After quietly testing Predator drones over the
Bahamas for more than 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security
plans to expand the unmanned surveillance flights into the Caribbean
and the Gulf of Mexico to fight drug smuggling, according to U.S.
officials.
The move would dramatically increase U.S. drone flights in the
Western Hemisphere, more than doubling the number of square miles
now covered by the department's fleet of nine surveillance drones,
which are used primarily on the northern and southwestern U.S.
borders.
But the high-tech aircraft have had limited success spotting drug
runners in the open ocean. The drones have largely failed to impress
veteran military, Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency officers
charged with finding and boarding speedboats, fishing vessels and
makeshift submarines ferrying tons of cocaine and marijuana to
America's coasts.
"The question is: Will they be effective? We have no systematic
evidence on how effective they are," said Bruce Bagley, who studies
U.S. counter-narcotics efforts at the University of Miami in Coral
Gables, Fla.
Despite that, a new control station will arrive this month in
Corpus Christi, Texas, allowing Predators based there to cover more
of the Gulf of Mexico. An additional drone will be delivered this
year to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's base in Cocoa
Beach, Fla., for operations in the Caribbean.
The Federal Aviation Administration already has approved a flight
path for the drones to fly more than 1,000 miles to the Mona
Passage, the strait between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
"There is a lot more going on in the deep Caribbean, and we would
like to know more," said a law enforcement official familiar with
the program who was not authorized to speak publicly. The official
said drones may be based temporarily at airfields in the Dominican
Republic and Puerto Rico.
The Predator B is best known as the drone used by the CIA to find
and kill al-Qaida terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. An unarmed
version patrols the U.S. borders searching known overland smuggling
routes.
On the ocean, however, there are no rutted trails or roads to
follow. And the Predator cannot cover as much open water as larger,
higher-flying surveillance aircraft, such as the Global Hawk.
"I'm not sure just because it's a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)
that it will solve and fit in our problem set," the top military
officer for the region, Air Force Gen. Douglas M. Fraser, said
recently.
Fraser's command contributes ships and manned surveillance
airplanes to the Joint Interagency Task Force South. Last year, the
task force worked with U.S. agencies and other countries to seize
119 metric tons of cocaine, valued at $2.35 billion.
For the recent counter-narcotics flights over the Bahamas, border
agents deployed a maritime variant of the Predator B called a
Guardian with a SeaVue radar system that can scan large sections of
open ocean. Drug agents can check a ship's unique radio pulse in
databases to identify the boat and owner.
The planned drone flights are partly a response to demands from
leaders in the western Caribbean to shift more drug agents,
surveillance aircraft and ships into the area, as cartels have
switched from the closely watched U.S.-Mexico border to seaborne
routes. In the last four years, drug seizures in the Caribbean and
the Gulf of Mexico have increased 36 percent, according to the
Department of Homeland Security.
"As we tighten the land borders, it squishes out to the seas,"
said the law enforcement official.
During the last several years, however, drug-war personnel have
been diverted from the Caribbean to the southwestern U.S. border. In
Puerto Rico, for example, 1 out of 8 DEA positions is vacant.
The increase in drug traffic has contributed to an unprecedented
rise in homicides in Puerto Rico, a major transit point for cocaine
moving from Central America to northeastern U.S. cities. In 2011,
the homicide rate hit a historic high of 1,136, with 8 out of 10
killings related to drug trafficking.
"We need help fighting this battle along the Caribbean border to
protect U.S. citizens there being buffeted by violence," Puerto
Rico's Gov. Luis Fortuno told a congressional panel this week.
Despite budget cuts in other areas, Customs and Border Protection
has requested $5.8 million to push its drone operations farther into
the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
But test flights for the Guardian showed disappointing results in
the Bahamas, according to two law enforcement officials familiar
with the program who were not authorized to speak publicly.
During more than 1,260 hours in the air off the southeastern
coast of Florida, the Guardian assisted in only a handful of large-
scale busts, the officials said.
One of the most recent occurred early Dec. 22, when a Guardian
trained its infrared eye on a sailboat heading toward the south
shoreline of New Providence island in the Bahamas. Photographs of
the sloop and grid coordinates were relayed by the U.S. embassy in
Nassau. The Royal Bahamas Defense Forces found no drugs, but
arrested 23 men, five women and a boy. The passengers were believed
to be migrants from Haiti.
The head of an interagency drug task force based in the Bahamas
called the mission a "great case" in an internal email obtained by
the Los Angeles Times. The mission proved "what we all suspect to be
the case with a piece of equipment that has such promising
capabilities and potential," wrote U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Louie C.
Parks Jr.
But federal officials who received the laudatory message said it
only underscored that such success stories have been extremely rare.
