Now,
it turns out, there's a secret U.S. detention system in the War on
Drugs, too — and this one is aboard U.S. Coast Guard cutters sailing in
the Pacific Ocean.
In an effort to staunch the flow
of cocaine and other hard drugs from South America to Central America
and points north, Coast Guard cutters have been deployed farther and
farther from the shore in the Pacific Ocean. When these cutters capture a
boat carrying drugs, the smugglers are brought onto the ships and kept
shackled to the deck, sometimes outside in the elements, until the Coast
Guard makes arrangements for them to be transported back to the U.S.
for trial.
But this isn't a wait of just a few hours or days. Often, these waits can last weeks or months, according to new reporting from The New York Times.
Coast Guard officials say they can do this because the drug smugglers
aren't under arrest until they reach U.S. shores, but some of the worst
cases are drawing criticism even from Coast Guard officials.
Seth Freed Wessler reported this story for The Times.
He says a combination of U.S. agreements with Latin American countries
and the U.S. Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act allows the US to take
this action. Wessler spoke with The World's Carol Hills about his
reporting and these "floating Guantánamos" on the Pacific Ocean.
The
Coast Guard usually has a reputation for being the good guys out there —
rescuing people, apprehending bad guys. We've done stories about that. I
take it it's a little bit more complicated?
It
is. The Coast Guard has a broad mission. It does search and rescue,
enforces fisheries laws. It enforces drug laws on the oceans and, what
few people know, is that the U.S. Coast Guard has actually been deployed
in recent years deep into the Pacific Ocean to interdict drug smugglers
moving between South America — Colombia, Ecuador — and Central America,
where the drugs — often cocaine — are dropped off and then often moved
up through Mexico. These Coast Guard ships are deployed deep into the
Pacific —sometimes thousands of miles from the nearest U.S. port, where
they're detaining suspected smugglers and holding them aboard these
Coast Guard cutters. What I found in my reporting is that detainees, men
who are moving cocaine in the Pacific Ocean.
You
write about some Ecuadorians who are out there transporting drugs and
they end up shackled for many, many days on a Coast Guard boat. Give us
the quick thumbnail sketch of this one guy, in particular, Jhonny
Arcentales, and how he ended up there?
He
is a fisherman from a coastal town in Ecuador and was having a
particularly, economically, rough year and made a decision to take a job
smuggling cocaine off of the coast of Ecuador. He really didn't know
all that much about what he was doing.
As he was
moving this cocaine on a boat with three other men, another Ecuadorian
man and a Colombian man, they were approaching Central America,
approaching Guatemala and the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard intercepted that
boat and pulled these men off. For the next 70 days, Mr. Arcentales and
the other man he was detained with were held — always chained by their
ankle to the deck of a ship or to a cable running along one of these
large Coast Guard or Navy ships — for 70 days. He was moved from ship to
ship as these Coast Guard cutters went about their patrols, picking up
more cocaine in the Pacific Ocean.
So this
guy, Arcentales, and another guy — they're on a ship. This is a Coast
Guard ship and they're basically exposed to the elements and basically
shackled and not getting much food. How can the Coast Guard get away
with keeping people under those conditions when the men haven't even
been charged?
The Coast Guard makes the
argument that these people are not formally under arrest until they get
to the United States. They're simply being held, while the Coast Guard
deals with the logistical challenges of trying to get these men onto
shore — into an airplane and flown to Florida, where they'll be
prosecuted.
Courts have generally bought the
government's argument. The argument by the Coast Guard and by federal
prosecutors that these logistical delays are legitimate, as it's hard
enough to get people back. The reality is that when the Coast Guard has
had to move people more quickly, they do. Very often, detainees are
brought to port in one of these cutters, then placed in a hidden room in
a helicopter hangar or in a room below deck and hidden there for the
day while the Coast Guard cutter refuels or the Coast Guard crew get a
bit of a break and then are brought back out to sea.
So
there are these delays that people in the Coast Guard — Coast Guard
officials I interviewed — though really are actually unreasonable,
considering that they're near an airport. Somebody could be put on a
plane and brought back to the United States. As we've made this decision
to prosecute more and more people, these delays have grown longer and
longer.
What we're seeing now is sort of carting
people around ... carting suspected drug smugglers around the ocean an
average of 18 days — very often longer than that — as the government
waits to transport people to courts in Florida.
Now
Donald Trump's chief of staff, General John Kelly, he played a key role
in expanding the reach of the Coast Guard in this way.
Well,
John Kelly was in charge of Southern Command, the Department of Defense
area of operation in Latin America that's in charge of managing the
drug war in Latin America. He was the head of Southern Command between
2012 and 2016 then retired. Under the Trump administration, he became
head of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Coast
Guard.
