LOS ANGELES — As a result of a security crackdown along the border with Mexico, the waters off Southern California have been teeming with smugglers in the past few years, as drug cartels seek new avenues to move illicit cargo into the United States.
Last week, the maritime crime claimed its first American life when smugglers rammed a small Coast Guard vessel with their 30-foot fishing boat, killing a Coast Guard member who was thrown overboard.
“There’s been an uptick in smuggling at sea because we have been successful in making it difficult for smuggling organizations at the land border,” said Claude Arnold, the special agent in charge for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles. “They’re trying everything they can to get their productsinto the country.”
Episodes involving smugglers off the California coast have increased fourfold since 2008, with more than 200 smuggling vessels spotted by U.S.
law-enforcement agencies last fiscal year. Marijuana seizures from maritime smugglers, meanwhile, were up fourfold from just one year earlier. And some smugglers are also carrying human cargo, circumventing the security along the land border for those with the means to pay for it.
Federal officials said there was no way to know precisely how many smugglers had successfully reached California’s shores, but they think that “a larger share” of smugglers make it through. And the flow of drugs and people into the country from the sea has clearly undercut some of the progress the authorities have made in blocking overland supply routes.
In just a few years, officials said, drug and human trafficking off the coast herehas grown into an elaborate, highly lucrative and increasingly dangerous operation, as smugglers venture farther out to sea and farther north along the coast in search of safe places to deliver their cargo undetected.
Coast Guard officials said the death of Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne, 34, was the first time a Coast Guard member had been killed by smugglers since prohibition.
But as rare as it was, the deadly encounter early Dec. 2 near an island off Santa Barbara also demonstrated some of the bold tactics smugglers are using here, putting law enforcement at ever greater risk.
“As the ships are going further offshore and further north, we are dealing with larger boats and more horsepower,” said Rear Adm. Karl L. Schultz, the Coast Guard commander in the region. “It does increase the challenge and the inherent danger out there to our folks on the water.”
When the surge in maritime smuggling began here around 2009, Schultz said, smugglers mostly used small boats with single engines that delivered their payloads to sites in San Diego County, rarely traveling more than 50 miles north of the Mexican border.
As the government devoted more resources to curbing smuggling, however, the Sinaloa drug cartel, which officials say controls smuggling corridors on both land and sea, has adapted.
Coast Guard surveillance aircraft have detected smuggling vessels up to 100 miles offshore, Schultz said, and in the past two years, smugglers have been arrested along remote stretches of beach on California’s Central Coast, more than 300 miles north of the border.
To make these longer journeys, smugglers have moved from cheap, 20-foot fishing vessels to boats that are oftentwice that size and sometimes equipped with multiple engines.
As the cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and smugglers moves farther out to sea, however, it also becomes more dangerous - not only for the Coast Guard but also for the smugglers’ human cargo.
At least six people are known to have died aboard smuggling vessels since 2008, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, all in episodes close to shore. Many more may have died out at sea if open-hulled smuggling boats, often packed with more than a dozen people, capsized or sank.
So many smuggling vessels have landed on the shores of Santa Barbara County that Brown appealed for federal help this year. And federalauthorities have begun to devote more resources toward combating maritime smuggling, not only in San Diego and Los Angeles, but farther up the coast.
Helicopters and planes watch from the air - it was a Coast Guard aircraft that spotted the smugglers before the deadly encounter Dec. 2 - while ships pursue smugglers farther and farther offshore. And the authorities have convened a series of task forces, bringing together local, state and federal agencies to fight maritime smuggling here.
“We have directed a lot of resources towards this because we recognize it as a huge potential security vulnerability,” Arnold said. “Who’s to say they wouldn’t be willing to smuggle a terrorist into the county ?”
Front Section, Pages 6 on 12/09/2012