It might have been a spaceship from some distant galaxy — that’s how incongruous it seemed — but it was just a submarine, somewhere in the South American jungle.

When it was discovered by law-enforcement agents in February 2011, the vessel was perched in an improvised shipyard, hidden amid the coastal woodlands of western Colombia.

Twenty-one metres long and constructed mainly of fibreglass, the craft had room for a six-member crew and 6,435 litres of diesel fuel. It was equipped with bunk beds, a ballast mechanism, a global positioning system, a 346-horsepower diesel engine, “scrubbing” devices to clean the air, a conning tower and a periscope with a night-vision camera.

One estimate put the cost of constructing such a sophisticated device in the remote backwoods of South America at about $5 million.

But that’s pocket change when measured against the anticipated value of the vehicle’s intended cargo — up to eight tons of pure cocaine, worth about $160 million wholesale in Dallas, Texas.

“These submarines are such an innovation,” says Bruce Michael Bagley, chair of international studies at the University of Miami, who follows the drug trade closely. “They can go up to 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres).”

And, repeatedly, they do.

Welcome aboard the Cocaine Express, a seemingly perpetual smuggling machine that starts in a forest clearing somewhere in South America and ends on a street corner somewhere near you — that is, if it ends at all.

What follows is a chronicle of the serpentine trek that a kilogram of cocaine might take on its northbound passage from Colombia to Canada.

If there is one constant in the South American drug trade, it’s change. The result is an always deadly game of snakes and ladders, pitting well-financed criminal organizations against the often beleaguered forces of the law, with tactics that evolve almost month by month, as the drug barons try anything and everything to bring their product to market.

“It’s probably the perfect example of the free-enterprise system,” says Supt. Rick Penney, who heads the RCMP’s drug section responsible for the Greater Toronto Area. “Everybody takes a piece of it.”

The drug’s northward odyssey generates an escalating series of revenues that benefit a succession of actors, ranging from Andean peasants to Central American police officers, from Mexican drug lords to Canadian street gangs. The journey traverses half a dozen countries, engendering corruption, violence and death, not to mention the near-wreckage of states.

Toward the end of its travels, the cocaine will be cut — “stepped on” in the current idiom — with a miscellany of additives, possibly including cornstarch, talcum powder, sugar, caffeine or boric acid, substances that may wreak havoc with its potency but dramatically inflate its profitability.

“Most of the time, it (the cocaine) will keep changing hands,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and an expert on the South American drug trade. “There is a lot of violence.”

Production of the stimulant begins in bucolic fashion, with a quantity of foliage harvested from a plant that is native to the western reaches of South America and known as Erythroxylum coca, or simply coca.

The shrubs are cultivated in 30 of Colombia’s 32 provinces, as well as in Bolivia and Peru, but the largest producer these days is the province of Narino in southwestern Colombia, which was responsible for nearly 25 per cent of the country’s cocaine output in 2009. Here, coca is grown mainly on minuscule plantations slashed from the Andean jungle and obscured by overarching canopies of tropical flora. A hectare produces about four kilograms of refined cocaine a year — that is, one kilogram from each of four annual harvests.

The neighbouring landscape is mostly vertiginous, largely roadless, and sewn with landmines. Snipers in camouflage gear lurk in the shadows, as protection against human invaders, while maroon-tailed parakeets dart through branches.

On their own, coca leaves impart a mild narcotic effect, a combination of euphoria and anesthesia, and native people have been chewing them for centuries.

About 100 years ago, some enterprising soul decided to investigate what might happen if the leaves were first shredded and then drenched in powerful dissolving agents.

Now, as in times past, the initial refinement stage involves the maceration of raw coca leaves, a process that typically takes place in one of numerous crude labs scattered through the Colombian wilderness. The resulting stew is doused with toxic solvents, usually gasoline, kerosene or diesel fuel.

By these means, a metric ton of coca leafage yields about 1.7 kilograms of a murky, cake-like substance called pasta basica, or basic paste. Jungle chemists dissolve the paste in sulphuric acid then oxidize the resulting fluid in a liquid solution of potassium permanganate, which eventually produces 1.6 kilograms of base de cocaina.

