--- title: "Narco-Subs: The Cartel's Undersea Drug Machines" description: "What is the most valuable substance in the world? Gold might be a good guess; an ounce of the stuff will cost you over $1,900. Silver? Not so much, at a measly $23 an ounce. Platinum is a decent shout at about $930, and if you guessed rhodium, you probably know what's up: that can fetch around $5,000 an ounce on a good day. But if you don't happen to have any pure rhodium on you, there's one more option. Try cocaine, where based on the legally gathered data, an ounce on the streets of London can net you over £2,400.\n\nWe should be very, very clear at the outset, given where this is going: dear viewer, please try not to be selling cocaine, or any other drugs for that matter. But if you *were* to, you'd be coming into possession of a very expensive substance your local government probably doesn't want you to have, and that begs one key question: how much will you pay in order to keep it hidden?\n\nThe answer, apparently, is a whole lot. And if you need proof, look no further than the narco-submarine. Produced en masse by drug cartels around the world, and alternately capable of operating partly or fully under the water, the narco-sub is the criminal underworld's best method for getting tons upon tons of drugs across the sea. Even a cheap one will run a cartel into the one-to-two-million-dollar range. But all that money is chump change when a single submarine can carry up to a hundred million dollars of product on board.\n\n## The Basic Idea\n\nTo understand the narco-sub, we first have to understand the world it was designed for. Drugs are an incredibly lucrative business; according to Global Financial Integrity, the global drug trade is valued upward of $650 billion annually, meaning it commands more wealth than over 170 of the world's nations. But because the major cities where drugs are sold in the highest volumes typically aren't the same places they're produced or manufactured, anybody looking to sell their drugs first has to be able to smuggle them.\n\nIn the 1980s, sea-based smuggling was done mostly via so-called go-fast boats: narrow, powerful craft designed to outrun law enforcement attempts to intercept them. Also known as cigarette boats, they have been around for a long time, and in the early decades, patrol organizations would generally have to either race them on their own go-fast boats, or try to intercept them using a combination of helicopters and larger, slower ships. But as radar, sonar, and infrared technology got better and better, the go-fast boats became less and less useful, especially because they weren't equipped with the same advanced technology as the people trying to catch them.\n\nBut for a problem like radar, the solution in principle isn't actually so hard to cobble together: just put the drug boats underwater, and radar won't pick them up.\n\n## From Black-Market Bigfoot to Confirmed Reality\n\nEarly attempts to solve this problem came by way of towed submarines, like the one found off the coast of Boca Raton, Florida, in 1988. In that incident, an unmanned, 21-foot submarine had been towed behind a slow surface vessel and equipped with a remote control so it could be submerged if anyone came sniffing around. Sealed from the outside, it wasn't meant to be piloted and had no navigational systems; the general idea seemed to be to submerge it in times of crisis and hope nobody from the DEA or the Coast Guard noticed anything under the surface. US law enforcement was surprised by the craft, and since it was empty aside from a few thousand pounds of ballast, there was no direct confirmation it had been used for smuggling. Funny enough, the salvager who found it was eventually allowed to keep it, after nobody came looking for their narco-sub.\n\nThis discovery set off waves of speculation that went basically unfounded for decades, to the point where the idea of a narco-submarine began to be regarded as a sort of black-market Bigfoot. Some expected they were all like the Boca Raton vessel, towed behind a ship and able to dive to avoid detection; others began to wonder whether independently navigating submarines might actually be possible for drug cartels to use. In 1995, an ex-Soviet fixer was arrested after trying to broker the sale of a retired Soviet submarine to a Mexican drug cartel. Five years later, in 2000, Colombian police raided a warehouse outside Bogota and found a half-built submarine that, if completed, could have carried up to 200 tons of cocaine. With time, more and more of the subs started popping up, and eventually US authorities believed they'd interdicted over ten percent of the subs in transit — not a high efficacy rate, but a good indication that a whole lot of subs were down below the waterline.\n\nNarco-subs really broke into American public consciousness in November 2006, when a Coast Guard ship 100 miles off the coast of Costa Rica sighted something they couldn't explain: three snorkels popping up out of the water where no submarines were supposed to be. The Coast Guard did what the Coast Guard does and got closer to check it out. The air pipes turned out to be attached to an entire 49-foot-long homemade submarine. Its passengers included four smugglers, one AK-47, and three tons of cocaine, with a street value well past fifty million dollars. It wasn't the first submarine caught that year, but it was tied to reports that two men from South Asia had provided plans to Colombian drug traffickers on how to make their submarines en masse. The next subs to be picked up were bigger semi-submersibles made from fiberglass, with cooled exhaust ports that reduced their infrared signature. As the cartels got better at building them — and better at building in higher numbers — the world also got better at catching them. By 2009, the Colombian Navy had discovered thirty-three, while the US observed as many as sixty, estimating they moved at least a ton of cocaine every single day.