Drug cartels using new 'go-fast' boats that are almost INVISIBLE to radar on Central American smuggling missions
- Fiberglass 'Picuda' are packed with motors and can carry a ton of drugs
- Speedy craft are long, thin and can avoid large amounts of radar detection
- Have cut travel time from Columbia to Costa Rica, Jamaica, by a third
The criminals have replaced older, slow boats with sleek 'Picuda' models that are long, thin and can confound detection methods, the analysts said.
Picudas can go as much as twice as fast as traditional smuggling vessels while carrying around a one ton of illegal drugs each.
Speedy: The 'Picuda' boats, shown above being chased by the U.S. Coast Guard, can drastically cut the time it takes smugglers to get from Colombia to destinations such as Costa Rica and Jamaica with their illegal hauls
Long and thin: The boats, packed full of powerful engines, are made of fiberglass, which makes them hard to track
The covert trips, made after dark, often take the smugglers from Colombia, and had on from there to Costa Rica, Honduras or Jamaica to unload their cargo to be sold off.
Whereas the trips used to take three days in the older speed boats, they can now be finished in two, according to military publication Dialogo.
The new boats also have a more efficient design, which means they use less fuel, saving money and making room for more illegal drugs, the report said.
By employing fiberglass as the sole building material for the hulls - rather than just parts as before - the boats have also been made practically impervious to radar, confounding Coast Guard authorities who try to catch them.
The boats, which measure 32-38ft long, are equipped with three separate 200 horsepower engines. An equivalent sized fishing boat may have 50 horsepower at its disposal - a twelfth of the power.
Haul: The boats can carry as much as a ton each of illegal drugs at high speed. Pictured above are bales of marijuana
Adam Isacson, a security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the developments are another sign of the criminals' high-tech struggle with authorities like the U.S. Coastguard.
He told Fox News that the cartels' tooling-up is: 'clearly indicative of the cat-and-mouse game they are playing with the law.'
The Coast Guard does sometimes win out over the smugglers. In November they recovered a 580-kilogram stash of cocaine off the coast of Central America.
But much continues to slip through, both in boats and in so-called narco-subs - underwater vehicles stuffed with drugs which are extremely difficult to find when they are on the move.
