Gretchen Peters, Chronicle Foreign Service Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Mexico City -- U.S. pilots flying surveillance missions first became suspicious of the 152-foot fishing boat when they spotted the vessel in remote Pacific waters not known for having much fish.
When a Coast Guard team, patroling the Pacific under a multinational agreement, finally boarded the Belize-flagged Svesda Maru south of Acapulco last month, they found no functioning fishing equipment and few fish stored in the cargo hold. Instead, officers uncovered 26,397 pounds of cocaine with a street value of more than $500 million stashed in secret compartments. It was the largest cocaine seizure in U.S. maritime history.
Since late last year, U.S. drug authorities have seized 129,721 pounds of cocaine -- some 80 percent of it in boats sailing in the Pacific, according to Coast Guard statistics. In contrast, 132,480 pounds were seized in fiscal year 2000, a record annual amount.
There is another alarming trend as well -- Ukrainians and Russians are increasingly being detained for manning drug boats.
The Svesda Maru bust was the latest in a string of major drug seizures off Mexico involving Russian and Ukrainian crews, leading authorities to suspect that Mexican smugglers -- in particular, the notorious Arellano-Felix brothers gang -- are now in business with the Russian mafia.
Authorities also fear that the Russians are in cahoots with the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The two Russians and eight Ukrainians manning the Svesda Maru are now in federal custody on smuggling charges.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials say that the cocaine originated in Colombia and was headed either for Central America or Mexico, from where it would eventually be smuggled into the United States.
The nationalities of the Svesda Maru crew are an "indication that there is direct involvement or some kind of association between Russian organized crime and members of the Arellano-Felix organization," said Errol Chavez, a DEA agent in San Diego.
Chavez says the Svesda Maru must have received permission from the violent Arellano-Felix cartel to transport cocaine in what is acknowledged as their territory.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego said it was still too early to link the captured Svesda Maru crew -- and a similar bust in February -- to Russian crime syndicates.
"It is obviously a little unusual to find Russians with a large amount of cocaine in the middle of the Pacific," said Gonzalo Curiel, the office's chief of narcotics. "Two cases don't necessarily make a pattern, but obviously it is something we will be looking at very closely."
Mexico is the largest transshipment point of South American cocaine bound for the United States. The U.S. government estimates that half of the $65 billion in narcotics annually sold on U.S. streets passes through Mexico.
Last November, the office of Mexico's attorney general said it had proof that Tijuana's Arellano-Felix gang had provided military hardware and cash to the FARC, which controls most of the drug-growing areas of Colombia, in exchange for large amounts of cocaine. The FARC taxes drug producers in areas under its control to finance its 37-year-old uprising against the government.
Last September, in a scene worthy of a Tom Clancy novel, police stumbled upon a half-built submarine in a warehouse outside Bogota. The 100-foot sub was being built to smuggle cocaine, reportedly with the help of the Russian mafia.
According to the Associated Press, leaders from Mexico's other leading drug cartels met for a three-day summit last month aimed at uniting their operations. The report, which cited unnamed sources, prompted speculation that the Arellano-Felix brothers may have looked to the Russian underworld to help protect their business interests and ensure their longevity.
Interpol, the international police organization, says hundreds of small Russian mafia "cells" operate in Mexico, though the DEA and Mexican authorities have never linked them publicly to the Arellano-Felix ring.
Ernesto Lopez Portillo, an organized-crime expert in Mexico City, notes that Russian crime organizations are the world's fastest-growing crime groups and may very well be developing narcotics ties in Mexico.
"They have the money. They have the protection. They have the power," said Lopez Portillo. "Why would they stop if they find a market to supply?"
"These are all very entrepreneurial people," added Brian Jenkins, an authority on international crime at Rand Corp. of Santa Monica, which advises multinational corporations. "They are in a sense globalizing for the same reasons all businesses are globalizing. Organized crime does not work very differently than regular business."
But Jenkins cautioned against concluding that the recent drug hauls signal "a vast, centrally directed underworld." Instead, he suggests that criminal gangs are plugged in to similar groups in the same way the World Wide Web functions.
"This is the underworld equivalent of global sourcing," he said.
But there are doubters. Russian underworld syndicates are known to be much more active in Central Asia and southern and eastern Europe than in the Americas. U.S. intelligence sources say they basically help Colombians import drugs into Europe through Italy.
"It seems like a very big leap from where they were," said Peter Reuter, a professor at the Public Policy School at the University of Maryland. "And it is not as if the Colombians don't know already how to do this."