\n\nIn the early 2010s, narco-subs became more and more prominently associated with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, in collaboration with Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel.\n\n## The Execution: Anatomy of a Narco-Sub\n\nBy 2014, US analysts had begun to work out a classification system. In a brief prepared by Byron Ramirez and Robert J. Bunker, the craft were broken into three categories: low-profile vessels that sat very low to the water, nearly but not quite submerged; self-propelled semi-submersibles that could dip below the surface; and fully submersible vessels, which are exactly what they sound like. That was in addition to narco-torpedoes, the towed versions, as well as static narco-containers — boxes bolted or magnetically placed on the underside of cargo ships. The latter are fairly self-explanatory, but they at least deserve a mention.\n\nTo describe what a narco-sub actually looks like, we have to make some generalizations; no two boats are exactly alike, especially when they're built with no factories and few standardized parts. But in most cases, a narco-sub will have a hull made of fiberglass or steel — fiberglass for a lighter, harder-to-detect design, steel for durability or to carry heavier cargo loads. In length, they run anywhere between twelve and twenty meters on average, with the largest ever found close to thirty meters. Most are powered by diesel engines, with significant portions of the interior dedicated to a fuel compartment. They can be human- or remote-operated, generally with a capacity of between three and twelve tons of cargo, a high percentage of which will be its own fuel load.\n\nRange really depends on the sub. Some designs are capable of transatlantic crossings; others might hold only a small fuel load and be used for transporting large loads over short distances. But over time, the subs have generally gotten faster: an eighteen-meter sub might hit 18 kilometers per hour — about eleven miles per hour — not enough to outrun a surface ship, but enough to avoid hanging around anywhere too long and begging to be stumbled upon. Often they're camouflaged with paint, riding between half a meter and one-and-a-half meters above the water, with almost no wake to speak of.\n\nInside, the facilities are almost always extremely cramped, with a crew compartment barely bigger than the smallest Manhattan studio apartment, shared between several crew members for weeks at a time. Toilets are a rare luxury onboard, as are lights, and luxury items like microwaves probably won't be found in all but the swankiest of narco-subs. Any area of the boat not explicitly necessary to keep the crew alive is devoted to storing drugs; everything aboard a narco-sub is done in service to the product. Comfort, or even survivability, is a mere afterthought. While out on the high seas, many suspect the vessels receive logistical support from innocuous-looking surface ships: refueling for longer journeys, supply restocks to keep everyone fed, and intelligence the submarines can use to avoid coastal and open-ocean patrols.\n\nOn occasion, more advanced submarines have popped up — craft dozens of meters long with the potential to dive a hundred meters or more, and with a functional range of thousands of kilometers. These have shown up in Colombia and Ecuador since as early as the year 2000. One particularly interesting find in Ecuador in 2010 featured a periscope, onboard air conditioning, room for a crew of five or six, and the capacity to operate up to 20 meters underwater at long range, with up to ten tons of drugs onboard. These subs are rare, at least from law enforcement's perspective, but in all likelihood they're worth their weight in gold to the cartels: not only are they far harder to find or intercept, but they're not even what most navies and coast guards would think to look for, given the relative prevalence and ease of interdiction of a more standard semi-submersible.\n\n## A Disposable Investment\n\nEven though a surface-traveling narco-sub can cost as much as one to two million dollars to construct, they're almost invariably scuttled to the bottom of the sea as soon as their cargo is unloaded. Carrying unrefined coca, the cargo might fetch well over a hundred million dollars at its destination, while the people who receive it and refine it into high-quality, salable cocaine may double the figure they paid to get it. With profits like that, the price of the submarine is barely more than a rounding error. There is zero financial incentive to risk someone getting caught with a sub rather than just getting rid of it and building another for the next trip. As a result, many narco-sub discoveries only come when they wash up onto foreign shores, long after their illicit cargo has been cleaned out.\n\nBut just as hard as building a submarine like this is building it away from the grasp of law enforcement. In Colombia, early narco-subs were built in the jungle using teams of 15 to 20 laborers, who were compelled to stay on premises until the submarine was done to avoid its location being betrayed to authorities. Relying on generators for electricity, these teams cobbled together their submarines using hand tools, without any of the elaborately machined parts that would have made them anything but a death trap. Fittingly, these home-brewed submarines were nicknamed *ataúd* — coffin — in Colombia, for their tendency to disappear at sea. The logistics deserve their own consideration: heavy material and expert personnel have to be transported to remote locations without leaving a trail, and a camp has to be run for the length of the build. Some estimates put the construction time at upward of a year.