It was the biggest single offload of illegal drugs ever for the U.S. Coast Guard — dozens of Guardsmen hefting hundreds of plastic-wrapped bales across the decks of their ship — but it marked the culmination of 19 separate interdictions over five weeks on two oceans. The Coast Guard cutter Hamilton docked at the port in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on August 25 and delivered a 38-ton cargo of contraband collected through its own operations and those of a dozen other units from the Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and international partners. The agencies work together through the Joint Interagency Task Force South, established at the Key West, Florida, Naval Air Station to fight smuggling.
All told, the haul amounted to 28,000 kilograms of cocaine and 6,530 kilograms of marijuana, valued at $473 million, the Coast Guard said in a news release. The crew of the Hamilton alone arrested 34 suspects while seizing 21,300 kilograms of cocaine and 11 vessels.
The operations began June 26 when helicopter and boarding crews from the Hamilton interdicted two boats in the Pacific Ocean near the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. They wrapped up August 18 when a boarding crew from the Royal Netherlands Navy patrol ship Friesland seized a vessel near Curaçao, the Dutch island in the Caribbean Sea off the northwest coast of Venezuela.
Drugs collected aboard the Hamilton also came from seizures near the Dutch island of Aruba near Curaçao; the uninhabited French island of Clipperton in the Pacific, southwest of Acapulco, Mexico; other locations off the coasts of Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela; and near the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica.
Videos recorded aboard Coast Guard helicopters show brief segments of two operations. In the June 26 interdiction, boarding crews from the Hamilton approach two vessels stopped nearby, open boats about 9 meters long with twin outboard motors. The boats carried some 2,030 kilograms of cocaine, the Coast Guard said. In an August 15 operation southwest of Haiti, a boarding crew from the Coast Guard cutter Vigilant races toward a 9-meter, twin-outboard vessel as one of its two occupants tumbles bales wrapped in white plastic over the side. The Coast Guard seized 733 kilograms of marijuana in that operation.
Videos recorded during the offloading operation, at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, show Guardsmen in blue service jumpsuits or fatigues hefting heavy bales hand to hand in bucket-brigade style to be stacked on wooden pallets for hoisting from the Hamilton. Most of the bales are wrapped in black plastic, some of them circled in strips of purple or red tape. Other bales are wrapped in white or multicolored plastic. The 115-meter cutter is homeported in Charleston, South Carolina.
In the final scene of one video, 120 Guardsmen pose on the Hamilton’s helicopter deck behind 60 stacks of cocaine and marijuana bales. The haul “represents a significant victory in the fight against transnational criminal organizations, highlighting our unwavering commitment to safeguarding the nation from illicit trafficking and its devastating impacts,” Rear Adm. Adam Chamie, Coast Guard Southeast District commander, said during remarks at Port Everglades.
The interdictions began with investigations by the Panama Express Strike Force, or PANEX, described by the federal government as a prosecutor-led, intelligence-driven, multiagency approach to disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal organizations involved in large-scale drug trafficking, money laundering and related activities.