Recently, three South Americans have been convicted by a San Diego Federal Jury for smuggling cocaine off the coast of Ecuador. The trio was carrying about 2,706 pounds of cocaine when they were caught in late 2017.
The cocaine was calculated to be worth around $28 million. United States District Judge Roger Benitez sentenced the three men to 13 to 19 years in prison.
According to prosecutors, members of the Coast Guard were tasked with investigating a suspicious boat about 100 miles north of Ecuadorian shores. When the Coast Guard arrived, the men sped off in the boat, attempting to outrun the helicopter that had just found them. They went as far as tossing bundles of cocaine off their boat to lower the weight and increase speed.
Eventually, a Coast Guard precision marksman was successfully able to destroy the engine of their boat, which eventually allowed officers to successfully apprehend them. They were able to recover the massive amounts of cocaine thrown overboard, and get a handle on the situation.
Officials were stunned by the amount of cocaine the three men were carrying on the boat. Karen Flowers, the DEA special agent in the San Diego area, gave a comparison that is very frightening: the amount of cocaine they had would have been enough to give 17 doses to each person in the entire City of San Diego, which is estimated to be 1.4 million people. Officers from the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, and police stations stop drug traffickers very frequently, and the magnitude of this situation highlights the severity of the drug smuggling crisis.
Republican lawmakers and officials in California and across the nation are working to ensure that situations like this are stopped. Drugs have been pouring into our nation for decades now, and the situation isn’t being adequately handled due to the massive political divide in Congress.
Photo by Bill Oxford
