A man writhes on the deck of a ship as the wind and rain thumps against his face.
His bruised ankles are held tight by shackles. He’s eaten little over the last few weeks;
his frame is slight and crooked; he’s in constant pain and ready to die. He lies there in the middle
of the night, partly illuminated by the glare of a full moon. He doesn’t know when his family
will see him again, if ever at all. They have no idea what happened to their patriarch. Will
he ever get off this boat, he wonders? Is this even legal in the United States? After all,
this isn’t 1856, it’s the 21st century, how is it possible that a man can be chained to a deck
like a mutinous traitor of yesteryear? Perhaps the answer is because nobody,
not his family or friends, not even some in the US government, nor the American public,
knows about his situation. How many of you viewers are now thinking,
surely not, surely the US authorities don’t shackle men to the decks of ships
and leave them exposed to the elements? Surely prisoners can’t be kept in such a way. No way
would they feed so little to prisoners that they would lose a good amount of their body weight.
Well, we’re sorry to burst your bubble, but yes, it does happen. Most people are just unaware it
does. It gets worse, too, but first let’s finish the story about the man we just talked about.
His name is Jhonny Arcentales. He was a fisherman in Ecuador back in 2014. That was a particularly
bad year in the fishing business and so he was wondering how to make ends meet. He remembered
a man, a man with a proposal. For about two years this guy had been telling Arcentales
that there was good money in cocaine smuggling, but Arcentales had always turned down the offers.
Those guys who go looking for local men to recruit to smuggle are known as “enganchadores.” They hook
people up, and before they know it the fishermen and others are working for Colombian cocaine
traffickers and Mexican cartels. It’s not an easy offer to turn down, either. The small town where
Arcentales lived was poor, very poor, but in the early 2010s fishermen started disappearing for a
while and later returning to buy new cars. They’d done the cocaine trafficking trip, the round-tip,
or what the locals call “La Vuelta.” Arcentales was broke. He had an unexpected
newborn to feed and a wife to take care of. His family of nine that slept on ripped mattresses and
shared one bathroom were desperate. Even though the most criminal act Arcentales had committed
was stealing a candy bar, he went to find the man who could turn him into a mule on the high seas.
Not long after, he was told he’d be teaming up with another Ecuadorian man
and a Columbian man. Together they’d be taking a shipment of Colombia’s finest to Central America,
which would then make its way to Mexico. From there it would be transported to its promised
land, where its most enthusiastic devotees would be waiting with open arms and ravenous nostrils.
It seemed like a good if not risky deal. Arcentales was paid $2,000 up front. If the job
was completed, he’d return home and get $20,000 more. And that was all in the few days work.
$22,000 was more than he’d earn from fishing in four years. He was given a GPS tracker,
told where to find the boat, and told that on that boat there’d be 100 kgs of cocaine.
Actually, when he got there, 100 kgs turned out to be 440 kgs, which if you convert that into
street level grams without cutting it would be worth around 44 million bucks. Arcentales
was suddenly a big fish in the sea, even if they were many like him where he came from.
The trip didn’t exactly go as planned. As the not-so crack team of smugglers were approaching
Guatemala their boat was intercepted by a United States Coast Guard Cutter.
That was it. Game over. They were caught with a mountain of blow. The men were arrested and
subsequently chained to the deck of the ship. Because that ship had more work to do finding
criminal vessels, they were sent aboard other ships, each time being shackled to the deck,
fed hardly any food, and being sunburned and rain-blasted in the Pacific Ocean.
Ok, so some of you might take a hardline on drug traffickers, but the question you
need to pose is don’t most developed nations have things called human rights? Being tied up
on the deck of a ship sounds like something Black Beard would do, or those unscrupulous
European slave traders back in the day. Well, when you want to break International
Law all you really have to do is find a loophole. Latin American nations have made agreements with
the US and the US invokes the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act. That means the authorities can
do as they bloody well please. That’s why the ships have been called “floating Guantánamos”.
The Coast Guard are supposed to be the good guys, but you can hardly blame them,
they are just doing as they are told. They also know that the prisoners have little to no rights.
You see, when they are picked up they are not formally arrested. As you know, if you ever
are formally arrested you have rights, even if you’re an Ecuadorian fisherman. Since they are
only detained and not really arrested, they have no rights and can be kept chained up like dogs.
One of those dogs, Mr. Arcentales, said he’d told his wife he’d be back in five days.
He didn’t get back of course, and no one told her where he was. After two months on
the ship he envisioned death. He was hungry and could barely ever sleep. His thoughts at
times consisted of his wife and son throwing his clothes on a fire and then attending his funeral.
He was chained all the time, except when he was allowed to go to the bathroom for a number two.
A sailor would lead him to the convenience, which was a plastic bucket. He’d then be taken back to
where he was shackled with the other men – some 20 prisoners in all from various trafficking boats.
As for the food, it mainly consisted of small portions of rice and beans.
Most of the men were malnourished and when they stood up, they’d get dizzy. Matters were made
worse when the rains came. Arcentales later said the prisoners would often be soaking wet
during the dark hours, just waiting for the morning and the sun to rise and dry them.
Another issue was they really didn’t know where they were going. They were never informed. One
time Arcentales almost lost his mind, whereupon the guy chained next to him, said, “Relax brother,
everything is going to work out. They’ll take us to Ecuador, and we will see our families.”
