58 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Winter 2018-19 TheCoastalBend.com Coastal Bend Community M ost Corpus Christians, and just about all Flour Bluff and Padre Is- land dwellers have seen them—those big, slow, four-engine prop airplanes with the big radar dish on top. Considering that the planes are taking off and landing from Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, they are obviously involved in some sort of military or law enforcement activity. And both answers would be correct. In fact, those planes, the Lockheed P-3 Orion, are among the most flexible platforms from which patrol, surveillance, and support missions are conducted by militar- ies and law enforcement agencies across the world. The particular P-3’s in Corpus Christi are operated by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service, and are instrumental in the mission to interdict and interrupt drug smuggling into Mexico, and eventually into the United States. CBP Patrol and Detection Squadrons were assembled almost two decades ago to combat narcotics smuggling first coming into the U.S. via small aircraft, primarily through the Bahamas and South Florida. As the small planes were intercepted on a more frequent basis, that method was replaced by high-powered, open speedboats called pangas, the main goal of which was getting the Colombian cocaine into Mexi- co, which is then transferred to trucks and passenger vehicles headed for the inter- national bridges into the U.S. After a few years, the pangas started getting caught more regularly, so the Colombian cartels, as they always do, made the necessary ad- justments, and corresponding investment, to take their smuggling efforts to the next level—underwater, mostly. Semi-submersibles are low-profile vessels that navigate the surface of the ocean, virtually invisible from above, with pilot, passenger and cargo contained in the boat’s hull, traveling below the surface. In those hulls can be transported $20 million or more in Colombian, Bolivian or Peruvian cocaine, a fair justification for the $2 million cost of building the semi- submersible, which is often ditched or destroyed once its cargo is delivered to its destination in Mexico or Central America. It is a safe assumption that most Ameri- cans believe that Colombian cocaine on the streets of the United States is smuggled directly from South America to the U.S., like what was depicted in movies like Good- fellas and Blow, and that is of Pablo Escobar legend going back to the 1980’s. And that is true—up until the late 1990’s, the bulk of cocaine smuggled into the U.S. from