Operation Stopgap
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Operation Stopgap was a campaign by agencies of the United States government against marijuana carried by sea from northern Colombia towards Florida and the south-eastern United States. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) ran it with the Coast Guard, the Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.[1]: 41 Its targets were the "mother ships" that loaded marijuana on the Guajira peninsula and carried it to points off the American coast, where it was transferred to fishing boats and small yachts.[1]: 16[2] The Central Intelligence Agency dated the campaign from December 1977 to February 1978.[3] The DEA reported in August 1978 that it had seized 900,000 pounds (about 410 tonnes) of marijuana and 33 vessels. About 220 people had been arrested or detained and deported.[1]: 42 Few of them were prosecuted. A senator cited the operation in support of a bill to extend American jurisdiction to drug vessels on the high seas.[1]: 6, 34
Intelligence and interception
In the DEA's account, Stopgap aimed to reduce the marijuana available in the United States by seizing loads of several tons together with the vessels that carried them and by arresting and prosecuting their entire crews, to disrupt the large Colombian smuggling organisations. Intelligence on suspect aircraft and vessels, chiefly mother ships, passed through the El Paso Intelligence Center to the Coast Guard.[1]: 41 The State Department and foreign governments also took part. DEA aircraft located vessels loading marijuana on Colombia's north coast and passed their identities to the Coast Guard, whose cutters stopped 33 ships carrying 450 short tons at choke points and elsewhere in the Caribbean and the Bahamas.[3] The Coast Guard's strategy at the time was to patrol the three channels that the routes from the Guajira had to cross: the Yucatán Channel and the Windward and Mona passages.[4]: 8 A law-review comment of 1984 called Stopgap a Coast Guard programme of fixed checkpoints: cutters patrolled the Windward, Leeward, Mona and Yucatán passages and boarded every vessel above a certain size.[5]: 392 n. 44
A press report of July 1978, quoting the DEA administrator Peter Bensinger, said that the 40 vessels seized under Stopgap were all mother ships longer than 80 feet (24 m), which took marijuana north to prearranged points 200 miles off the American coast. The DEA had been able to seize them outside United States waters because the State Department had made arrangements in advance with the countries whose flags they flew, which Bensinger named: Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras, Panama and Liberia. Four more suspect vessels were scuttled by their crews before the Coast Guard could board them. The same report, citing unnamed sources, said that undercover agents in Colombia identified the ships and that Navy satellites tracked them once they reached the high seas.[2] Newsweek called Stopgap in October 1978 a secret project in which the Coast Guard used Navy satellites to track suspect ships.[1]: 115
The journalist José Cervantes Angulo gave an account of the operation from the Colombian side in La noche de las luciérnagas (1980). In his telling it was directed by the DEA and Customs, whose aircraft flew over the peninsula and out to sea twice a day looking for airstrips and for mother ships loading at Bahía Portete and other places. At the end of each day the pilots radioed Miami with a description of each loaded ship and its likely time of arrival off the American coast. Meanwhile the Coast Guard blocked the Yucatán Channel and other points on the usual route. The DEA's policy was not to intervene directly in other countries, after complaints from their governments, but when a Customs crew saw an aircraft being loaded with marijuana at Dibulla it asked the Colombian army for help, including an armed helicopter. By his count 24 ships and many aircraft were captured, with cargoes worth 220 million dollars. In his account the DEA made so many mistakes that the operation's partial success had to be kept secret.[6]: 163
The crews
Under the law of the time, a vessel found with drugs on the high seas could be seized with its cargo, but its master and crew had to be released unless an intent to bring the drugs into the United States could be proved.[7] By the July 1978 count the DEA made 220 arrests from 40 seizures, almost all of them of Colombian nationals. Only the crew of the Night Train had been charged; the others were kept overnight in American hotels and then deported to Colombia.[2] At a Senate subcommittee hearing in August 1978 Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island said that only four of the 220 people caught had been or would be prosecuted, all of them Americans arrested on United States territory. Some of those deported, he said, had been caught five times before. His written statement read:
The brilliant success of Operation Stopgap is only dimmed by the fact that of the 220 persons apprehended, only four have been or will be prosecuted.
The day before the hearing Chafee had introduced a bill that would bring under United States jurisdiction any vessel documented in the United States and any foreign vessel on the high seas whose flag state allowed it.[1]: 6
When it ran
The DEA's statement to the Senate subcommittee in August 1978 called Stopgap a 45-day programme initiated by the DEA. At the hearing Bensinger listed it among the "long-range programs" that used the agencies' intelligence from Colombia, with Operation Atlantis in New England.[1]: 16, 41 Newsweek wrote in October 1978 that it had been launched late the year before.[1]: 115 The CIA's assessment of 1982 and Cervantes Angulo's account both place it between December 1977 and February 1978.[3][6]: 163 In July 1978 the DEA said that "the first ship seized under Stopgap was the Night Train, boarded last December", with 54 tons of marijuana on board.[2] Laliberte, a retired Coast Guard captain, dates the seizure of the Night Train east of Great Abaco Island to 1 February 1977.[7] A history of the DEA later published by the agency says that Stopgap was created in December 1975. The same history credits the programme with cutting the flow of marijuana from Colombia to the United States by at least a third by 1978 and with seizing over a million pounds of marijuana, which raised the price in Colombia from $20 a pound to as much as $80.[8]
Assessments
The DEA expected in 1978 that pressure on the sea routes would push some of the traffic to Colombia's Pacific coast or send the mother ships east around the island chains to avoid the three passages watched by the Coast Guard, and that smugglers would make more use of aircraft.[1]: 42 In the CIA's assessment of 1982, Stopgap was the first of several concentrated American efforts to intercept marijuana shipments, reduce supplies and raise the cost of smuggling. Large shipments had been seized routinely in the previous five years, it found, but Colombian marijuana was still plentiful in the United States and its street price had not risen.[3]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (1978). Stopping "Mother Ships": A Loophole in Drug Enforcement (Hearing on S. 3437, August 22, 1978). Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved 30 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 "Satellites Aiding In Pot Seizures". Sarasota Herald-Tribune. 11 July 1978. Retrieved 2 November 2026 – via Google News Archive.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Directorate of Intelligence, Office of Global Issues (September 1982). Smuggling Colombian Marijuana: A High-Profit Venture (Intelligence assessment). Central Intelligence Agency. GI 82-10211. Retrieved 21 October 2026 – via CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room.
- ↑ Comptroller General of the United States (12 February 1979). The Coast Guard's Role in Drug Interception: How Much Is Enough? (Report to the Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Navigation, House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries). U.S. General Accounting Office. CED-79-40. Retrieved 2 November 2026.
- ↑ Levy, Lawrence A. (1984). "Searching the Parameters of the Fourth Amendment Warrant Requirement: Reasonableness Gone Overboard: United States v. Villamonte-Marquez". St. John's Law Review. 58 (2): 383–399. Retrieved 2 November 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Cervantes Angulo, José (1980). La noche de las luciérnagas (in español). Bogotá: Plaza & Janés.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Laliberte, Daniel A. (August 2018). "End of the Line for the Night Train". Naval History. Vol. 32, no. 4. U.S. Naval Institute. Retrieved 2 November 2026.
- ↑ "DEA History Book, 1975–1980". Drug Enforcement Administration. Archived from the original on 13 August 2009. Retrieved 2 November 2026.