Maritime Transportation of Illegal Drugs from South America
Abstract
The US invests considerable effort in searching and interdicting drug-trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific regions. While some vessels are indeed interdicted, resulting in confiscation of substantial quantities of drugs, many such vessels manage to avoid detection and arrive safely at their destinations in Central America and Mexico with their drug load intact. The agency in charge of interdicting this traffic, Joint Interagency Task Force South - JIATF-S, sends out both aerial and surface assets for search and interdiction missions. An important parameter for planning such missions is an estimate of the expected steady-state number of the various types of vessels present in the search regions at any given time. In this paper we use various sources to estimate these numbers. We estimate that the number of shipments initiated per month ranges between four and six dozen, and at any given time there are between two and four vessels, of all types, on the high seas.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2017
- Accession Number
- AD1016658
Entities
People
- Michael P. Atkinson
- Moshe Kress
- Roberto Szechtman
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School