos of cocaine, had a street value of over $1 billion.
The scene of the recovery was a Philadelphia shipping port, and it is, however, one of the biggest drug seizures in U.S. history.
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