San Diego — U.S. authorities unloaded 8.8 tons of cocaine Sunday that they said was seized on a rusty fishing boat off the coast of Mexico. It was the government's fourth-largest such seizure ever.
The Coast Guard said a Navy destroyer with a Coast Guard law enforcement unit on board seized the boat Feb. 24 about 250 miles west of Acapulco. They towed the boat to San Diego.
The seizure, which the Coast Guard said was the government's fourth-largest, capped what the agency called one of its most productive weeks of anti-drug patrols.
In six days, the Coast Guard from Miami to the Caribbean, and in the Pacific from Mexico to Washington state seized 28,845 pounds of cocaine, about what it captured in all of 1996.
"We've never had a week like this where our border has been assaulted all the way from the Bahamas to Seattle," said Cmdr. Jim McPherson.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta praised the anti-drug effort.
"Those engaged in drug trafficking are attempting to penetrate all of our borders," he said near a Coast Guard pier, where the 8.8 tons of cocaine were stacked neatly in large blocks on wooden pallets.
The 10 crew members of the Belize-flagged boat, the "Forever My Friend," will face drug smuggling charges that carry a minimum 10-year sentence and a maximum of life in prison, U.S. Atty. Gregory Vega said. They were to appear today in federal court in San Diego.
Eight of the men are from Nicaragua, one is from El Salvador and one from Ukraine. The cocaine was hidden in a secret compartment, buried under ice and fresh fish, authorities said.
The string of recent seizures reflects a general increase in the amount of cocaine seized at sea by the Coast Guard working with the Navy, the Customs Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies.
In 1999, the Coast Guard seized a record 55 tons of cocaine, which broke the previous high of 40.7 tons. Then in 2000, the agency captured 66 tons.
The Coast Guard estimates it catches only a small fraction of U.S.-bound cocaine, which is generally produced in Colombia and shipped either through the Caribbean or via the Pacific to Mexico to be smuggled overland into the United States through the Southwest.
"We've put a dent in it, but we certainly haven't cut off the flow or driven the price of cocaine through the roof," said Capt. Joseph Conroy, chief of the agency's law enforcement division.
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