But more days passed; weeks passed, and that fellow prisoner changed his tune.
He too wondered if they’d ever get off the ship, or worse, be thrown into the ocean.
We’ll come back to his plight soon. First you need to know some things.
Getting South American blow to the US has always been something of a problem,
especially after Reagan’s War on Drugs kicked off. So, the traffickers have to change strategies
every time the authorities get wise. It's a seemingly never-ending, unchanging cycle,
so long as Americans keep hoovering up that stuff with a determinedness only matched by the British.
Deviated septums and embarrassing text messages aside, cocaine is still very popular. The
traffickers just need to keep changing up the game so they can deliver that devil’s dandruff
to their avid consumers. That’s why in around 2011 Colombian traffickers started to look at
fishermen in Ecuador. That’s the first leg of the journey, anyway, getting it out of South America.
Almost 3,000 people over a few years signed up for the job,
and things were going well for a while, until the US made some deals with 40 or so countries
so coast guard ships could gain access to boats they thought were carrying contraband.
The US shouldn’t really have this power, but as the New York Times said, the country wielded,
“vast extraterritorial exertion of American legal might.”
In the past, the law stated that authorities could only arrest or hold traffickers when
they were in US territorial waters. Then in 1986 the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act was passed,
and with the permission of certain countries, the US could sail far and wide, sometimes
thousands of miles, and pick up drug mules. In the 1980s and 90s not so many mules were
detained and prosecuted in the US, perhaps only about 200 of them in a year. Then in 2012,
Operation Martillo came into effect, and the Coast Guard was told to venture farther out
into the ocean and stop the mules a long way before they got anywhere near Mexico.
After that, the number of people detained on prison ships and later sent to the US for
prosecution went through the roof. It was like shooting ducks in a barrel given just how many
cocaine shipments were sailing across the Pacific. The human rights issue comes into play because the
captured men might spend many months chained up on a deck. They won’t ever get a lawyer,
a phone call home, a nutritious meal, or read their Miranda rights.
Arcentales and the other twenty prisoners were moved from ship to ship,
with each day bringing a new pall of fear and desperation. One of the prisoners later
said that he told a nurse on the ship, “Just shoot me and kill me, I would appreciate it,
because I cannot take this anymore.” The men were becoming emaciated, while throughout
the day they watched the Coast Guard sailors throw out bags of food from unfinished meals. They even
made a plan to ask to go to the bathroom and then try and root through the garbage and rescue some
leftovers. It worked, and later the men bit a chunk of something and then passed it down
the line of chained prisoners. Some men lost 20 pounds (9kg), and others lost 50 pounds (22.6 kg).
Some of the sailors on the Coast Guard ships didn’t like what they were seeing, but without
getting word from other agencies they had no choice but to keep the men in the water. One guy
said he worked on what he called a “boat prison” adding that those vessels just weren’t made to
carry prisoners. They did the best they could, although you’d have thought the sailors might
have remembered the starved prisoners when they threw away a good piece of half-eaten chicken leg.
77 days after Arcentales set sail, his wife was sure he was dead. But she got home that
day and there was a phone call. It was her husband, alive, but perhaps not so well.
He said to her, “I am here. I am alive.” Before that, his ship had sailed to Panama.
The prisoners thought they’d be going back home, until a DEA agent told them that their next stop
was the United States. Some of the men were flown to Florida, where they were finally formally
arrested and read their rights. Arcentales was told to give up names, but the trouble was,
he didn’t really know any of the people working in the larger operation. He was of no use to the
DEA. An enticing plea deal was off the cards. In court a judge said that it troubled her,
hearing the stories of not being fed properly, of being exposed to the elements,
of the weight loss and the ad hoc bucket bathroom. Still, she said, the trial must go on.
When it ended she concluded, “They are just trying to do it to make some money for their family”...
and then she sentenced Arcentales to 10 years. In a jail cell at Fort Dix federal
prison in New Jersey he now sits in the daytime thinking about his wife, his kids,
pining for his squalid shack in a fishing town in Ecuador. At times during the night he dreams
about rattling chains. In his own words, he said, “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.”
In his hometown word got around about what had happened to him, the fact he was serving
time in a cell in a foreign country. People certainly feared taking the same risk as he had,
but then the catastrophic 2016 earthquake destroyed large swathes of the Ecuadorian coast.
It left many families penniless and desperate. La Vuelta became more attractive than ever before.
Even a member of Arcentales’ own family tried it, and he too, was arrested by the Coast Guard.
Still, out of work fishermen queued up when the enganchadores came to town.
“The more we push our borders out, the safer our homeland will be,” the US administration
said recently about this matter. The government seems intent on forging ahead with the War on
Drugs industry that costs around $51 billion a year, over a trillion since the 1970s. Wily
traffickers still manage to get as much, if not more cocaine into the US, while prisons are
bursting at the seams and are home to more poor Ecuadorians. The authorities want more resources,
admitting that something like 75 percent of the ocean-trafficked blow gets into the country,
but the question is, if there is always steady demand, will there always be a steady supply?
Now you need to watch this, “Cocaine vs Heroin - Which Drug is More Dangerous
(Drug Addiction)?” Or, have a look at this, “What Does Heroin Do To Your Body?”