Reposted by Kas
Kas
@kasvargo.bsky.social
143 followers 178 following 120 posts
Nerdy MBA designer. Mom, wife, pal to cats and assorted humans. ❤️🌵 AZ Ally 🏳️🌈🇺🇦🌵
Nerdy MBA designer. Mom, wife, pal to cats and assorted humans. ❤️🌵 AZ Ally 🏳️🌈🇺🇦🌵
![Smuggling inside shipping containers aboard boats carrying licit cargo. No estimates exist for how many tons of cocaine are smuggled this way each year, because it is impossible to know what has gone undetected. However, large-scale container seizures have become more frequent in recent years, especially at European ports.[236]
Submarines and semi-submersible craft. These have larger payloads than small boats and are harder to detect. Authorities in Colombia and Ecuador periodically raid sites, often hidden in dense Pacific mangrove estuaries, where traffickers build these vessels.[237]
Small boats making short hops up the coasts of South and Central America. This is more time-consuming than using the open ocean and probably requires paying off more corrupt authorities along the way. However, it involves less time in international waters and is less vulnerable to interdiction, lethal or otherwise, from U.S. forces.
Overland transshipment, usually along road networks, perhaps combined with shorter maritime routes. Land routes are the principal vector for migrant smuggling, and drugs are harder to detect and easier to conceal than humans.
Riverine routes. Traffickers are particularly using the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, and their tributaries, to move cocaine to eastern areas of South America, closer to markets in Europe. The Defense Department’s Humire testified that, in response to the boat strikes, traffickers’ “movements shifted eastward through Venezuela and Guyana into Suriname.”[238]
Aerial routes. Smuggling via small aircraft appears to be less frequent than it was during the 20th century, as U.S.-backed “airbridge denial” programs in Colombia, Peru, Honduras, and elsewhere—which today rarely kill people aboard civilian planes—have made aircraft easier to detect and intercept at their destinations. Still, a significant portion of cocaine travels at least part of the way by air. During the 2010s, maps produced by SOUTHCOM estimated that aerial trafficking made u…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:t5hgkoxrsxpe3wfisqfeymg5/bafkreigpmyec34kifhfilsd7ek5xd4prn6vbmnkrxo7x5hnj5s2pveqa5y)
