Cocaine Price Crash Forces Traffickers to Reuse "Narco-Submarines"

A steep fall in the price of cocaine is changing how drug traffickers operate. Spanish police report that criminal groups are now reusing specialized "narco-submarines" to move drugs from South America to Europe. They used to sink these vessels after a single trip. A senior Spanish police officer explained the shift. Before, the high profit from one cocaine shipment made discarding the custom-built submarine worthwhile. Now, with lower prices, reusing the expensive vessels makes financial sense for the traffickers. While common in the Americas since the 1980s, these semi-submersible vehicles—which travel mostly underwater—only appeared in Europe in 2006. Police found an abandoned one that year in Galicia, a region in north-west Spain.