Who's Running Guns and Drugs on the High Seas?
The Stockholm Institute says that ships registered to Western nations are routinely used for running weapons and drugs. In most cases, however, the owners of the ships aren't aware they're being used for smuggling. Thanks to containerization, SI notes, they don't actually know what they're carrying.
Interestingly, the drug war has shown weapons smugglers how to move their goods around:
The report also shows that the methods adopted by arms trafficking networks in response to the UN arms embargoes on Iran and North Korea were pioneered by drug traffickers in the past few decades to evade detection. These methods include hiding the goods in sealed shipping containers that claim to carry legitimate items; sending the goods on foreign-owned ships engaged in legitimate trade; and using circuitous routes to make the shipments harder for surveillance operations to track.��
