There’s a popular saying in the port city of Buenaventura : “Those who talk are carried away by the tide.”

So it’s understandable that Diego Morales doesn’t want to reveal too many details about why he agreed to undertake such a perilous mission. All he will say is that his sister owed money to the wrong people. And owing money to the wrong people in Colombia’s new cocaine capital is a good way to end up dead.

“I needed a lot of pesos fast,” says Morales, 52, a sullen-looking fireplug of a man with a scar over his right eye.

So imagine the relief when the offer came: 30,000 American dollars, half now, the other half when the work was completed, a mind-boggling amount of money for someone used to living on the equivalent of $5 a day. And all he had to do, he was told, was go on a fishing trip.

It was August 2007 when Morales was picked up in a truck and taken to a damp estuary on the outskirts of Buenaventura, a vast, tangled network of rivers and inlets bordered by dense jungle. He glimpsed men wearing camouflage uniforms and cradling assault rifles guarding something half-submerged in the muddy creek. Morales was expecting a fishing boat, so he was puzzled to see a rusty cigar-shaped metal contraption about 60 feet long and eight feet wide. Suddenly, it dawned on him what it was—a narco-submarino, the latest weapon in the Colombian drug traffickers’ campaign to smuggle cocaine into North America. Morales had heard the stories about fishermen who went on one of these deadly vessels and never came back.

“I didn’t know that I was going to be traveling in a vessel underwater,” he says. “But I couldn’t say no. When someone takes you to one of these things and you say no, you can lose your life.”

The coke was already in place, five tons wrapped in plastic and tightly packed in the fore and aft. Morales was ordered on board, and he squeezed his thick frame through the hatch into the sub, where he saw three figures crouching in the shadows: the burly captain, Arturo Gonzalez; a mechanic named Arley Arraya whose face was blistered with nasty-looking burns; and a Mexican “load guard,” Luis Galindo, a 25-year-old with jug ears who was sent by the drug traffickers to makesure their precious cargo reached its intended destination.

The interior smelled of rusty iron, and the walls dripped with condensation. Morales had worked on some junkers in his nearly four decades as a fisherman, but nothing like this. “There was nothing inside except cocaine—no beds, no toilets, no kitchen,” says Morales. The Captain told him the mission would take about eight days. The assignment was to transport the contraband, worth about $100 million on the streets of America. Though the crew didn’t know it, they were headed some 1,700 miles to Mexico’s Gulf of Tehuantepec. Morales’ job was to help Gonzalez and steer the mini-sub when the captain was asleep.

Ready to go, Captain Gonzalez started up the 350-horsepower diesel engine and rode the receding tide out of the estuary, puttering at a slow and steady five knots into the darkness of the Pacific.


The frontline in the war on drugs has now shifted underwater. The U.S. Coast Guard calls these cocaine submarines SPSS s (selfpropelled semi-submersibles) because they don’t dive like military subs but glide just below the surface of the water. Sightings of the vessels have skyrocketed in the last year. Back in 2006, the Coast Guard detected only three; now they are spotting as many as 10 a month. Last year alone, more drug subs were seized at sea and on dry land than in the entire previous decade. According to the DE A, as much as a third of the cocaine that arrives on American shores comes via these sometimes comical conveyances. They’re usually bound for Mexico’s west coast, where the cocaine is off-loaded onto speedboats or fishing vessels and taken ashore, while the sub is scuttled.

“We can’t say exactly how many there are and how many are getting through,” says one DE A source. “But there’s a lot.”

Regarded as a joke by law enforcement when they first appeared in the early 1990s, the prototypes were jerry-built contraptions, difficult to steer and limited in how far they could travel and how much cocaine they could hold. Now, with a new fleet of faster, more seaworthy vessels that can travel as much as 2,000 miles without refueling, the U.S. government officially regards cocaine submarines as “an emerging threat.”

Commander Timothy Espinoza of the U.S. Coast Guard told a recent maritime security conference, “An SPSS can smuggle 10 to 12 tons of coke without detection. What else can they smuggle: money, guns, illegal aliens, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction?”

These subs cost upwards of $1 million, which sounds substantial until you realize that each vessel carries cocaine worth 100 times that amount. They’re built in secret jungle shipyards on the outskirts of Buenaventura, protected by armed guards and shielded from aerial surveillance by a thick canopy of trees and near constant cloud cover. While their construction may be a secret, their existence isn’t. Everybody in Buenaventura knows about the narco-subs. People line up at the dockside for a chance to work on one. For some in the slums, a job on one of these boats is like winning the lottery, a ticket out of deprivation.


The first couple of days were intolerable. With nowhere to lie down, the crew had to sleep sitting up, eyes half-closed, leaning on one another’s shoulders. They survived on stale bread and canned tuna, and if they needed to go to the bathroom, the captain had to surface the vessel, and the crew would defecate with the fishes.

Worst of all was the punishing humidity. Morales had to keep pouring water over the engine to prevent it from overheating, releasing clouds of steam that turned the narrow space into a sauna. It was so hot the crew worked in their underwear. The ventilation system that poked up through the surface of the water didn’t provide nearly enough air in the cramped quarters for four people.

Morales’ main role was to steer the submarine when the captain was otherwise occupied. A compass sitting on top of a metal box guided the way, and Morales could see where the vessel was headed by looking through a narrow slit level with the ocean surface. But only the captain was allowed to communicate with the traffickers via the radio.

By the seventh day, the food and drinking water were running low. Things were officially desperate. Where were they going? The captain refused to say. The traffickers had sworn him to secrecy on pain of death.

Then, in the early evening, the Mexican load guard popped his head up through the hatch to get a breath of fresh air and looked up to see a propeller-powered military plane circling overhead. He rushed back below and told his comrades:
“Americanos.”

The captain turned off the engine, fearful that the U.S. plane might fire at them. And then the sub started to leak. Throughout the voyage, Gonzalez had to stop periodically and surface to let Morales pump out puddles of water. But this time the Pacific Ocean roared into the interior and soon the panicked crew was up to its knees, frantically operating bilge pumps in a futile attempt to halt the tide. They thought about abandoning ship, but were worried about being eaten by sharks. So instead they donned their life vests and clambered onto the deck, where they waved T-shirts in the air in a frantic attempt to attract the attention of the military plane. What if the Americans couldn’t reach them in time? Galindo the load guard predicted that they were all going to die.