\n\nOne account of what it was like inside an early narco-sub came courtesy of a New York Times exposé published in 2009, after interviews with a Colombian fisherman who agreed to complete a trip for $3,000 in pay. Escorted by armed men into the jungle, the fisherman was put into a cramped, three-section submarine, where he and three others lived off dry noodles and bottled water in a twelve-by-six-foot hold. The submarine — navigated with GPS and steered with a splintered wooden wheel from a sailboat — was carrying some seven tons of cocaine, worth almost $200 million. Moving at barely seven miles per hour, it checked in twice daily with a home base for navigation coordinates. Although this particular trip was unsuccessful, due to the sub losing contact and being set adrift, it had been explained to the fisherman that the submarine would be met by go-fast boats off the destination coast, where the craft would be offloaded and sunk, joining hundreds of others scattered across the sea floor.\n\n## The Narco-Sub Halls of Fame and Shame\n\nNot all narco-subs are created equal. On one hand, there have been some truly impressive feats of homemade engineering. On the other, there have been some more dubious achievements — massive interdictions by law enforcement, or exceptionally awful conditions onboard. As a rule, we typically won't hear about anything to do with narco-subs unless something doesn't go to plan for their operators. But even so, the efforts of global law enforcement have left us some fascinating stories.\n\nA first big example cropped up in 2015, when the US Coast Guard discovered a 40-foot-long submarine in international waters in the eastern Pacific. An estimated 16,000 pounds — eight tons — of cocaine were onboard, with a rough value of nearly $200 million, but only about three-quarters of that could be removed, since some had to stay in the sub simply to maintain its balance. Before the submarine sank on its way back to port, it was confirmed to have been the largest narco-sub interdiction in Coast Guard history.\n\nIn 2019, a crew of three unfortunate narco-submariners pulled off an unprecedented feat: the first known transatlantic crossing in a narco-sub. In a journey of 27 days and nights, in a 20-meter, 65-foot fiberglass submarine, the crew suffered a hot, cramped, and highly unpleasant trip from South America to a location just off the coast of Galicia, living off energy bars and — probably the most unpleasant choice for an already-smelly space — sardines. And speaking of smell, the crew was consigned to doing their back-end business in plastic bags. But they managed a journey of thousands of miles, hauling three tons of cocaine worth $150 million. It probably wasn't the first crew to make the trip, or even the tenth, or perhaps not even the hundredth — but due to engine troubles, they were the first to be caught, confirming that these journeys are possible at all. Many experts speculate there may well be narco-sub graveyards off the Canary Islands and the Azores, valuable waypoints where subs can be unloaded and sunk. These rumors remain unconfirmed.\n\nThen, in 2020, Colombia picked up something odd: an electric-powered narco-sub, discovered at an artisan boatyard near Colombia's Cucurrupí River. Unlike most, this one was particularly sophisticated, run with twin electric motors and twin propellers, and powered not by gas but by ten tons of heavy-duty batteries. It featured bunks for the crew, as well as dive planes to help control its own depth. Its carrying capacity was all of six metric tons of product, and unlike the vast majority of narco-subs, this one could fully submerge. The craft was fitted with a towing ring, in keeping with the fact that its electric batteries would only have taken it a few dozen miles unaided — suggesting that this, and craft like it, may still be towed behind slow surface vessels before being sent inland on their own. A similar electric sub had been found in the same area in 2017, suggesting either a common master builder or a wider trend of electric, towed subs basically unknown to global law enforcement.\n\nVery recently in the narco-sub saga, a 2023 raid in the Cauca and Nariño Departments of Colombia led to the discovery of entire secret shipyards in the jungle. Operating out of the city of Buenaventura, the group behind the shipyards apparently weren't tied to a specific cartel, but were instead freelance builders marketing their services to various crime organizations. The implications are twofold: not only is the illicit narco-sub industry developing to the point where large numbers of submarines are being bought and sold by expert builders, but building expertise is so valuable that these groups can operate semi-independently. One such builder, Oscar Moreno Ricardo, was arrested in 2022 after two decades of narco-sub design and construction. But even Ricardo — known as \"Rey de los Semisumergibles,\" or King of the Submersibles — appeared to leave a void that was quickly filled by other qualified professionals.\n\nAnd just shortly before this story was written, in May 2023, the Colombian Navy intercepted the largest single narco-sub ever recorded, at a length of 100 feet and a width of ten feet. Onboard, the sub was packing three tons of cocaine en route to Central America before its crew of three were interdicted. In its grand history, this sub brought the Colombian Navy to 228 total captures, and four so far in 2023. Two weeks later, Colombia caught another one, as its crew was midway through trying to sink the 5,000 pounds of cocaine onboard. That sub was 55 feet long, crewed by three men who are now facing some fourteen years in prison.