Workers convey the cocaine base to a more sophisticated facility, where it is subjected to further processing that finally yields roughly a kilogram of the finished product, formally known as cocaine hydrochloride.

In this form, the drug is about 90 per cent pure.

At each stage of refinement, the product increases in value.

In 2010, in Colombia, a kilogram of coca leaves was worth $1.30.

A kilogram of refined cocaine hydrochloride? On average, it commanded a price of $2,439.

But there’s more. The retail value of the drug is vastly higher, as we shall see. “Narcotics trafficking is a very lucrative business,” says Jerome Mangelinckx, director of the Centre for Research on Drugs and Human Rights in Lima.

Once the drug has been refined, little remains but to compress the white crystalline powder into bricks, wrap them in plastic, stamp the lots with an identifying logo and prepare them to be loaded aboard the Cocaine Express, an engine of diverse parts, including mules, light aircraft, ocean-going speed boats, transport trucks, even homemade submarines — in other words, anything that will get the product to market.

Nearly three-quarters of Colombian cocaine departs the country by the Pacific corridor, traveling north by a variety of means that include fishing craft, so-called “go-fast” speed boats and SPSSs — shorthand for self-propelled semi-submersibles, vessels that cruise just below the ocean surface, with only their air and exhaust pipes exposed.

Law-enforcement officers captured their first drug-laden Colombian semi-submersible in 2006. By 2010, another 47 had been apprehended, as authorities in patrol aircraft became increasingly adept at identifying the craft by their wakes.

As a result, the narcotraficantes are switching tactics yet again and now also construct bona-fide submarines — jerry-built yet remarkably sophisticated vessels capable of diving to depths of nine metres or so and remaining submerged.

The current fleet of narcotics-bearing Colombian submersibles represents a huge technological leap over the primitive underwater vessels that traffickers employed very occasionally in the past.

Prior to embarking on its northward voyage, each narco-sub is positioned at a collection point, typically a backwater tangle of mangrove swamp near Colombia’s Pacific coast. It remains there while its payload steadily accumulates.

The voyage is undoubtedly hellish — hot, stinking, claustrophobic and perilous. It ends at a pre-arranged rendezvous at sea, often near the Gulf of Fonseca, where three Central American republics — Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador — converge around a large salt water bay.

Here, the submarine crew will be greeted by local fishing boats or small outboard vessels. The cargo is off-loaded.

It provides some idea of the stakes involved — not to mention the colossal profits — when you consider that in most cases these submarines, worth several million dollars apiece, don’t return to Colombia.

“They’re one-way,” says Special Agent Christopher Jakim of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “A lot of these subs are not coming back.”

Instead, they are scuttled by their crews — who stand to share a payment of about $65,000 for their efforts — and left to rot on the seabed.

A 2010 police estimate, cited by a U.S. research and documentation centre called Insight — Organized Crime in the Americas, suggests that as many as 30 vessels unload their drug cargos in or near the Gulf of Fonseca on an average day.

With the drugs once again on dry land — in the Salvadoran province of La Union, say — local criminal groups break the shipment into smaller quantities and prepare to transport it north.

The main local actors in Central America’s cocaine connection are experienced smugglers known as transportistas, whose origins date back to the civil wars that plagued the region during the 1980s and into the 1990s. “Usually, it’s a fee per kilo — $300 per kilo,” says Jakim.

The preferred method for hauling cocaine through El Salvador is simply to hide the drugs in motor vehicles, then take the Pan-American Highway to the Guatemala border.

“The percentages of what’s inspected and what is not are in the traffickers’ favour,” says Jakim.

Besides, bribing a Central American border officer or two is not exactly a major logistical challenge for drug traffickers.

“Often, they interdict a third of the drugs, just to make things look good,” says Felbab-Brown. “This is deliberately organized to allow corrupt officials to demonstrate they are being tough.”

Once in Guatemala, the cocaine changes hands again.

At times, the Guatemalan crime families co-operate with the larger Mexican cartels. Other times, they try to compete, usually with disastrous results. Much of the contraband is funneled through the Peten, a large, sparsely populated territory that borders both southern Mexico and Belize.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The region is no longer under the day-to-day control of the Guatemalan government. Instead, for all practical purposes, a large Mexican cartel known as Los Zetas governs. “It’s called the loss of effective sovereignty,” says Bagley.

