How US Coast Guard targets smugglers and detains them for months to await trial

The Coast Guard captured more than 700 suspects and chained them aboard American ships in the 12 months leading up to September 2017

A Us Coast Guard ship (Getty Images)

In an expansion of the war on drugs, the US coast guard is targeting low-level smugglers in international waters - shackling them on ships for weeks or even months before they are formally charged in American courts.

On nights when the November rain poured down and he had not slept at all, Jhonny Arcentales had visions of dying, of his body being cast into the dark ocean. He would imagine his wife and their teenage son tossing his clothes into a pit in a cemetery and gathering at the local church for his funeral.

It had been more than two months since Arcentales, a 40-year-old fisherman from Ecuador’s central coast, left home, telling his wife he would return in five days. A cuff clamped onto his ankle kept him shackled to a cable along the deck of the ship but for the occasional trip, guarded by a sailor, to defecate into a bucket.

Most of the time, he couldn’t move more than an arm’s length in either direction without jostling the next shackled man. “The sea used to be freedom,” he told me. But on the ship, “it was the opposite. Like a prison in the open ocean.”

By day Arcentales would stand against the wall and stare out at the water, his mind blank one moment, the next racing with thoughts of his wife and their newborn son. He had not spoken to his family, though he asked each day to call home. He increasingly felt panicked, fearing his wife would believe he was dead.

Arcentales has wide muscular shoulders from his 25 years hauling fishing nets from the sea. But his meals now consisted of a handful of rice and beans, and he could feel his body shrinking from the undernourishment and immobility.

In the first weeks, Arcentales had turned to his friend Carlos Quijije, another fisherman from the small town of Jaramijó, to calm him. They were chained side by side, and the 26-year-old would offer some perspective. “Relax brother, everything is going to work out,” Arcentales remembered Quijije saying. “They’ll take us to Ecuador, and we will see our families.” But after two months of being shackled aboard the ship, Quijije seemed just as despondent. They often thought they would simply disappear.

By this time it was November 2014, and in the brick box of a house where Arcentales lived in Ecuador, Lorena Mendoza, Arcentales’s wife, and their children were praying together for his return.

Mendoza had no way of knowing that her husband was still alive. He had departed Jaramijó because his family needed money so desperately that he had accepted a job smuggling cocaine off the coast of Ecuador. But deep in the Pacific, Arcentales and the other fishermen he travelled with were stopped not by pirates or vigilantes but by the United States Coast Guard, deployed more than 2,000 miles from US shores to trawl for Andean cocaine.

Over the past six years, more than 2,700 men like Arcentales have been taken from boats suspected of smuggling Colombian cocaine to Central America, to be carried around the ocean for weeks or months as the American ships continue their patrols. These fishermen-turned-smugglers are caught in international waters, or in foreign seas, and often have little or no understanding of where the drugs aboard their boats are ultimately bound.

But nearly all of these boatmen are now carted from the Pacific and delivered to the United States to face criminal charges here, in what amounts to a vast extraterritorial exertion of American legal might.

The US Coast Guard never intended to operate a fleet of “floating Guantánamos,” as a former Coast Guard lawyer put it to me in May. In the 1990s and through the 2000s, maritime detentions averaged around 200 a year. Then in 2012, the Department of Defense’s Southern Command, tasked with leading the war on drugs in the Americas, launched a multinational military campaign called Operation Martillo, or “hammer.”

The goal was to shut down smuggling routes in the waters between South and Central America, stopping large shipments of cocaine carried on speedboats thousands of miles from the United States, long before they could be broken down and carried over land into Mexico and then into the United States.

In 2016, under the Southern Command’s strategy, the Coast Guard, with intermittent help from the US Navy and international partners, detained 585 suspected drug smugglers, mostly in international waters. That year, 80 per cent of these men were taken to the United States to face criminal charges, up from a third of detainees in 2012. In the 12 months that ended in September 2017, the Coast Guard captured more than 700 suspects and chained them aboard American ships.

Their protracted detention is justified by Coast Guard officials and federal prosecutors alike, who argue that suspects like Arcentales are not formally under arrest when the Coast Guard detains them. While on board, they’re not read Miranda rights, not appointed lawyers, not allowed to contact their consulate or their families. They don’t appear to benefit from federal rules of criminal procedure that require that criminal suspects arrested outside the United States be presented before a judge “without unnecessary delay.”

It is as if their rights are in suspension during their capture at sea. “It’s hard-wired into the Coast Guard’s minds,” says Eugene R Fidell, a former Coast Guard lawyer who teaches at Yale Law School, “that usual law enforcement constraints don’t apply.”

