It was a shocking discovery. On July 2, agents from the Ecuadorian military and police, acting on a tip from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, raided a smugglers' camp deep in Ecuador's jungle. Among rickety buildings and some scattered equipment lay a 100-foot-long submarine, half-submerged in a muddy channel.
The diesel- and electrically powered vessel, constructed partially of fiberglass and capable of carrying six people and up to 12 tons of cargo fully underwater, was clearly designed to smuggle multi-million-dollar shipments of cocaine, most likely to the major drug markets in the U.S
Smugglers have been using low-riding, hard-to-spot semi-submersible boats for more than a decade, but the fully submersible Ecuadorian vessel is the first of its kind known to authorities. "We don't know whether there are others," U.S. Southern Command chief Gen. Douglas Fraser said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington July 29.