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December 9, 2025
The plummeting price of cocaine is forcing drug-traffickers to reuse the “narco-submarines” they would previously have scuttled once the custom-built vessels had completed their cargo runs from South America to Europe, according to a senior Spanish police officer.
While semi-submersible vehicles have been used regularly in Colombia and other parts of South and Central America since the 1980s, they were not detected in European waters until 2006, when an abandoned sub was found in an estuary in the north-west Spanish region of Galicia.
Since then, 10 such subs have been spotted or seized by Spanish police. Until recently, the boats, which cost about €600,000 (£524,000) to build, were used for one-way trips."
But with massive cocaine production leading to market saturation – wholesale prices have halved to €15,000 (£13,000) a kilo over the past few years – drug-traffickers can no longer afford to consign their vehicles to a “narco-sub graveyard” between the Azores and the Canary Islands.
“These semi-submersibles used to head to the area around the Canaries on one-way voyages and they’d then be sunk,” said Alberto Morales, the head of the central narcotics brigade of the Spanish Policía Nacional.
“Back then, the cost of the merchandise in comparison with the cost of the vessel still made doing that very worthwhile – they’d be carrying three or four tonnes minimum, so operating that way was very profitable. But what’s happened lately is that the price of the merchandise is really, really low, so the organisations have, logically, had a rethink."
“Rather than sink them, what they do now is unload the merchandise and set up a refuelling platform at sea so that the semi-submersibles can head back to the countries they came from and make as many journeys as possible.”
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