The increased detentions and the domestic prosecutions of extraterritorial activity were ushered in largely under the watch of General John Kelly, who from 2012 to 2016 served as the head of the Southern Command and is now the White House chief of staff. He has long championed the idea that drug smuggling and the drug-related violence in Central America poses what he has called an “existential” threat to the United States and that to protect the homeland, American law enforcement must reach beyond US borders.

Arcentales never had much money. The $6,000 (£4,500) he could hope to make a year, on the skiff and working on tuna ships for a month or two at a time, does not stretch far in Ecuador’s economy. The house where he and Mendoza lived was just a single room for their family of nine: their teenage son, Enrique; Mendoza’s two older daughters from a previous marriage, Nelly and Juliana, who have three children between them; and Nelly’s husband, Wladimir Jaramillo. They all slept on fraying mattresses, sharing a single toilet. When it rained, the roof leaked and muddy water trickled through the door.

On the morning of 5 September after a very bad night of sleep, Arcentales left Mendoza and their children. “Viejita,” he told her, “don’t worry, everything will be Okay”.

A fisherman Arcentales had known for years had been soliciting Arcentales for two years to accept a cocaine smuggling job. Arcentales always refused. But when he left home that September morning, Arcentales went looking for that man. Ecuador is a secondary shipment point for Colombian drug-smuggling groups who work increasingly for Mexican cartels, and in Jaramijó, recruiters, called enganchadores, those who “hook,” have become fixtures.

Residents of the town have watched as their neighbours return from what they say were fishing trips, then buy cars or fix up their homes. Residents call the trip “la vuelta ” which means, aspirationally, “round trip.” The fisherman told Arcentales that he would earn $2,000 (£1,500) up front, and then $20,000 (£15,000) apiece for him and his partner upon their return. It was as much as Arcentales could expect to earn in three or four years. If Quijije joined him, they could finally buy their boat.

The next evening, he and Quijije met another man in San Lorenzo, near the Colombian border. The man led them to a skiff, gave Arcentales a GPS tracker and instructed the pair to meet another boat at a location 50 nautical miles away. There, he said, they would collect 100 kilos of cocaine, split in four packages, and the coordinates for another vessel less than a day’s trip away where they would drop off the drugs and then be done.

But when they arrived at the location to retrieve the drugs, they were instead given 440 kilos of cocaine and joined by a baby-faced Colombian in his early 20s named Jair Guevara Payan, paid to watch the drugs. Payan led Arcentales and Quijije on a five-day voyage, 1,100 miles to the north, farther than either man had ever ventured. Arcentales considered refusing to go, but he knew there was no real choice now that they were at sea. “We had been screwed,” he told me.

When Arcentales, Quijije and Payan finally arrived at their final coordinates, 145 miles off the coast of Guatemala, a small white speedboat motored toward them, then another, each manned by two Guatemalan men. Together, the men offloaded the drugs onto one of the boats, and Payan motored away on it with a pair of Guatemalan brothers. Arcentales and Quijije were told to step into the second boat, a skiff called the Yeny Arg, manned by the two other Guatemalans, Giezi Zamora, a mechanic, and Hector Castillo, a fisherman. The four of them headed for shore, and Arcentales let his senses dull for the first time since he had set out. “We are free,” he thought to himself, and nearly fell asleep.

But a US Navy patrol airplane had been tracking the Guatemalan boats since the morning. The plane’s crew had watched the men step into the arriving boats and the Southern Command had contacted the Coast Guard. Soon, Arcentales spotted a white military ship, then a speedboat with five officers aboard racing toward them. The officers ordered Arcentales and the others not to move, and the men raised their hands in the air.

For several hours, the Coast Guard officers searched the Yeny Arg. By midafternoon, Arcentales, Quijije and the two Guatamalans were moved to the Coast Guard speedboat, and were delivered to the Coast Guard ship. On board, they had mug shots taken. Less than 12 hours later, the men were moved to a Coast Guard ship called the Boutwell, a 378-foot, 46-year-old cutter with a crew of 160. Payan and the Guatemalan brothers were already onboard.

The men were not told where they would be taken nor allowed to call their families. Officials told them to strip down and change into papery white Tyvek jump suits, and then guards led them up a flight of stairs above the deck and into a hangar. Arcentales felt a cuff close around his ankle. He and Quijije looked at each other, and then at their ankles, which, he said, were now attached to the floor by short chains. Thin rubber mats would serve as their beds. “A deep sadness came over me,” Arcentales said. “Right there my life changed.”

On 6 October, 25 days after the men were caught, the Boutwell returned to its home port in San Diego. The crew of the ship lined up for photos on the deck behind bales of cocaine wrapped in black tarps, collected from 14 smuggling boats, including, presumably, Payan’s, and worth, according to the Coast Guard, more than $400 million.