Moving drugs from the Peten into Mexico is quite possibly the simplest stage on the entire route.

“There is no physical barrier,” says Felbab-Brown. “The monitoring of the border is minimal.”

By now, the eight-ton submarine payload has been divided and subdivided into hundreds of far smaller components — typically 40 kilograms or so — each of which is hidden among other merchandise in semi-trailers, shipping containers, or the like.

“It’s really hard to identify this stuff,” says Bagley. “It’s really hard to find.”

But a more challenging obstacle lies ahead — the border between Mexico and the United States.

“The riskiest part in the whole chain is when it crosses the Mexico-U.S. border,” says Tony Payan, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso and an expert on border issues. “It’s very difficult to bribe a U.S. border officer.”

There are plenty of sensational stories about the schemes Mexican traffickers have devised to move cocaine into U.S. territory, including the use of ultralight airplanes, tunnels and even, on at least one occasion, a catapult. But the most reliable method is the simplest — drive up to a checkpoint and hope for the best.

Payan recites a list of hiding places smugglers have used to secrete cargos of cocaine, including coffins, wooden furniture, wax statuettes, tiles or bricks, religious icons, vehicle upholstery, gas tanks and spare tires.

Another common tactic is to dispatch several cocaine cargos in quick succession. That way, if the first vehicle is discovered, the border guards will likely be too distracted to catch the second — or the third.

Most of the cocaine bound for the United States enters through Texas, mainly from the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo to Laredo, Texas, the route for about 40 per cent of all legitimate land-based commerce between the two countries.

“That’s a great conveyor belt for cocaine,” says Payan.

Smaller but still significant quantities of the drug cross between Tijuana and San Diego or between Ciudad Juárez — now among the most violent places on earth — and El Paso.

On the Mexican side of the frontier, a kilo of pure cocaine is worth about $10,000 wholesale. Once it reaches the U.S. side, the value more than doubles to roughly $21,000, a price that increases as the product proceeds north.

Despite stringent U.S. law enforcement, a lot of cocaine goes undetected.

“There are about 20 million semis every day on U.S. roads in all the continental USA,” says Payan. “There are thousands and thousands and thousands on the U.S. interstate system.”

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime pegs U.S. cocaine consumption in 2009 at 157 tons, representing about 40 per cent of the global market. Canadians consumed 14 tons of cocaine that year.

“We’ve seen increased amounts going into Ontario over the last four years or so,” says Special Agent Rich Isaacson at the U.S. DEA’s field office in Detroit.

Once again, the main means of entry is overland, by car or truck.

Isaacson says the border posts with the heaviest illicit traffic are the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor and the Blue Water Bridge linking Sarnia with Port Huron, Mich.

In Toronto, no single organization controls the local cocaine trade.

“Toronto’s too large for that,” says Const. Tony Canepa, a 20-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service’s drug squad. Instead, a variety of gangs share the territory. “Sometimes, they help each other out.”

According to Canepa, a kilo of 90-per-cent-pure cocaine sells in Toronto for about $45,000, wholesale. That represents an 18-fold increase in the price of the processed cocaine hydrochloride, an extremely appealing return.

But that’s just the beginning.

Prior to its distribution on the street, the cocaine will be cut as many as three times, so that one kilo triples in quantity — and value. These portions are then broken into one-gram units that each command a price of $80 to $100.

As a result, a kilo of cocaine purchased in Colombia for about $2,400 could well sell in Toronto for as much as $300,000 — a cumulative markup of 12,750 per cent.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates worldwide profits in the cocaine trade at about $84 billion in 2009 alone — or roughly double Guatemala’s annual GDP.

And Canadians are lucky. They have been spared the worst predations of the business — those measured in blood.

In Mexico alone, some 47,000 people have died violently since late 2006 in that country’s so-called war on drugs. In much of the region, murder rates have spiralled. Government authority has been undermined in almost all Central American states. Peru and Bolivia, largely insulated from the corrosive effects of cocaine for years, have now been dragged into the bloody fray.

“A classic truth is that, as long as there is demand, there will be supply,” says Felbab-Brown. “As long as there is demand, the demand will be supplied.”

Welcome aboard the Cocaine Express — a trip that never ends.