The men were not told where they would be taken nor allowed to call their families. Officials told them to strip down and change into papery white Tyvek jump suits, and then guards led them up a flight of stairs above the deck and into a hangar. Arcentales felt a cuff close around his ankle. He and Quijije looked at each other, and then at their ankles, which, he said, were now attached to the floor by short chains. Thin rubber mats would serve as their beds. “A deep sadness came over me,” Arcentales said. “Right there my life changed.”

On the Boutwell, Arcentales and the other men began asking the guards where they were being taken. One Spanish-speaking guard explained to the men that American officials were coordinating with officials from his country to arrange a transfer. The guard, Arcentales said, told him they would be on land in five days. Several nights passed on the Boutwell. Then, as the sun rose on the fifth day, the men spotted land. They could make out a volcano, then a port — the topology of Central America. “We thought we were going back to our country,” Arcentales said. “We thought they were going to hand us over to migration. Migration or the Ecuadorean consulate.”

But as they approached land, a guard showed up with a plastic bucket to use as a toilet. An officer closed the doors of the hangar where they were held. Through small holes in the wall, they could see people walking on the docks. The Guatemalans recognized a port called Acajutla. An hour passed, then four, then eight. When the narrow beams of light that had shone through the holes in the hangar wall faded, they felt the Boutwell move. The boat’s engines roared, and a guard threw open the doors: The sun was setting, and the men were back at sea. For 30 minutes, an hour maybe, they sat in silence, watching the water and the sky become dark, their minds turning to their families. That night, Arcentales and Castillo, the Guatemalan fisherman, both cried, their chests heaving as the other men looked out at the sea.

When the sun rose the next morning, the men took notice of each other not as they had before, as accidental fellow prisoners, but as longer-term companions. Castillo, who was just shy of 24, asked Arcentales, whom he called “Don Jhonny” out of his respect for his age, about his family. They learned that Zamora, Quijije and Arcentales were fathers of newborns, or had a child on the way. “We would talk of our young kids,” Arcentales said about conversations the men had. “And then there were days when I would not say a word. I would just stay in my mind thinking of my kids, my baby, my failure.” They had all accepted what they thought was the remote risk of arrest in order to provide for their family. Castillo said that he had already taken la vuelta two weeks before. It had been relatively easy, so he’d taken another. “You start to think you can get away with it,” Castillo told me.

Coast Guard and Southern Command officials, including John Kelly, have argued that if the agency had more ships to deploy, it could interdict four times as much cocaine. “Because of asset shortfalls, we’re unable to get after 74 percent of suspected maritime drug smuggling,” Kelly said at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in 2014. “I simply sit and watch it go by.” Colombian cocaine production is again on the rise, and while the Coast Guard says it has seized nearly half a million pounds of cocaine over the past year, agency officials have warned as recently as this September that they need more resources to stop the flow.

Government officials say intelligence gained from small-time boatmen is key to investigating and dismantling larger transnational criminal networks. The Coast Guard has claimed that between 2002 and 2011, cases against these maritime smugglers helped the government secure three-quarters of its extraditions of Colombian drug kingpins. Affidavits filed more recently in criminal cases against three Mexican and Central American drug leaders, including the notorious cartel leader El Chapo, have noted boat interdictions as small points in larger constellations of evidence. By linking kingpins to boats, prosecutors can add maritime smuggling to the list of charges against them. But the fishermen caught aboard these small smuggling boats, many detained on their first or second run, often have access to mere fragments of information about the people they’re working for. For the most part, men like Arcentales barely know the identity of their recruiter, sometimes just a first name or moniker, and nothing more. “They are not key widgets in this process,” said Bruce Bagley, a leading scholar on drug smuggling and a professor of political science at the University of Miami. By prosecuting them, he added, “you don’t slow down the broader operations.”