Drug runners are taking a page out of the purse seine industry’s playbook.
For decades, commercial fishing boats have used fish aggregation devices (FADs) to increase their fish catches. The Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority has installed dozens of FADs around the nation to assist local fishermen with improving their catches.
But technological advances in the past 10 years have allowed fishing companies to position both sonar equipment and satellite radio communications gear on the FADs. The sonar scans the ocean under the FADs, allowing fish managers in distant countries and vessels in the fishing grounds to “see” the volume of tuna below individual FADs. This allows for focus on the FADs that have the largest volume of tuna around them.
The satellite communications gear communicates location and the data to the vessels and company headquarters.
Today, the capture of securely wrapped kilo packages of cocaine floating on the ocean with satellite communications gear attached demonstrates that drug dealers are using the same technology as the fishing companies.
A social media post, with photos, by Edgar Feliciano, stated: “What you are likely seeing are “bricks” of cocaine — tightly sealed to keep water out, roped together as a single shipment, with a radio buoy attached.
“Those buoys should look familiar to anyone in our fishing industry. They are the same satellite/radio buoys used on FADs — the tool our purse seine fleets use to pinpoint FAD locations across thousands of miles of open ocean. Traffickers have adapted our own industry’s technology: drop the shipment at sea, let it drift, track it by buoy, and send a small, unremarkable vessel to retrieve it days or weeks later.”
His post continued:
“Think about what that means for detection. A raft of bales sits maybe a foot above the waterline. No radar signature. No wake. No Automatic Identification System. Compared to a suspicious sailing vessel or a narco sub, a floating shipment low on the horizon is nearly invisible — to radar, to long-range binoculars, to everything except a patrol asset that happens to be in the right place.
“Why the Pacific? Follow the money. Cocaine in the Australia and New Zealand markets sells for roughly five times the US price. As the US Department of War takes out narco high-speed vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, traffickers are rerouting through the vastness of the South Pacific — less patrol coverage, less risk of seizure, higher reward.
Analysts now describe a ‘cocaine logistics corridor’ consolidating across the South Pacific, originating in Colombia and Peru and pushing multi-ton shipments toward Australia and New Zealand.”
A reported 17 tons of cocaine has been confiscated from the South Pacific in the first few months of 2026, triple last year’s haul by law enforcement.
Similarly wrapped one-kilo packages of cocaine frequently wash up on beaches around the Marshall Islands or float in on so-called “narco boats.”