\n\n## What We Don't Know Is Down There\n\nIn all this talk about narco-subs, we have to circle back to that key point from the outset: we just don't know what else is down there. According to the US Coast Guard's own estimates, the service believes it captures barely ten percent of the submarine traffic that passes through US waters. And given that not all narco-subs are created equal, it's entirely likely that it's the louder, slower, or less-professionally-piloted ones getting caught. Even these ten-percent estimates are based on statistics where more-advanced, higher-capacity, fully-underwater submarines are hardly ever counted. In this realm, we simply don't know what we don't know: there could be only a handful of those submarines in existence around the world, or they could be operating with impunity, with elements of construction and design we don't even know are possible.\n\nWhatever the full reality of the narco-sub is, it's hidden under the sea, in a place few things are ever revealed in full. But with such a booming narco-sub industry all around the world, it seems all but guaranteed that these boats will continue to do their work. Each of them one intrepid, foolhardy crew, and their twenty thousand kilos under the sea.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The global drug trade is valued at upward of $650 billion annually — more wealth than over 170 of the world's nations — and narco-subs exist to move that product past radar, sonar, and infrared-equipped patrols.\n- A narco-sub can cost $1–2 million to build yet carry up to $100 million in cargo, making the vessel itself disposable; most are scuttled the moment they're unloaded.\n- Most subs are jungle-built by hand over as long as a year, are extremely cramped and dangerous (earning the Colombian nickname *ataúd*, or \"coffin\"), and typically carry 3–12 tons of cargo.\n- US analysts classify the craft into low-profile vessels, self-propelled semi-submersibles, and fully submersible boats, plus towed narco-torpedoes and static narco-containers.\n- Milestones include the first confirmed transatlantic crossing in 2019 (27 days), a fully submersible electric sub in 2020, freelance jungle shipyards uncovered in 2023, and a record 100-foot sub the same year.\n- The US Coast Guard believes it captures only about ten percent of submarine traffic — and the most advanced fully-submersible craft are barely counted at all.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is a narco-submarine?\n\nA narco-submarine is a vessel built by drug cartels to smuggle large quantities of drugs across the sea while avoiding detection. They range from low-profile boats that sit just at the waterline, to self-propelled semi-submersibles that can dip below the surface, to fully submersible craft. The category also includes towed narco-torpedoes and static narco-containers attached to cargo ships.\n\n### Why do cartels use submarines instead of fast boats?\n\nIn the 1980s, smuggling relied on go-fast boats designed to outrun law enforcement. But as radar, sonar, and infrared technology improved, those boats — which lacked equivalent tech — became easier to catch. Putting the cargo underwater solves the radar problem in principle, since a submerged craft is far harder to detect.\n\n### How much do narco-subs cost, and why are they thrown away?\n\nEven a cheap narco-sub costs a cartel roughly $1–2 million to build. But because a single trip can carry cargo worth up to $100 million, the cost of the sub is barely a rounding error. Cartels almost always scuttle the vessel as soon as it's unloaded, since there's no financial incentive to risk getting caught with it.\n\n### How big are narco-subs and how much can they carry?\n\nOn average they run between twelve and twenty meters long, with the largest ever found close to thirty meters. Most are diesel-powered with a large fuel compartment, and they typically carry between three and twelve tons of cargo. The record-setting sub intercepted in May 2023 measured 100 feet long and ten feet wide.\n\n### Have narco-subs ever crossed the Atlantic?\n\nYes. In 2019, a crew of three completed the first known transatlantic crossing in a narco-sub — a 27-day journey in a 20-meter fiberglass vessel from South America to off the coast of Galicia, carrying three tons of cocaine worth $150 million. Experts believe earlier crossings likely occurred; this crew was simply the first caught, due to engine trouble.\n\n### How many narco-subs actually get caught?\n\nAccording to the US Coast Guard's own estimates, the service captures barely ten percent of the submarine traffic passing through US waters. Even that figure is thought to skew toward the louder, slower, or less professionally piloted vessels, and rarely counts the most advanced fully-submersible craft. In short, authorities admit they don't know what they don't know.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original MegaProjects video: Narco-Subs are Getting Ridiculously Advanced](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPLXdtbLZ0)\n- [CBS News — Record-size narco sub intercepted off Colombia in the Pacific](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/narco-sub-record-size-intercepted-colombia-pacific-ocean/)\n- [CBS News — Narco sub seized as crew tries to sink 5,300 pounds of cocaine](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/narco-sub-seized-colombia-crew-tries-sink-5300-pounds-cocaine/)\n\n- [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coast_Guard,_Navy_and_CBP_Interdict_Drug-Laden_Semi-Sub_DVIDS55630.jpg) by U.S. Customs and Border Protection / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.