After a flood wiped out Bexy Guerrero Salmiento’s home in 2013, her husband disappeared. Just days earlier, Manuel, Bexy and their five children had fled the wreckage of their washed-out home in Manta, a port city of 200,000 in Ecuador, to seek shelter with relatives. Then Manuel left on a fishing trip to earn money to rebuild their home. He never came back.
For months, Bexy searched frantically for clues to Manuel’s disappearance. Perhaps his small boat had sunk in the rough seas. Perhaps he had fallen prey to the pirates who prowl the water stealing boat motors, leaving fishermen stranded miles from shore. Neighbors advised Bexy to move on. Her husband was surely dead.
Then, eight months after Manuel had gone missing, Bexy’s phone rang.
Mi amor, perdoname [My love, I’m sorry], said a man. Through the static, Bexy barely recognized her husband’s voice. Her heart stopped.
You won’t believe this, Manuel said. But I’m in the United States. In prison.
Before the call dropped, Bexy learned the hazardous details of Manuel’s journey. Desperate to find money to rebuild their home, he had agreed to transport cocaine to the US in his boat. Colombian drug smugglers had promised him $10,000 for the two-week trip.
Manuel had sailed to Colombia with two other men to pick up the cargo before heading out to sea. But the US Coast Guard, which patrols the Pacific coasts of Central and South America, intercepted his boat off the coast of Guatemala and captured the men.
For four months, Manuel was held onboard the Coast Guard ship as it crawled slowly to the United States, picking up human cargo as it went.
During the day, through scorching sun and pounding rain, the detainees were chained on deck, fed little and made to defecate in buckets. At night, they were shackled below deck, tossed about in the belly of the boat. By the time the ship made land in Florida, Manuel had lost all sense of time.
In Florida, federal prosecutors charged Manuel and his co-defendants with attempting to smuggle cocaine into the United States. They sentenced him to 14 years in prison.
The Maritime Drug Enforcement Act, enacted in 2006, declares it a crime against the United States to transport drugs in international waterseven without proof that the boats are headed to the US. The US has signed agreements with dozens of countries, including Ecuador, that allow US officials to board foreign vessels, detain suspected smugglers and prosecute them in the United States.
At first, the US Coast Guard captured around 200 foreigners at sea per year. But in 2012, under the leadership of General John Kelly, former chief of staff to President Trump, the US Department of Defense launched Operation Martillo to crack down on drug smuggling along the Pacific coast. Nearly overnight, US Coast Guard detentions tripled. From 2012 to 2018 the Coast Guard intercepted 1,066 tons of cocaine and detained 3,277 people suspected of smuggling700 of them from Ecuador.