Narco-subs: Venezuela's drug smuggling submarines 'evade detection from border force'
The coffin-like vessels are launched from countries including Venezuela and Colombia to smuggle as much as three tonnes of cocaine
Narco-submarines are the drug smuggling method taking over the Caribbean Sea, that law enforcement cannot detect, submarine expert tells LBC.
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Drug smugglers are building home-made fibreglass submarines to smuggle cocaine undetected.
With crews couched, or lying down, for days at a time, the vessels can cross the Caribbean, or even the Atlantic, with as much as three tonnes of cocaine.
The coffin-like vessels are launched from countries including Venezuela and Colombia, are not military submarines but low-profile craft designed to evade radar and patrols by travelling outside established shipping routes.
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Verineia Codrean, Chief of Strategy & Partnerships at EUROATLAS, the company behind the GREYSHARK autonomous underwater vehicle, told LBC the scale of the problem may be far greater than authorities realise.
"Narco submarines are not a niche criminal problem," she said.
"They’re an early sign of undersea innovation happening outside state control."
The biggest concern, Ms Codren said, is "we only know about narco submarines that were caught".
The US military caught a drug-carrying vessel, allegedly from Venezuela, in October. The president later said the two survivors from the submersible would be sent to Ecuador and Colombia, their home countries, "for detention and prosecution".
Unlike naval submarines, many narco subs are built in remote locations, without formal shipyards or advanced facilities.
Despite that, Ms Codrean said they remain "so hard to detect" that they continue to baffle law enforcement agencies.
"They look for the gaps in known routes," Ms Codrean explained.
"That’s why detection, classification and pattern discovery is the hardest problem authorities are dealing with."
Most narco subs are semi-submersibles, travelling just below the surface with a small section visible above water.
According to the U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force South, most of the submersibles are typically:
- Made of wood, fiberglass, or steel
- Up to 12–24 metres long
- Range of 3200 kilometers
- Reach speeds of 11 km/h
- Crew capacity 4 smugglers
In some cases, Ms Codrean said, the vessels avoid detection by switching off systems entirely.
“They disconnect all their sensors and are dragged by another vessel,” she said, meaning they use no power and leave little trace.
"They’re not meant to come back,” she said.
Even if it costs up to a million dollars to build one, it’s worth it if the shipment gets through."
While the routes typically begin in South America, the impact is global.
Ms Codrean said growing sophistication has enabled traffickers to attempt transatlantic journeys, with European ports increasingly affected.
The challenge, she said, is not a lack of enforcement power, but a lack of intelligence.
“Authorities are missing the data,” she told LBC. “They don’t know where the routes are.”
'Slipping through completely unseen'
GREYSHARK, an autonomous underwater vehicle, is designed to help fill that gap. Ms Codrean stressed it is not an interception tool, but a surveillance asset.
“Autonomous underwater vehicles can act as a force multiplier,” she said, detecting anomalies, identifying patterns and building intelligence over time.
“Once you have that missing layer of data, border guards can intervene very quickly.”
As narco submarines continue to evolve beneath the surface, experts warn that without better detection, many may be slipping through completely unseen.