The cocaine made land long before the detainees. For 44 more days, Arcentales, Quijije, Payan and the Guatemalans were transferred from one ship to the next, passing a week or 10 days on one, a few days on another, always chained to the decks. “I remember one time I asked the nurse officer if he could do me a favor,” Payan wrote later in a letter, “just shoot me and kill me, I would appreciate, because I cannot take this anymore.”

After more than two months of detention, Arcentales says, he had lost 20 pounds; Payan says he lost 50. Time began to warp for them. “We could no longer endure living in such conditions for that prolonged period of time,” Arcentales wrote later in a letter. “It did not matter to us where they would leave us; we were desperate to communicate with our family.”

The Coast Guard and the Department of Justice maintain that all detainees are treated humanely and with accordance to the law. The Coast Guard adds that it shackles detainees and conceals them while in port for their own safety and the safety of the crew.

Coast Guard ships and frigates on loan from the Navy slowly fill up their hangars or decks, waiting to unload detainees when port calls can be arranged with foreign officials and flights arranged with the okay. Other detainees are simply kept aboard cutters as they make trips back to San Diego or through the Panama Canal on the way to East Coast ports. No matter the route, federal judges have repeatedly waived normal protections against extended pre-arraignment detention, accepting the government’s claims that transferring detainees from the Pacific is too logistically complex to allow for a speedy appearance before a judge.

And so over the years federal judges have allowed for progressively longer periods of detainment: five days in the Caribbean in 1985; then 11 in 2006; in 2012, 19 days in the Pacific. Average detention time is now 18 days. An official told me that men have been held up to 90 days.

On 21 November, 77 days after her husband left on his vuelta, Lorena Mendoza walked with her newborn in a stroller from Jaramijó to the nearby port city of Manta as part of a procession of the Virgen de Montserrat. Amid a crowd of thousands of people who had packed into the streets with brass bands, she prayed for her husband, imagining what her life would be like if he was really dead.

When she returned home, Mendoza saw that she had missed a series of phone calls from the United States. At 11 the next morning the phone rang again. “I am here,” Arcentales said. “I am alive.” Mendoza cried, overcome by a great swell of relief. “Thank God I can hear my family again, thank God you are all okay,” Arcentales said.

Several days before, the American ship had taken yet another trip to port, this time on the coast of Panama. This time the detainees were told to stand up. Guards unlocked their ankle cuffs and led them off the ship. He would see his family soon, Arcentales thought. Then he heard a guard announce: “Gentlemen, okay. agents are waiting for you outside. You are going to the United States.”

Orlando do Campo, a private defense lawyer in Miami, has been assigned by the courts to handle 23 cases of maritime smuggling. “It’s like a nature documentary where you see the hawk grab the fish out of water, and the fish is there saying, ‘What the hell am I doing in the air?' ” do Campo said.

Arcentales, Quijije, Payan and the four Guatemalans were put on a flight to Florida. On Nov. 19, they were formally arrested. Arcentales says he told a federal agent all he knew about the operation. “But the truth is,” Arcentales told me, “I don’t know anything about it at all.” All seven accepted plea agreements. No motions were filed challenging the conditions of their extended detentions.

On July 2, 2015, Arcentales and Castillo were taken to court for a sentencing hearing. In testimony before Congress this year, John Kelly attested that “suspects from these cases divulge information during prosecution and sentencing that is critical to indicting, extraditing and convicting drug-cartel leadership and dismantling their sophisticated networks.”

But the judge presiding in the Arcentales case, Virginia Hernandez Covington, made it clear that the two men were of little use. Defendants charged under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, even mules like Arcentales, are rarely provided reduced sentences on mandatory minimums, as a suspect caught on US shores with the same quantities of drugs might be. Covington sentenced Arcentales to 10 years in federal prison and Castillo to just over 11.

I met Arcentales for the first time at the Fort Dix federal prison in New Jersey in late 2016. Speaking slowly and precisely, he told me he had never considered before he was charged that by smuggling drugs he might be committing a crime against the United States. He wondered repeatedly why the United States would not let him serve his time in Ecuador. At least then he would have contact with his family, beyond a time-limited call every few weeks. He thinks about them constantly. And of the Coast Guard cutters he was detained on.

“I had a terrible nightmare about the chains,” Arcentales told me in the visitation room. “I would wake up feeling the chains digging into my ankle and jerk my leg thinking I was shackled, and feel my leg free and be relieved that I was not chained there on the boat. I would wake up sweating; almost crying, thinking I was still chained. Over time it passes. But a thing like this, it never leaves you.”

The New York Times