In an expansion of the war on drugs, the US coast guard is targeting low-level smugglers in international waters - shackling them on ships for weeks or even months before they are formally charged in American courts.

On nights when the November rain poured down and he had not slept at all, Jhonny Arcentales had visions of dying, of his body being cast into the dark ocean. He would imagine his wife and their teenage son tossing his clothes into a pit in a cemetery and gathering at the local church for his funeral.

It had been more than two months since Arcentales, a 40-year-old fisherman from Ecuador’s central coast, left home, telling his wife he would return in five days. A cuff clamped onto his ankle kept him shackled to a cable along the deck of the ship but for the occasional trip, guarded by a sailor, to defecate into a bucket.

Most of the time, he couldn’t move more than an arm’s length in either direction without jostling the next shackled man. “The sea used to be freedom,” he told me. But on the ship, “it was the opposite. Like a prison in the open ocean.”

By day Arcentales would stand against the wall and stare out at the water, his mind blank one moment, the next racing with thoughts of his wife and their newborn son. He had not spoken to his family, though he asked each day to call home. He increasingly felt panicked, fearing his wife would believe he was dead.

Arcentales has wide muscular shoulders from his 25 years hauling fishing nets from the sea. But his meals now consisted of a handful of rice and beans, and he could feel his body shrinking from the undernourishment and immobility.

In the first weeks, Arcentales had turned to his friend Carlos Quijije, another fisherman from the small town of Jaramijó, to calm him. They were chained side by side, and the 26-year-old would offer some perspective. “Relax brother, everything is going to work out,” Arcentales remembered Quijije saying. “They’ll take us to Ecuador, and we will see our families.” But after two months of being shackled aboard the ship, Quijije seemed just as despondent. They often thought they would simply disappear.

By this time it was November 2014, and in the brick box of a house where Arcentales lived in Ecuador, Lorena Mendoza, Arcentales’s wife, and their children were praying together for his return.

Mendoza had no way of knowing that her husband was still alive. He had departed Jaramijó because his family needed money so desperately that he had accepted a job smuggling cocaine off the coast of Ecuador. But deep in the Pacific, Arcentales and the other fishermen he travelled with were stopped not by pirates or vigilantes but by the United States Coast Guard, deployed more than 2,000 miles from US shores to trawl for Andean cocaine.

Over the past six years, more than 2,700 men like Arcentales have been taken from boats suspected of smuggling Colombian cocaine to Central America, to be carried around the ocean for weeks or months as the American ships continue their patrols. These fishermen-turned-smugglers are caught in international waters, or in foreign seas, and often have little or no understanding of where the drugs aboard their boats are ultimately bound.

But nearly all of these boatmen are now carted from the Pacific and delivered to the United States to face criminal charges here, in what amounts to a vast extraterritorial exertion of American legal might.

The US Coast Guard never intended to operate a fleet of “floating Guantánamos,” as a former Coast Guard lawyer put it to me in May. In the 1990s and through the 2000s, maritime detentions averaged around 200 a year. Then in 2012, the Department of Defense’s Southern Command, tasked with leading the war on drugs in the Americas, launched a multinational military campaign called Operation Martillo, or “hammer.”

