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The [U.S.] Coast Guard's "Floating Guantanamos"

S.J.B.

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The Coast Guard's "Floating Guantanamos"
Seth Freed Wessler
The New York Times
November 20th, 2017

On nights when the November rain poured down and he had not slept at all, Jhonny Arcentales had visions of dying, of his body being cast into the dark ocean. He would imagine his wife and their teenage son tossing his clothes into a pit in a cemetery and gathering at the local church for his funeral. It had been more than two months since Arcentales, a 40-year-old fisherman from Ecuador's central coast, left home, telling his wife he would return in five days. A cuff clamped onto his ankle kept him shackled to a cable along the deck of the ship but for the occasional trip, guarded by a sailor, to defecate into a bucket. Most of the time, he couldn't move more than an arm's length in either direction without jostling the next shackled man. "The sea used to be freedom," he told me. But on the ship, "it was the opposite. Like a prison in the open ocean."

By day Arcentales would stand against the wall and stare out at the water, his mind blank one moment, the next racing with thoughts of his wife and their newborn son. He had not spoken to his family, though he asked each day to call home. He increasingly felt panicked, fearing his wife would believe he was dead.

Arcentales has wide muscular shoulders from his 25 years hauling fishing nets from the sea. But his meals now consisted of a handful of rice and beans, and he could feel his body shrinking from the undernourishment and immobility. "The moment we would stand up, we would get nauseated, our heads would spin," he recalled. The 20-some prisoners aboard the vessel - Ecuadorians, Guatemalans and Colombians - would often stand through the night, their backs aching, their bodies frigid from the wind and rain, waiting for the morning sun to rise and dry them.

In the first weeks, Arcentales had turned to his friend Carlos Quijije, another fisherman from the small town of Jaramijo, to calm him. They were chained side by side, and the 26-year-old would offer some perspective. "Relax brother, everything is going to work out," Arcentales remembered Quijije saying. "They'll take us to Ecuador, and we will see our families." But after two months of being shackled aboard the ship, Quijije seemed just as despondent. They often thought they would simply disappear.

By this time it was November 2014, and in the brick box of a house where Arcentales lived in Ecuador, Lorena Mendoza, Arcentales's wife, and their children were praying together for his return. In Jaramijo, it is not unheard-of for fishermen to vanish, stranded by a broken motor, shot by a pirate or shipwrecked in a storm. "I was always worried that we would never see him again," she told me. "But he always came home." This time Mendoza was certain she would receive a call to collect Arcentales's waterlogged body from the docks.

Read the full story here.
 
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Fark, be grateful for your upbringing and provided for life if in such a place. Thats hard and unfortunate for those folk
 
Fuck this country and its neonazi politicians. They all deserve to be tortured to death by the hundreds of millions of people they're inflicting suffering upon.
 
I am disgusted by the things done in my name. Disgusted
 
US Coast Guard boats used as floating prisons to combat drug war, report reveals

THE US Coast Guard is reportedly using boats as floating prisons to combat the war on drugs, it has been revealed.

The US is deploying ships across the Pacific Ocean to stop the flow of cocaine from South and Central America by using cutter ships, or commissioned vessels, to hold suspected smugglers caught at sea.

New York Times’ reporter Seth Freed Wessler, who has covered this issue, told Public Radio International drug smugglers are taken on-board the US vessels and are sometimes chained to the deck before being shipped back to the US for trial.

Wessler said the suspects can be on board for weeks waiting for this to happen and the Coast Guard is allowed to do this because the smugglers aren’t technically under arrest until they reach the US mainland.

According to him the US Coast Guard has deployed deep into the Pacific Ocean to stop the flow of drug smugglers between South America — Colombia, Ecuador — and Central America, where the drugs are dropped off and then often moved up through Mexico.

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The smugglers are held on average for 18 days but Wessler mentioned one suspect who was held for 70 due to delays in processing.

Those who are moved are taken to port and arrested before being processed in courts in Florida.

Wessler also said US President Donald Trump’s chief of staff General John Kelly has played a key role in expanding the use of the coast guard for this purpose.

“He’s called drug smuggling in Central America an existential threat to the United States,” he said.

While some of the drugs are heading to the US, Wessler also points out some is also headed to Europe and also Australia which means they can’t prosecute unless they can prove that the drugs were headed to the United States.

“And that’s one of the reasons why federal prosecutors prefer to bring these cases to Florida, where that burden of proof is not required,” he said.

The US Coast Guard has captured several recent seizures of drugs in recent months.

In September, it seized more than 22,000kgs of cocaine and heroin worth an estimated $679.3 million ($AU894m) in San Diego, California since August.

The Coast Guard Cutter Stratton and a Navy ship off the coast of Central and South America made 25 separate seizures by members of the Coast Guard Cutter Stratton and a Navy ship, CBS News reported.

Acting US Attorney Alana Robinson warned drug smugglers authorities were onto them.

“To drug traffickers who may think they are invisible in the middle of what seems to be a vast, empty ocean: You are not alone,” she said.

“We are doing everything we can to prevent you from using the high seas as your personal freeway.”



Source: http://www.news.com.au/world/north-...s/news-story/6eb8a635b440eff593ec37fcffa6b411
 
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