\n\n## Related Coverage\n\n- [The Ford Model T: A Revolutionary Car With a Terrible Dark Side](/article/ford-model-t-revolutionary-and-terrible-legacy)\n\n- [The Interoceanic Corridor: Mexico's Attempt at a Panama Canal Rival](/article/interoceanic-corridor-tehuantepec-mexico-panama-canal-rival)\n\n- [The Laerdal Tunnel: The Longest Road Tunnel in the World](/article/laerdal-tunnel-longest-road-tunnel-world)" url: https://megaprojects.pub/article/narco-submarines-cartel-drug-smuggling-engineering.md canonical: https://megaprojects.pub/article/narco-submarines-cartel-drug-smuggling-engineering datePublished: 2026-06-09 dateModified: 2026-06-09 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://megaprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: MegaProjects image: https://media.megaprojects.pub/articles/5aPLXdtbLZ0/hero.jpg type: Article contentHash: be105ec204745368d429010f2cb0db9c533e14b246553ca466d7f2d1b2174356 tokens: 5803 summaryUrl: https://megaprojects.pub/article/narco-submarines-cartel-drug-smuggling-engineering.md.summary.md --- What is the most valuable substance in the world? Gold might be a good guess; an ounce of the stuff will cost you over $1,900. Silver? Not so much, at a measly $23 an ounce. Platinum is a decent shout at about $930, and if you guessed rhodium, you probably know what's up: that can fetch around $5,000 an ounce on a good day. But if you don't happen to have any pure rhodium on you, there's one more option. Try cocaine, where based on the legally gathered data, an ounce on the streets of London can net you over £2,400. We should be very, very clear at the outset, given where this is going: dear viewer, please try not to be selling cocaine, or any other drugs for that matter. But if you *were* to, you'd be coming into possession of a very expensive substance your local government probably doesn't want you to have, and that begs one key question: how much will you pay in order to keep it hidden? The answer, apparently, is a whole lot. And if you need proof, look no further than the narco-submarine. Produced en masse by drug cartels around the world, and alternately capable of operating partly or fully under the water, the narco-sub is the criminal underworld's best method for getting tons upon tons of drugs across the sea. Even a cheap one will run a cartel into the one-to-two-million-dollar range. But all that money is chump change when a single submarine can carry up to a hundred million dollars of product on board. ## The Basic Idea To understand the narco-sub, we first have to understand the world it was designed for. Drugs are an incredibly lucrative business; according to Global Financial Integrity, the global drug trade is valued upward of $650 billion annually, meaning it commands more wealth than over 170 of the world's nations. But because the major cities where drugs are sold in the highest volumes typically aren't the same places they're produced or manufactured, anybody looking to sell their drugs first has to be able to smuggle them. In the 1980s, sea-based smuggling was done mostly via so-called go-fast boats: narrow, powerful craft designed to outrun law enforcement attempts to intercept them. Also known as cigarette boats, they have been around for a long time, and in the early decades, patrol organizations would generally have to either race them on their own go-fast boats, or try to intercept them using a combination of helicopters and larger, slower ships. But as radar, sonar, and infrared technology got better and better, the go-fast boats became less and less useful, especially because they weren't equipped with the same advanced technology as the people trying to catch them. But for a problem like radar, the solution in principle isn't actually so hard to cobble together: just put the drug boats underwater, and radar won't pick them up. ## From Black-Market Bigfoot to Confirmed Reality Early attempts to solve this problem came by way of towed submarines, like the one found off the coast of Boca Raton, Florida, in 1988. In that incident, an unmanned, 21-foot submarine had been towed behind a slow surface vessel and equipped with a remote control so it could be submerged if anyone came sniffing around. Sealed from the outside, it wasn't meant to be piloted and had no navigational systems; the general idea seemed to be to submerge it in times of crisis and hope nobody from the DEA or the Coast Guard noticed anything under the surface. US law enforcement was surprised by the craft, and since it was empty aside from a few thousand pounds of ballast, there was no direct confirmation it had been used for smuggling. Funny enough, the salvager who found it was eventually allowed to keep it, after nobody came looking for their narco-sub. This discovery set off waves of speculation that went basically unfounded for decades, to the point where the idea of a narco-submarine began to be regarded as a sort of black-market Bigfoot. Some expected they were all like the Boca Raton vessel, towed behind a ship and able to dive to avoid detection; others began to wonder whether independently navigating submarines might actually be possible for drug cartels to use. In 1995, an ex-Soviet fixer was arrested after trying to broker the sale of a retired Soviet submarine to a Mexican drug cartel. Five years later, in 2000, Colombian police raided a warehouse outside Bogota and found a half-built submarine that, if completed, could have carried up to 200 tons of cocaine. With time, more and more of the subs started popping up, and eventually US authorities believed they'd interdicted over ten percent of the subs in transit — not a high efficacy rate, but a good indication that a whole lot of subs were down below the waterline. Narco-subs really broke into American public consciousness in November 2006, when a Coast Guard ship 100 miles off the coast of Costa Rica sighted something they couldn't explain: three snorkels popping up out of the water where no submarines were supposed to be. The Coast Guard did what the Coast Guard does and got closer to check it out. The air pipes turned out to be attached to an entire 49-foot-long homemade submarine. Its passengers included four smugglers, one AK-47, and three tons of cocaine, with a street value well past fifty million dollars. It wasn't the first submarine caught that year, but it was tied to reports that two men from South Asia had provided plans to Colombian drug traffickers on how to make their submarines en masse. The next