One of the most fascinating aspects of the drug trade is the unceasing ingenuity of traffickers. Navy inspectors at the port of Progreso, in Yucutan, recently uncovered a new strategy—hiding cocaine in frozen sharks. They noticed something amiss during routine X-ray inspections of two shipping containers on board the freighter Dover Strait. Directing their suspicions to a cache of frozen sharks, they split one open to find it filled with black rectangular bags filled with cocaine. In all, the navy recovered almost a ton of cocaine (867 kilograms). The cargo was loaded in Costa Rica and bound for the U.S. Similar ploys are well known in the Andes, where law enforcement has come to expect drug barons utilizing submarines to transfer cocaine and money laundering schemes that produce perfect forgeries by bleaching the ink off one dollar bills and using the paper to reprint Franklins. But such wiles are an ominous addition to the conflict in Mexico. As American and Mexican authorities crackdown on the trade along the border, similar tales of seagoing and air trafficking are sure to continue.
