While patrolling international waters off the coast of El Salvador the United States Coast Guard teamed up with the U.S. Navy to intercept one of the words drug smuggling vehicles we’ve ever seen. This semi-submersible vessel isn’t quite a fully fledged submarine, presumably it isn’t able to dive below the surface for days on end. For the purposes of running blow up from Colombia though, well, this is one of the most inconspicuous boats we’ve ever seen.
Border Patrol and Customs, the U.S. Navy, and the Coast Guard tracked the vessel for miles before swooping in as a speedboat began to approach the semi-sub off the coast of El Salvador. Once seizing the vessel over 16,870 pounds of cocaine (over 8 tons of blow) was seized, with a street value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. According to NBC Miami, there were four drug traffickers aboard, all taken into custody. The cocaine was split up into 274 separate bales, and the seizure of cocaine was party of a joint 15-nation operation to cripple international drug traffickers. No photos have been released yet of this historic bust or I’d obviously be sharing them with you right now. So here’s a GIF of Pam from Archer instead:
To put this drug bust into something you can understand: an ‘8 ball’ is 3.5 grams, there are 453.592 grams in a pound. Doing the math that means that 7,652,097.04 8 balls of blow were just confiscated off the coast of El Salvador. Once you take into consideration that the cocaine likely hasn’t been cut yet, you can probably go ahead and double, triple, or even quadruple that number and say that over 21 MILLION 8 balls of blow never made it to the streets. That’s just an unfathomable amount of cocaine. But you know what they say, for every bust officials make at the borders a hundred others are getting in….