subs to be picked up were bigger semi-submersibles made from fiberglass, with cooled exhaust ports that reduced their infrared signature. As the cartels got better at building them — and better at building in higher numbers — the world also got better at catching them. By 2009, the Colombian Navy had discovered thirty-three, while the US observed as many as sixty, estimating they moved at least a ton of cocaine every single day. In the early 2010s, narco-subs became more and more prominently associated with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, in collaboration with Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel. ## The Execution: Anatomy of a Narco-Sub By 2014, US analysts had begun to work out a classification system. In a brief prepared by Byron Ramirez and Robert J. Bunker, the craft were broken into three categories: low-profile vessels that sat very low to the water, nearly but not quite submerged; self-propelled semi-submersibles that could dip below the surface; and fully submersible vessels, which are exactly what they sound like. That was in addition to narco-torpedoes, the towed versions, as well as static narco-containers — boxes bolted or magnetically placed on the underside of cargo ships. The latter are fairly self-explanatory, but they at least deserve a mention. To describe what a narco-sub actually looks like, we have to make some generalizations; no two boats are exactly alike, especially when they're built with no factories and few standardized parts. But in most cases, a narco-sub will have a hull made of fiberglass or steel — fiberglass for a lighter, harder-to-detect design, steel for durability or to carry heavier cargo loads. In length, they run anywhere between twelve and twenty meters on average, with the largest ever found close to thirty meters. Most are powered by diesel engines, with significant portions of the interior dedicated to a fuel compartment. They can be human- or remote-operated, generally with a capacity of between three and twelve tons of cargo, a high percentage of which will be its own fuel load. Range really depends on the sub. Some designs are capable of transatlantic crossings; others might hold only a small fuel load and be used for transporting large loads over short distances. But over time, the subs have generally gotten faster: an eighteen-meter sub might hit 18 kilometers per hour — about eleven miles per hour — not enough to outrun a surface ship, but enough to avoid hanging around anywhere too long and begging to be stumbled upon. Often they're camouflaged with paint, riding between half a meter and one-and-a-half meters above the water, with almost no wake to speak of. Inside, the facilities are almost always extremely cramped, with a crew compartment barely bigger than the smallest Manhattan studio apartment, shared between several crew members for weeks at a time. Toilets are a rare luxury onboard, as are lights, and luxury items like microwaves probably won't be found in all but the swankiest of narco-subs. Any area of the boat not explicitly necessary to keep the crew alive is devoted to storing drugs; everything aboard a narco-sub is done in service to the product. Comfort, or even survivability, is a mere afterthought. While out on the high seas, many suspect the vessels receive logistical support from innocuous-looking surface ships: refueling for longer journeys, supply restocks to keep everyone fed, and intelligence the submarines can use to avoid coastal and open-ocean patrols. On occasion, more advanced submarines have popped up — craft dozens of meters long with the potential to dive a hundred meters or more, and with a functional range of thousands of kilometers. These have shown up in Colombia and Ecuador since as early as the year 2000. One particularly interesting find in Ecuador in 2010 featured a periscope, onboard air conditioning, room for a crew of five or six, and the capacity to operate up to 20 meters underwater at long range, with up to ten tons of drugs onboard. These subs are rare, at least from law enforcement's perspective, but in all likelihood they're worth their weight in gold to the cartels: not only are they far harder to find or intercept, but they're not even what most navies and coast guards would think to look for, given the relative prevalence and ease of interdiction of a more standard semi-submersible. ## A Disposable Investment Even though a surface-traveling narco-sub can cost as much as one to two million dollars to construct, they're almost invariably scuttled to the bottom of the sea as soon as their cargo is unloaded. Carrying unrefined coca, the cargo might fetch well over a hundred million dollars at its destination, while the people who receive it and refine it into high-quality, salable cocaine may double the figure they paid to get it. With profits like that, the price of the submarine is barely more than a rounding error. There is zero financial incentive to risk someone getting caught with a sub rather than just getting rid of it and building another for the next trip. As a result, many narco-sub discoveries only come when they wash up onto foreign shores, long after their illicit cargo has been cleaned out. But just as hard as building a submarine like this is building it away from the grasp of law enforcement. In Colombia, early narco-subs were built in the jungle using teams of 15 to 20 laborers, who were compelled to stay on premises until the submarine was done to avoid its location being betrayed to authorities. Relying on generators for electricity, these teams cobbled together their submarines using hand tools, without any of the elaborately machined parts that would have made them anything but a death trap. Fittingly, these home-brewed submarines were nicknamed *ataúd* — coffin — in Colombia, for their tendency to disappear at sea. The logistics deserve their own consideration: heavy