Today, the Tayrona semisubmersible sits on a patch of grass at the ARC Bolivar naval base in Cartagena. It is exposed to the elements; The rain has dulled its colour. On one side is an old, bulky narco sub, seized a decade ago, a blue cylinder with a clumsy profile. The Tayrona’s hull looks lower, slimmer and more refined.
Upon closer inspection it is clearly handmade. The hull is light grey-blue, the fiberglass is rough in places, there are scratches and dents from the tow by which it was brought into port. There are no identifying marks on its exterior – nothing that links it to any country, company or port. On top sit two Starlink antennas, painted the same grey-blue to avoid standing out against the sea.
I climb a ladder and drop down the small hatch near the stern. Inside, the air is humid and stuffy, the walls lined with condensation. Small puddles of fuel have accumulated in the debris. The ship has no seating, no rudder or steering wheel and not enough room to stand upright or lie down. It is clear that it was never intended to carry people. A technical report by CMCON found that the sub would have enough fuel for a voyage of approximately 800 nautical miles, and 1 to 1.5 tons of cocaine in the central cargo bay.
At the rear end, the machinery compartment is a mesh of hardware: a chaotic bundle of cables feeding the diesel engine, batteries, pumps, and an electronics rack. All the main components are still there. Inside that rack, investigators identified a NAC-3 autopilot processor, a commercial unit designed to pilot medium-sized boats by tying into standard hydraulic pumps, heading sensors and rudder-feedback systems. They cost around $2,200 on Amazon.
“These are plug-and-play technologies,” says Wilmer Martínez, a mechatronics professor at the University of the Americas in Bogotá, when I show him photos of the inside of the sub. “Midcareer mechatronics students can install them.”
Despite all its advantages, an autonomous drug-smuggling submarine will not be invincible. Even without a crew onboard, there are still people in the series. Every satellite Internet terminal – whether Starlink or not – comes with a billing address, a payment method, and a log of where and when it pings the constellation. Colombian authorities have begun talking about negotiating formal agreements with providers asking them to alert authorities when the activities of transceivers match known trafficking patterns. The Brazilian government has already struck a deal with Starlink to prevent criminal use of its service in the Amazon.
The basic playbook for drone subsearch will look much like that of a crude semisubmersible. Aircraft and ships will use radar to pick up small anomalies and infrared cameras to see diesel engine heat or wake turbulence. As said, this may not work. “If they get smaller, they will become almost impossible to detect,” says Michael Knickerbocker, a former US Navy officer who advises defense technology companies.
“Autonomous drug subs” are a great example of how flexible cocaine traffickers are, and how they constantly stay one step ahead of the authorities, says one researcher.
Worse, navies already act on only a fraction of the intelligence they receive because they do not have enough ships and aircraft. The answer, Knickerbocker argues, is “robots on robots.” Navies and coast guards will need their own small, relatively inexpensive uncrewed systems – surface ships, underwater gliders and long-haul aerial vehicles that can transmit, interpret and relay data to human operators. Those experiments have started. The U.S. Fourth Fleet, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean, is experimenting with uncrewed platforms in counter-narcotics patrols. Across the Atlantic, the EU’s European Maritime Safety Agency operates drones for maritime surveillance.