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 11 August 2020 French Prime Minister Jean Castex is helped by a member of staff to put a protective suit on prior to his visit at the CHU hospital in Montpellier AFP via Getty World news in pictures 10 August 2020 Locals harvest their potatoes as Mount Sinabung spews volcanic ash in Karo, North Sumatra province, Indonesia Antara Foto/Reuters World news in pictures 9 August 2020 Doves fly over the Peace Statue at Nagasaki Peace Park during the memorial ceremony held for the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing EPA World news in pictures 8 August 2020 Anti-government protesters try to remove concrete wall that installed by security forces to prevent protesters reaching the Parliament square, during a protest against the political elites and the government after this week's deadly explosion in Beirut AP World news in pictures 7 August 2020 A protester throws a stone towards Israeli forces in the village of Turmus Aya, north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, following a march by Palestinians against the building of Israeli settlements AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 August 2020 A woman yells as soldiers block a road for French President Emmanuel Macron's visit the Gemmayzeh neighborhood. The area in Beirut suffered extensive damage from the explosion at the seaport AP World news in pictures 5 August 2020 Damage at the site of Tuesday's blast in Beirut's port area, Lebanon Reuters World news in pictures 4 August 2020 A large explosion in the Lebanese capital Beirut. The blast, which rattled entire buildings and broke glass, was felt in several parts of the city AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 August 2020 A general view shows the new road bridge in Genoa, Italy ahead of its official inauguration, after it was rebuilt following its collapse on August 14, 2018 which killed 43 people Reuters World news in pictures 2 August 2020 Empty stall spaces are seen hours before a citywide curfew is introduced in Melbourne, Australia EPA World news in pictures 1 August 2020 People take part in a demonstration by the initiative "Querdenken-711" with the slogan "the end of the pandemic - the day of freedom" to protest against the current measurements to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Berlin, Germany AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 July 2020 Pilgrims circumambulating around the Kaaba, the holiest shrine in the Grand mosque in Mecca. Muslim pilgrims converged today on Saudi Arabia's Mount Arafat for the climax of this year's hajj, the smallest in modern times and a sharp contrast to the massive crowds of previous years Saudi Ministry of Media/AFP World news in pictures 30 July 2020 The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission lifts off at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The mission is part of the USA's largest moon to Mars exploration. Nasa will attempt to establish a sustained human presence on and around the moon by 2028 through their Artemis programme EPA World news in pictures 29 July 2020 A woman refreshes herself in a outdoor pool in summer temperatures in Ehingen, Germany dpa via AP World news in pictures 28 July 2020 Malaysia's former prime minister Najib Razak speaks to the media after he was found guilty in his corruption trial in Kuala Lumpur AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 July 2020 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un poses for a photograph after conferring commemorative pistols to leading commanding officers of the armed forces on the 67th anniversary of the "Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War". Which marks the signing of the Korean War armistice KCNA via Reuters

The goal was to shut down smuggling routes in the waters between South and Central America, stopping large shipments of cocaine carried on speedboats thousands of miles from the United States, long before they could be broken down and carried over land into Mexico and then into the United States.

In 2016, under the Southern Command’s strategy, the Coast Guard, with intermittent help from the US Navy and international partners, detained 585 suspected drug smugglers, mostly in international waters. That year, 80 per cent of these men were taken to the United States to face criminal charges, up from a third of detainees in 2012. In the 12 months that ended in September 2017, the Coast Guard captured more than 700 suspects and chained them aboard American ships.

Their protracted detention is justified by Coast Guard officials and federal prosecutors alike, who argue that suspects like Arcentales are not formally under arrest when the Coast Guard detains them. While on board, they’re not read Miranda rights, not appointed lawyers, not allowed to contact their consulate or their families. They don’t appear to benefit from federal rules of criminal procedure that require that criminal suspects arrested outside the United States be presented before a judge “without unnecessary delay.”

It is as if their rights are in suspension during their capture at sea. “It’s hard-wired into the Coast Guard’s minds,” says Eugene R Fidell, a former Coast Guard lawyer who teaches at Yale Law School, “that usual law enforcement constraints don’t apply.”

The increased detentions and the domestic prosecutions of extraterritorial activity were ushered in largely under the watch of General John Kelly, who from 2012 to 2016 served as the head of the Southern Command and is now the White House chief of staff. He has long championed the idea that drug smuggling and the drug-related violence in Central America poses what he has called an “existential” threat to the United States and that to protect the homeland, American law enforcement must reach beyond US borders.

Arcentales never had much money. The $6,000 (£4,500) he could hope to make a year, on the skiff and working on tuna ships for a month or two at a time, does not stretch far in Ecuador’s economy. The house where he and Mendoza lived was just a single room for their family of nine: their teenage son, Enrique; Mendoza’s two older daughters from a previous marriage, Nelly and Juliana, who have three children between them; and Nelly’s husband, Wladimir Jaramillo. They all slept on fraying mattresses, sharing a single toilet. When it rained, the roof leaked and muddy water trickled through the door.

On the morning of 5 September after a very bad night of sleep, Arcentales left Mendoza and their children. “Viejita,” he told her, “don’t worry, everything will be Okay”.

A fisherman Arcentales had known for years had been soliciting Arcentales for two years to accept a cocaine smuggling job. Arcentales always refused. But when he left home that September morning, Arcentales went looking for that man. Ecuador is a secondary shipment point for Colombian drug-smuggling groups who work increasingly for Mexican cartels, and in Jaramijó, recruiters, called enganchadores, those who “hook,” have become fixtures.

