They use submarines to transport cocaine to Europe

Antonio Martínez Duarte, one of Spain’s leading anti-drug police officers, explained that police have been able to seize only two drug trafficking mechanisms in the last three years, despite having been in use for “more than 20 years.”

As intelligence circles believe hundreds of domestic submarines have been launched into Europe, the world’s largest cocaine market after the Americas, the chief commissioner of the Spanish National Police’s Anti-Narcotics Brigade told the BBC that “they are very difficult to detect”.

Police believe there is a massive cocaine submarine graveyard in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, near the Canary Islands and the Azores, where drug traffickers may discover evidence of their crimes after transporting tons of cocaine to Europe.

Caught for the first time in 2019

The first case of a submarine being used by smugglers occurred in 2019, when the submarine was carrying three tonnes of cocaine worth £121 million, traveling over 27 days from the Brazilian jungle to the Amazon River.

The 20-meter-long submarine, made of fiberglass, carried the smugglers and their cargo across the Atlantic just below the water’s surface.

“This operation also confirms links between Colombian and Mexican criminals who joined Spanish gangs working in Spain,” Chief Commissioner Duarte said.

The growing successes of the drug trade have come as cocaine production has skyrocketed around the world following the massive drop in supply and demand caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The UN drug agency said cocaine production rose by a third between 2020 and 2021, after a brief decline between 2019 and 2020.