The Floating Guantánamos: USCG’s Ship Prisons

“The sea used to be freedom, but on the ship, it was the opposite. Like a prison in the open ocean”, said Jhonny Arcentales, a 40-year-old fisherman from Ecuador’s central coast. Arcentales was captured in these open waters between Ecuador and Colombia, and shackled onto the deck of a US Coast Guard ship.

The new floating prisons, what experts call as a ‘floating Guantánamos’ are the face of US ‘war on drugs’. In an effort to staunch the flow of cocaine and other hard drugs from South America to Central America and points north, Coast Guard ships have been deployed farther and farther - more than 2,000 miles from U.S. shores.

When these ships capture a boat carrying drugs, the smugglers are brought onto the ships and kept shackled to the deck, sometimes outside in the elements, until the Coast Guard makes arrangements for them to be transported back to the US for trial, according to reports.

But the wait is sometimes quite long- may be weeks or months- until they reach the US shores. Coast Guard officials say they can do this because the drug smugglers aren't under arrest until they reach US shores. Many argue, the Coast Guard with the mandate of search and rescue and enforcing maritime law, such inhuman detentions affect the ‘humanitarian reputation’ of it.

Seth Freed Wesslernov, who reported this story, writes:

“Over the last year, I’ve interviewed seven former Coast Guard detainees, some of whom are still in American federal prison, and received detailed letters, some with pencil renderings of the detention ships, from a dozen others. Most of these men remain confounded by their capture by the Americans, dubious that U.S. officials had the authority to arrest them and to lock them in prison. But it is the memory of their surreal imprisonment at sea that these men say most torments them. Together with thousands of pages of court records and interviews with current and former Coast Guard officers, these detainees paint a grim picture of the conditions of their extended capture on ships deployed in the extraterritorial war on drugs.”

This is not the first time the ‘floating prison’ allegations have surfaced. In 2008 and later in 2015, the US Navy has been accused of detaining people charged with terrorism offences on board for long period before transferring them to prisons in different countries.

According to an earlier analysis done in 2008 by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.