The new drug smuggling tool of choice

Undetectable: A narco submarine seized by the Colombian Navy in July. The uncrewed vessel is capable of carrying more than 1.5 tonnes of cocaine. Photo / Colombian Navy Press Office

Use of meth and other highly addictive drugs is soaring as organised crime overwhelms the Pacific, and the government is playing catch-up. You can read Part I of Danyl McLauchlan’s feature here.

It’s becoming the smuggling tool of choice for the discerning international crime syndicate: the narco-sub, also known as an LPV (low profile vessel). These are not literal submarines but semi-submersible vessels that are small, low-profile with muffled or cooled exhausts to reduce heat signature. They’re difficult to detect by radar or from the air, which makes them ideal for drug trafficking.

They have primarily been used to traffic drugs to North America, assembled in hidden shipyards and makeshift boat-yards in the jungles and riverine areas of Colombia, Ecuador or Peru. But in recent years they have been used to ship drugs across the Atlantic: to Spain via the Canary Islands. And three of these have been found in the Solomon Islands over the past two years.

Jose Santos-Sousa, head of the Pacific Regional Security Hub at the University of Canterbury hopes that, rather than being made in the Pacific, they’re being manufactured in South America and being towed to the Pacific by a mothership, then utilised to unload the ship.

“These boats can island hop to an atoll where there’s a pre-deployed resupply cache and then move on to the next. And at that speed, there is nothing really in the Pacific that can stop it. The guardian boats cannot match them in speed.”

But if the LPVs are now being built in the Pacific, that indicates an increase in the scale and sophistication of the drug networks.

In July, the Colombian navy announced that it had seized an “autonomous semisubmersible”, an LPV capable of carrying 1.5 tonnes of cocaine equipped with onboard cameras, antenna and a Starlink modem that allowed the entire device to be operated remotely. And in October, the Trump administration conducted a drone strike on a suspected narco sub in the Caribbean, killing two crew members.