material and expert personnel have to be transported to remote locations without leaving a trail, and a camp has to be run for the length of the build. Some estimates put the construction time at upward of a year. One account of what it was like inside an early narco-sub came courtesy of a New York Times exposé published in 2009, after interviews with a Colombian fisherman who agreed to complete a trip for $3,000 in pay. Escorted by armed men into the jungle, the fisherman was put into a cramped, three-section submarine, where he and three others lived off dry noodles and bottled water in a twelve-by-six-foot hold. The submarine — navigated with GPS and steered with a splintered wooden wheel from a sailboat — was carrying some seven tons of cocaine, worth almost $200 million. Moving at barely seven miles per hour, it checked in twice daily with a home base for navigation coordinates. Although this particular trip was unsuccessful, due to the sub losing contact and being set adrift, it had been explained to the fisherman that the submarine would be met by go-fast boats off the destination coast, where the craft would be offloaded and sunk, joining hundreds of others scattered across the sea floor. ## The Narco-Sub Halls of Fame and Shame Not all narco-subs are created equal. On one hand, there have been some truly impressive feats of homemade engineering. On the other, there have been some more dubious achievements — massive interdictions by law enforcement, or exceptionally awful conditions onboard. As a rule, we typically won't hear about anything to do with narco-subs unless something doesn't go to plan for their operators. But even so, the efforts of global law enforcement have left us some fascinating stories. A first big example cropped up in 2015, when the US Coast Guard discovered a 40-foot-long submarine in international waters in the eastern Pacific. An estimated 16,000 pounds — eight tons — of cocaine were onboard, with a rough value of nearly $200 million, but only about three-quarters of that could be removed, since some had to stay in the sub simply to maintain its balance. Before the submarine sank on its way back to port, it was confirmed to have been the largest narco-sub interdiction in Coast Guard history. In 2019, a crew of three unfortunate narco-submariners pulled off an unprecedented feat: the first known transatlantic crossing in a narco-sub. In a journey of 27 days and nights, in a 20-meter, 65-foot fiberglass submarine, the crew suffered a hot, cramped, and highly unpleasant trip from South America to a location just off the coast of Galicia, living off energy bars and — probably the most unpleasant choice for an already-smelly space — sardines. And speaking of smell, the crew was consigned to doing their back-end business in plastic bags. But they managed a journey of thousands of miles, hauling three tons of cocaine worth $150 million. It probably wasn't the first crew to make the trip, or even the tenth, or perhaps not even the hundredth — but due to engine troubles, they were the first to be caught, confirming that these journeys are possible at all. Many experts speculate there may well be narco-sub graveyards off the Canary Islands and the Azores, valuable waypoints where subs can be unloaded and sunk. These rumors remain unconfirmed. Then, in 2020, Colombia picked up something odd: an electric-powered narco-sub, discovered at an artisan boatyard near Colombia's Cucurrupí River. Unlike most, this one was particularly sophisticated, run with twin electric motors and twin propellers, and powered not by gas but by ten tons of heavy-duty batteries. It featured bunks for the crew, as well as dive planes to help control its own depth. Its carrying capacity was all of six metric tons of product, and unlike the vast majority of narco-subs, this one could fully submerge. The craft was fitted with a towing ring, in keeping with the fact that its electric batteries would only have taken it a few dozen miles unaided — suggesting that this, and craft like it, may still be towed behind slow surface vessels before being sent inland on their own. A similar electric sub had been found in the same area in 2017, suggesting either a common master builder or a wider trend of electric, towed subs basically unknown to global law enforcement. Very recently in the narco-sub saga, a 2023 raid in the Cauca and Nariño Departments of Colombia led to the discovery of entire secret shipyards in the jungle. Operating out of the city of Buenaventura, the group behind the shipyards apparently weren't tied to a specific cartel, but were instead freelance builders marketing their services to various crime organizations. The implications are twofold: not only is the illicit narco-sub industry developing to the point where large numbers of submarines are being bought and sold by expert builders, but building expertise is so valuable that these groups can operate semi-independently. One such builder, Oscar Moreno Ricardo, was arrested in 2022 after two decades of narco-sub design and construction. But even Ricardo — known as "Rey de los Semisumergibles," or King of the Submersibles — appeared to leave a void that was quickly filled by other qualified professionals. And just shortly before this story was written, in May 2023, the Colombian Navy intercepted the largest single narco-sub ever recorded, at a length of 100 feet and a width of ten feet. Onboard, the sub was packing three tons of cocaine en route to Central America before its crew of three were interdicted. In its grand history, this sub brought the Colombian Navy to 228 total captures, and four so far in 2023. Two weeks later, Colombia caught another one, as its crew was midway through trying to sink the 5,000 pounds of cocaine onboard. That sub was 55 feet long, crewed by three men who are now facing some fourteen years in prison. ## What We Don't Know Is Down There In all