THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Winter 2018-19 59 TheCoastalBend.com Coastal Bend Community South America made its way directly into the U.S. via small planes that island-hopped their way through the Caribbean until reaching the Bahamas, where cargo was transported in fishing and leisure boats, or was flown directly into South Florida. A fair quantity was brought in by drug mules traveling on commercial flights from major South American cities to international airports in the eastern half of the United States. Cocaine, along with other narcotics, and an infinite variety of contraband, is also smuggled in on giant container ships, often hidden within legitimate cargo ranging from textiles and bulk raw dry goods, to livestock, frozen and fresh food prod- ucts and, most popularly, produce. As law enforcement, customs and military authori- ties became increasingly effective at catching and cutting off even the most innovative smuggling methods by the Colombians, the cartels began forming working partner- ships with overland smugglers in Mexico, who would, in time, establish their own billion-dollar cartels. Around the time Pablo Escobar was taken down in Medellin, and the U.S. began to succeed in dismantling the top-down corruption of the Colombian federal government, smug- gling routes took a decisive turn westward. For the better part of the last 15 years or so, and directly corresponding to the explosion of cartel-related violence in Mexico, the entire smuggling mission of South American cocaine producers is to get their cargo into Mexico, and into the hands of their Mexican partners. Today, 93% of sea and air narcotics traffic from South America, primarily from Colombia, is in the Pacific off the western coasts of Central America and Mexico. The most difficult and costly obstacle for the Mexican cartels to overcome on their route to their sole customer, the United States, despite popular misunderstanding, was the U.S./Mexico border. This problem has been farmed out to Mexico—the Colombians don’t even get involved any more. Central American trans- port countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras impose little resistance to sea and air traffic, loaded with Colombian cocaine, arriving on their coastlines and then being driven through jungles and along the Pan American Highway into Mexico. The overwhelming volume of narcotics traffic from Mexico into the U.S. comes in vehicles, especially cargo trucks, crossing authorized ports of entry also known as international bridges. A statistically insignificant volume of drugs is walked or swam across the border by individuals—again—despite one of today’s more popu- lar misunderstandings. CBP officials say that roughly 17% of vehicles crossing into the U.S. from Mexico are digitally scanned for suspicious characteristics, a fact the cartels know well. High-volume smuggling of narcotics into the U.S. is a business of statistics and calculated losses, a.k.a. the cost of doing business. If one in six trucks is likely to be scanned, inspected by drug dogs, and caught, on any given day—then five in six will make it through. Too bad if you’re the driver of the sixth truck. This basic business dynamic applies to the Colombian cartels operating in the Eastern Pacific, and with every step the smugglers take to increase their rate of suc- cess, law enforcement authorities take their next step to catch them. This is where the Customs and Border Protection P-3 Orion Patrol and Detection Squadron, based at NAS Corpus Christi, and manned, operated and piloted by our Coastal Bend neigh- bors, comes in. Tandem patrols include two planes, one with the big radar dome on top and one without. The radar plane is equipped with the most advanced detection and tracking technology in the world today, along with the capacity to communicate directly with law enforcement and military commanders of any country on earth. Us locals, even those who know what those planes are all about, would be surprised to learn that the P-3 mission area is not Mexico, or the southern border, or the Gulf of