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Coast Guard Dude Surfs a Narco-Sub Packed With Cocaine

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A Coast Guard boarding team scaled the hull of a moving narco-submarine in the middle of the Pacific — and this time, the whole thing was caught on a helmet camera.

The U.S. Coast Guard released footage on July 11, 2019, showing guardsmen from the cutter USCGC Munro chasing down and boarding a self-propelled semi-submersible packed with cocaine off the coasts of Central and South America. The June 18 interdiction ended with five suspected smugglers in custody and more than 17,000 pounds of cocaine seized, though most of it went down with the sinking vessel before it could be pulled aboard. The clip, dramatic even by Coast Guard standards, quickly became part of the day’s trending news cycle online.

• Guardsmen deployed from USCGC Munro in high-speed interceptor boats to chase a 40-foot low-profile narco-sub in international waters of the eastern Pacific on June 18, 2019.
• Boarding team members leapt onto the moving vessel’s hull, with one guardsman pounding on the hatch and shouting “¡Alto tu barco!” until an occupant surrendered with hands raised.
• Five suspected smugglers were apprehended and more than 17,000 pounds of cocaine — worth an estimated $232 million — were seized, though only about 1,100 pounds were recovered before the vessel became unstable and sank.

The Chase and the Boarding

The video shows the semi-submersible cutting through open water hundreds of miles off the coast, riding low with just its hatch and a sliver of hull above the surface — the design feature that makes these “narco-subs” so hard to spot by radar or satellite in the first place. Coast Guard interceptor boats closed the gap and pulled alongside the moving target while it was still underway, and boarding team members jumped from their boat directly onto the sub’s slick, wave-battered hull.

One guardsman is seen straddling the hull as spray breaks over him, hammering on the hatch cover with his fist and shouting commands in Spanish. The footage captures the exact moment the standoff ends: the hatch pops open and an occupant emerges with both hands raised in surrender, followed by the rest of the crew.

¡Alto tu barco! — “Stop your boat!”

Confirmed Details of Seized Assets

The semi-submersible was carrying more than 17,000 pounds of cocaine, with a street value the Coast Guard estimated at roughly $232 million. But the vessel didn’t cooperate with the recovery effort — after the boarding, it began taking on water and became unstable, forcing the crew to pull off what they could before it sank. In the end, only about 1,100 pounds of the cargo made it onto the Coast Guard’s boat; the rest went down with the sub.

Despite losing most of the physical product, the Coast Guard still walked away with five suspected traffickers, who were handed off for prosecution. Coast Guard officials have long argued that even a partial seizure like this one still disrupts a shipment large enough to have supplied a significant slice of the U.S. cocaine market for weeks.

Part of a Larger Offload

The June 18 boarding wasn’t an isolated case. It was one of 14 separate interdictions carried out by three Coast Guard cutters — USCGC Munro, USCGC Vigorous and USCGC Tahoma — off the coasts of Mexico, Central America and South America between May and July 2019. Combined, those operations netted more than 39,000 pounds of cocaine and 933 pounds of marijuana, with a total value the Coast Guard put at $569 million.

All of that contraband was offloaded in San Diego on July 11, 2019, the same day the helmet-cam footage went public, in a ceremony attended by Vice President Mike Pence. The type of vessel involved in the June 18 chase has become a familiar problem for interdiction crews: narco-subs are cheap to build, hard to detect, and increasingly common as traffickers try to outrun exactly the kind of pursuit caught on camera here.

The Coast Guard didn’t say whether the guardsman seen pounding on that hatch has a name attached to the footage yet, but the clip has done more to explain what a modern drug interdiction actually looks like than any press release could — a guy in a helmet, standing on a submarine going full speed, banging on a hatch until somebody inside decides surrendering beats drowning.