On two occasions he has had a role in these
operations. And John Kelly has really been a proponent of the idea. He's
called drug smuggling in Central America an existential threat to the
United States. And the idea that we need to push our borders outward
farther and farther away from our actual borders in order to defend the
homeland, that's led to this effort to interdict drugs far, far away
from the United States in places where drug smugglers actually really
have very little idea where their drugs are headed. So, Johnny
Arcentales and the other men that I've spoken to know, they're not
thinking about where these drugs are going. The drugs are moving from
South America to Central America as far as they're concerned. It's out
of their control after that, but we're arresting people in international
waters, often on foreign boats, thousands of miles from the United
States.
So the Coast Guard is arresting
these people in these boats and it's not clear whether the drugs on
these boats are going to the U.S.?
Ultimately,
most of the cocaine on these smugglers' small boats is probably headed
for the United States. But some of it may be going to other markets, to
European markets, to Australian markets or elsewhere. It's not always
clear that the drugs are coming here and, in fact, the circuit court in
California has said that the U.S. can't prosecute these cases unless
they can prove that the drugs were headed to the United States — that
they actually intended to to show up there. And that's one of the
reasons why federal prosecutors prefer to bring these cases to Florida,
where that burden of proof is not required.
Whatever happened to Johnny Arcentales? How many days was he out there on this ship?
He
was picked up in September of 2014. And for the next 70 days, he was
held aboard a series of Coast Guard cutters and Navy frigates as he was
moved around the Pacific Ocean. He describes the experience of feeling
like he really might disappear.
He didn't know
that he was going to be brought to the United States, wasn't being
allowed to call his family — wondering, "does my family think I died?"
He was ultimately brought to shore in Central America and told "you're
going to be handed over to the Drug Enforcement Administration now" and
brought to the United States to face prosecution after more than two
months held aboard these ships.
He was brought to
the United States, charged criminally under drug trafficking laws and
was sentenced to 10 years to a decade in federal prison. He's now in a
federal prison in New Jersey.
The community he
comes from on the central coast of Ecuador, many men have left on these
smuggling trips. More than a year ago, there was a major earthquake in
Ecuador that left families in dire economic straits. Since then, there
have been more and more people leaving. In fact, his son-in-law decided
not long after that earthquake to take one of these jobs and left home.
He didn't tell anyone and disappeared. Days later, was picked up by the
Coast Guard. He was also sentenced to a decade in U.S. federal prison.
The
question about the legality of the U.S. Coast Guard's detention
practices has not been raised, in an international context, in criminal
courts. In the United States, when defense attorneys have tried to argue
that the conditions amount to inhumane treatment, some cases judges
have agreed. But they've said there's nothing we can really do about it.
The law does not allow for us to throw this case out.
What about the shame factor?
This is a practice of detention that until now hasn't really been known.
I
wrote to dozens of men and received letters back from many of these men
who'd been detained on these Coast Guard ships, describing the
conditions of their confinement. Describing what sounded to me like real
terror for them on the high seas. Those are stories that hadn't been
told before.
Are they allowed to use a proper bathroom?
No
the bathrooms on these boats are very different, ship to ship. They're
provided essentially buckets to use as toilets on some of the boats. And
these men are then required to clean out the buckets themselves and
dump them off the edge of the ship. They describe that as a really
terrible disgusting process. And the Coast Guard says "our ships aren't
equipped as detention centers. We don't have facilities here. This is
what we've got."
In fact, I spoke to Coast Guard
commanders who are really uncomfortable about the conditions on their
ship — and uncomfortable about the amount of time people are held.
I
have evidence of people being held for upwards of 70 days. A Coast
Guard official told me people have been held for 90 days. But the Coast
Guard has no clear rules about how long they can hold people.
When
you talk to Coast Guard officials and ask them about these things that
you've researched and found out, what do they say? Are they proud of
this or are they a little bit wary of what's going on?
Many
of the Coast Guard officials that I talked to were really uncomfortable
about the detention conditions and the amount of time that people were
being held during their detention. I really felt that officials thought
people need to be moved off the boats more quickly and, again, are
uncomfortable about the conditions that they have to hold people in.
Have you talked with the families?
Yes.
Many families, in fact, believe that their loved ones — husbands,
fathers, sons — had disappeared. It's not unheard of for fishermen to
disappear in the sea.
For these fishermen, the
ocean is the geography of their life. And so when I talked to
Arcentales, for example, about the sea, he said to me "the ocean used to
be a place that for me represented freedom. But now it's like a prison
in the open ocean."
And all of these men say "we
understand that we've broken laws. We understand that we made these
decisions. We understand that we're going to be punished for this." The
question that they raise is "how are we in the United States right now?"
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