Narco Submarines, What You Need To Know

[Music] hello and welcome to another submarine chat this one is going to be about narco submarines i've been following this topic for about 10 years and a master database of 200 or more individual narco submarine incidents so this chat is going to be just about the main types if you see a narco submarine in the news it probably fits into the five types of narco submarine i'm going to describe here like my other videos this is unscripted but i prepared some materials so let's get on with it firstly to clear up some terminology narco submarine is a colloquial catch-all term for the purpose-built vessels they use to smuggle drugs typically cocaine mostly from colombia up in the pacific to mexico for onward supply to united states or across the atlantic they've also the submarines themselves have also been known to travel across the atlantic and you get something very similar in europe as well most narco submarines are actually not true submersibles they don't fit the full description of a submarine however it's a useful term so if you have anyone in the comments explaining what a real submarine is you know how far into the video they watched narco submarines are much more common than we realize i estimate that around a thousand have been built if not more they're built in the jungles typically in mangrove swamps like this one in what they term an artisan boat yard the materials are quite basic fiberglass marine plywood and so on they're built for a one-way trip so they build it launch it do some minimal testing then they load it with drugs and send it off on a one-way trip up to mexico typically at the other end it is scuttled some of them are interdicted by the us coast guard colombian navy and other forces i have a database of about 200 incidents and i've analyzed them and that's what's going to form the basis of this talk i have also written a book called narco submarines so if you're interested in topic check that out also check my website out narco subs 101 and actually quite a lot of articles on microsoft so there's five main types obviously the people who build them don't tell us the names and categories and so on however from an external perspective we can make observations about the designs and the trends and different categories the first one is what we determine lpvim this was actually the main type from about 2005 through to 2015 2016 you still get them they're not extinct but they've been superseded by other types which will come on to lpv stands for low profile vessel and im stands for inboard motor they're also known as spss self-propelled semi-submersibles that term is used in law enforcement in some quarters it's becoming less common in general we term lpvs and lpvim when we're being more detailed they look like this this is pretty prototypical i'd say early on there was more variation and some of them had two motors but they've more or less standardized on a single motor a hull form that looks a lot like a sailing yacht but without the sails and without the drop keel obviously the cocaine goes at the front and it has a hatch in the forward deck that hatch isn't always present but it's usually the way they they load and unload the drugs the crew live in the center sleeping on fuel tanks there's a single cockpit with a windows uh raised in the center and the motors at the back one interesting characteristic is the scuttling valve these are used to sink the vessel when it gets to its destination and has been unloaded contrary to popular belief it is not common to scuttle the narco submarine when it gets boarded by law enforcement in the early days it was more common people wanted to destroy the evidence however it's illegal to simply be on board one of these vessels regardless of whether the vessel is sunk or floats and regardless of whether any cocaine is discovered so sinking the vessel won't get you out of jail but it does increase the risks of dying obviously and that's why people don't do it the other thing they used to do is set fire to a vessel equally dangerous it's a good thing that they don't do it around about 2016 we started to see a new type of vessel which was more like a go fast boat or go fast vessel with outboard motors but was running semi-submerged at first we didn't quite know what this was hybrid go fast boat that sort of thing but we've now settled on lpv om om simply stands for outboard motors they're also sometimes called lpgfv so low profile go fast vessel that's much less commonly used i think and also could be challenged to what extent they really are go fast vessel designs vary but one characteristic they all have is that the cabin is at the back if we looked inside that cabin it's invariably a stinking mess this one has is has been interdicted by the us coast guard and you can see the sort of living conditions you'll also notice on the left there's actually a bale of cocaine in the center of your screen there's a tunnel and that leads forward to the cargo area i think that they use this tunnel for sleeping and they can also use it to move individual bales backwards and forwards to trim the vessel so to affect the balance of the vessel when it's underway it's also the main way to load and unload the vessel alternative you can cut the top open they tend not to have a hatch on the top at the fire and dirt tunnel is the cargo area and it will be jam-packed full of cocaine the exact quantity varies typically it's about one and a half to one point six kilo tons metric tons but it can be three tons or more i think the actual quantity has more to do with the market and the needs of the cartel than the physical capacity of the vessel soon after we started seeing the vessels with the outboard motors a new variation started to emerge this looks very similar to the regular ones from the side but actually if you look at it from the top is much narrower it has a length to width ratio of about 10 to one and we term this a vsv or very slender vessel that is a generic term for for vessels with this shape and it improves the stability and efficiency when it's going through waves as opposed to over top of wave so it's different from a speed boat the goat tries to plane over a wave inside they're pretty similar to the ones that are not vsv you have the cargo hold you have fuel at the front and also the sides beside the tunnel you have the cabin at the back and the outboard motors and so on at the very back those outboard motors are typically going to be enduro 75 horsepower two-stroke but it does vary they're looking for something that's reliable and pretty ubiquitous something that's easy to source and not easy to trace the first three were the ones that we commons commonly seen much rarer but perhaps more interesting are beasts like this one at first sight this looks like a regular low profile vessel im you can see it's got an internal motor you can see the exhaust coming out of the back there it's viewed from the back looking forward but the same vessel from another angle you can see how long it is they've essentially combined the vsv hull form with the internal motor layout this is potentially the most stealthy of all the designs it's quite rare though this shows a contrast between the two the bottom one obviously is the vsv there's a story to both these vessels actually the top one happens to be one that was found in spain and has crossed the atlantic and the bottom one happens to be the largest low-profile vessel that's ever been found certainly by length about 30 meters long i suspect that they're built by the same person okay the last category is the one that people are generally most excited by sometimes you find narco submarines that look like true submarines we call these fsvs for fully submersible vessel the designs vary they've only ever been found before they've been launched not a single one has ever been interdicted which suggests they're much more successful i don't think they're as common as low profile vessels but clearly there's many more out there than we know of they do share certain characteristics though the first one is the hull has to have a circular or generally circular cross-section that ends up looking like a sausage a tube just like a regular submarine and for the same reason it needs to be strong from all angles to withhold the weight of water these only submerge a few meters so they're not anything like a military submarine in terms of operating depth but they still need to be completely watertight built like a submarine some of them actually are fiberglass which is quite interesting the arrow points to hatch this will be a giveaway if you're going to fully submerge you need to have a very solid hatch which is watertight and so you see more elaborate circular hatches than you do on low profile vessels if you see one which has got a square hatch that implies that it's not fully submersible although i'd be cautious of that they also need hydroplanes of some sort so these small wings which allow them to dive and surface again this particular design had very large ones but they're all going to have them of some sort and they need some sort of propulsion power source so a very large number of batteries would be typical some of them do have diesel engines but they can't run those while they're fully submerged an example one with a diesel engines this one as you can see it looks like a submarine this one actually is not fully submersible it's what we term a snorkel sub so when it's running it uses its diesel engines and it doesn't have enough batteries to operate on its own it needs to have the mast above water at all times that mast also has a camera and navigation aids in this particular case what i say though is that although it's not a true submarine because it cannot fully submerge you would only know that if you analyzed it so we don't have a different category for this because it's not visible from the outside that it's not a true submarine okay hopefully that was interesting so if you're interested in narco subs check out my book check out my website i hope to do more videos talking about the most interesting examples the history the very early ones the trends and how they build them let me know in the comments what you think and what you'd like to know more about thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: H I Sutton

Views: 1,037,370

Keywords: submarine, narcos

Id: BR18qhnGEpM

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021