The U.S. Coast Guard has added resources to its battle against crime and drugs in the Caribbean, according to a news release issued Tuesday by the office of Delegate to Congress Donna M. Christensen.
According to Christensen, she, along with Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi and Congressmen Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and John Mica (R-Fla.), requested the report from the General Accounting Office to resolve questions about whether the Coast Guard was meeting its performance targets in the region.
Christensen said the report confirms that the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have gotten the attention of Department of Homeland Security officials who have “increased vessel and aircraft operations for drug interdiction efforts” by reallocating Coast Guard resources.
“We have insisted that there be a Caribbean border strategy to equal what is done on the southwest border and I am pleased that there has been significant movement to get us there,” Christensen said. “The GAO report contains important information that can be used as the strategy is developed."
General Accounting Office investigators found varying levels of drug-interdiction resources in the "transit zone" – the area from South America through the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean that is used to transport illegal drugs to the United States – from Fiscal Year 2009 to 2012. Those resources declined sharply in FY13, the report shows. For example, the number of "cutter days" fell from 1,947 in 2012 to 1,346 in 2013, a drop of about 30 percent.
The Coast Guard cited the declining readiness of its aging vessel, delays in the delivery of replacement vessels and the 2013 budget "sequestration" as primary factors.
“To make up for the shortfall, the Coast Guard implemented a surge operation to provide additional vessels and aircraft to regularly patrol Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands,” the report summary says, as well as, “The increased vessel and aircraft deployments have since become the new baseline level of resources to be provided for drug interdiction operations there.”
Coast Guard officials said the additional resources for the "surge" were drawn from other operations, such as alien migrant interdiction. Those resources include vessels and aircraft that regularly patrol the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
Christensen was briefed by GAO on their findings in May prior to the release of the report, according to the news release. She also met with the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas task force in Puerto Rico in May, where she was told about renovations on Puerto Rico to house new Coast Guard cutters.
The Coast Guard reported that the number of vessel hours has more than tripled since 2009. Similarly, the number of maritime patrol aircraft hours has increased from about 150 flight hours in FY11 to about 1,000 hours.
A copy of the GAO report can be found online at http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-14-527.