this talk about narco-subs, we have to circle back to that key point from the outset: we just don't know what else is down there. According to the US Coast Guard's own estimates, the service believes it captures barely ten percent of the submarine traffic that passes through US waters. And given that not all narco-subs are created equal, it's entirely likely that it's the louder, slower, or less-professionally-piloted ones getting caught. Even these ten-percent estimates are based on statistics where more-advanced, higher-capacity, fully-underwater submarines are hardly ever counted. In this realm, we simply don't know what we don't know: there could be only a handful of those submarines in existence around the world, or they could be operating with impunity, with elements of construction and design we don't even know are possible. Whatever the full reality of the narco-sub is, it's hidden under the sea, in a place few things are ever revealed in full. But with such a booming narco-sub industry all around the world, it seems all but guaranteed that these boats will continue to do their work. Each of them one intrepid, foolhardy crew, and their twenty thousand kilos under the sea. ## Key Takeaways - The global drug trade is valued at upward of $650 billion annually — more wealth than over 170 of the world's nations — and narco-subs exist to move that product past radar, sonar, and infrared-equipped patrols. - A narco-sub can cost $1–2 million to build yet carry up to $100 million in cargo, making the vessel itself disposable; most are scuttled the moment they're unloaded. - Most subs are jungle-built by hand over as long as a year, are extremely cramped and dangerous (earning the Colombian nickname *ataúd*, or "coffin"), and typically carry 3–12 tons of cargo. - US analysts classify the craft into low-profile vessels, self-propelled semi-submersibles, and fully submersible boats, plus towed narco-torpedoes and static narco-containers. - Milestones include the first confirmed transatlantic crossing in 2019 (27 days), a fully submersible electric sub in 2020, freelance jungle shipyards uncovered in 2023, and a record 100-foot sub the same year. - The US Coast Guard believes it captures only about ten percent of submarine traffic — and the most advanced fully-submersible craft are barely counted at all. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is a narco-submarine? A narco-submarine is a vessel built by drug cartels to smuggle large quantities of drugs across the sea while avoiding detection. They range from low-profile boats that sit just at the waterline, to self-propelled semi-submersibles that can dip below the surface, to fully submersible craft. The category also includes towed narco-torpedoes and static narco-containers attached to cargo ships. ### Why do cartels use submarines instead of fast boats? In the 1980s, smuggling relied on go-fast boats designed to outrun law enforcement. But as radar, sonar, and infrared technology improved, those boats — which lacked equivalent tech — became easier to catch. Putting the cargo underwater solves the radar problem in principle, since a submerged craft is far harder to detect. ### How much do narco-subs cost, and why are they thrown away? Even a cheap narco-sub costs a cartel roughly $1–2 million to build. But because a single trip can carry cargo worth up to $100 million, the cost of the sub is barely a rounding error. Cartels almost always scuttle the vessel as soon as it's unloaded, since there's no financial incentive to risk getting caught with it. ### How big are narco-subs and how much can they carry? On average they run between twelve and twenty meters long, with the largest ever found close to thirty meters. Most are diesel-powered with a large fuel compartment, and they typically carry between three and twelve tons of cargo. The record-setting sub intercepted in May 2023 measured 100 feet long and ten feet wide. ### Have narco-subs ever crossed the Atlantic? Yes. In 2019, a crew of three completed the first known transatlantic crossing in a narco-sub — a 27-day journey in a 20-meter fiberglass vessel from South America to off the coast of Galicia, carrying three tons of cocaine worth $150 million. Experts believe earlier crossings likely occurred; this crew was simply the first caught, due to engine trouble. ### How many narco-subs actually get caught? According to the US Coast Guard's own estimates, the service captures barely ten percent of the submarine traffic passing through US waters. Even that figure is thought to skew toward the louder, slower, or less professionally piloted vessels, and rarely counts the most advanced fully-submersible craft. In short, authorities admit they don't know what they don't know. ## Sources - [Original MegaProjects video: Narco-Subs are Getting Ridiculously Advanced](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aPLXdtbLZ0) - [CBS News — Record-size narco sub intercepted off Colombia in the Pacific](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/narco-sub-record-size-intercepted-colombia-pacific-ocean/) - [CBS News — Narco sub seized as crew tries to sink 5,300 pounds of cocaine](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/narco-sub-seized-colombia-crew-tries-sink-5300-pounds-cocaine/) - [Hero image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Coast_Guard,_Navy_and_CBP_Interdict_Drug-Laden_Semi-Sub_DVIDS55630.jpg) by U.S. Customs and Border Protection / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. ## Related Coverage - [The Ford Model T: A Revolutionary Car With a Terrible Dark Side](/article/ford-model-t-revolutionary-and-terrible-legacy) - [The Interoceanic Corridor: Mexico's Attempt at a Panama Canal Rival](/article/interoceanic-corridor-tehuantepec-mexico-panama-canal-rival) - [The Laerdal Tunnel: The Longest Road Tunnel in the World](/article/laerdal-tunnel-longest-road-tunnel-world)