Residents of the town have watched as their neighbours return from what they say were fishing trips, then buy cars or fix up their homes. Residents call the trip “la vuelta ” which means, aspirationally, “round trip.” The fisherman told Arcentales that he would earn $2,000 (£1,500) up front, and then $20,000 (£15,000) apiece for him and his partner upon their return. It was as much as Arcentales could expect to earn in three or four years. If Quijije joined him, they could finally buy their boat.

The next evening, he and Quijije met another man in San Lorenzo, near the Colombian border. The man led them to a skiff, gave Arcentales a GPS tracker and instructed the pair to meet another boat at a location 50 nautical miles away. There, he said, they would collect 100 kilos of cocaine, split in four packages, and the coordinates for another vessel less than a day’s trip away where they would drop off the drugs and then be done.

But when they arrived at the location to retrieve the drugs, they were instead given 440 kilos of cocaine and joined by a baby-faced Colombian in his early 20s named Jair Guevara Payan, paid to watch the drugs. Payan led Arcentales and Quijije on a five-day voyage, 1,100 miles to the north, farther than either man had ever ventured. Arcentales considered refusing to go, but he knew there was no real choice now that they were at sea. “We had been screwed,” he told me.

When Arcentales, Quijije and Payan finally arrived at their final coordinates, 145 miles off the coast of Guatemala, a small white speedboat motored toward them, then another, each manned by two Guatemalan men. Together, the men offloaded the drugs onto one of the boats, and Payan motored away on it with a pair of Guatemalan brothers. Arcentales and Quijije were told to step into the second boat, a skiff called the Yeny Arg, manned by the two other Guatemalans, Giezi Zamora, a mechanic, and Hector Castillo, a fisherman. The four of them headed for shore, and Arcentales let his senses dull for the first time since he had set out. “We are free,” he thought to himself, and nearly fell asleep.

But a US Navy patrol airplane had been tracking the Guatemalan boats since the morning. The plane’s crew had watched the men step into the arriving boats and the Southern Command had contacted the Coast Guard. Soon, Arcentales spotted a white military ship, then a speedboat with five officers aboard racing toward them. The officers ordered Arcentales and the others not to move, and the men raised their hands in the air.

For several hours, the Coast Guard officers searched the Yeny Arg. By midafternoon, Arcentales, Quijije and the two Guatamalans were moved to the Coast Guard speedboat, and were delivered to the Coast Guard ship. On board, they had mug shots taken. Less than 12 hours later, the men were moved to a Coast Guard ship called the Boutwell, a 378-foot, 46-year-old cutter with a crew of 160. Payan and the Guatemalan brothers were already onboard.

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 6 October, 25 days after the men were caught, the Boutwell returned to its home port in San Diego. The crew of the ship lined up for photos on the deck behind bales of cocaine wrapped in black tarps, collected from 14 smuggling boats, including, presumably, Payan’s, and worth, according to the Coast Guard, more than $400 million.

The cocaine made land long before the detainees. For 44 more days, Arcentales, Quijije, Payan and the Guatemalans were transferred from one ship to the next, passing a week or 10 days on one, a few days on another, always chained to the decks. “I remember one time I asked the nurse officer if he could do me a favor,” Payan wrote later in a letter, “just shoot me and kill me, I would appreciate, because I cannot take this anymore.”

After more than two months of detention, Arcentales says, he had lost 20 pounds; Payan says he lost 50. Time began to warp for them. “We could no longer endure living in such conditions for that prolonged period of time,” Arcentales wrote later in a letter. “It did not matter to us where they would leave us; we were desperate to communicate with our family.”

Gordon Ramsay watches cement and sulphuric acid being added to coca leaves to make cocaine

The Coast Guard and the Department of Justice maintain that all detainees are treated humanely and with accordance to the law. The Coast Guard adds that it shackles detainees and conceals them while in port for their own safety and the safety of the crew.

Coast Guard ships and frigates on loan from the Navy slowly fill up their hangars or decks, waiting to unload detainees when port calls can be arranged with foreign officials and flights arranged with the okay. Other detainees are simply kept aboard cutters as they make trips back to San Diego or through the Panama Canal on the way to East Coast ports. No matter the route, federal judges have repeatedly waived normal protections against extended pre-arraignment detention, accepting the government’s claims that transferring detainees from the Pacific is too logistically complex to allow for a speedy appearance before a judge.

And so over the years federal judges have allowed for progressively longer periods of detainment: five days in the Caribbean in 1985; then 11 in 2006; in 2012, 19 days in the Pacific. Average detention time is now 18 days. An official told me that men have been held up to 90 days.

On 21 November, 77 days after her husband left on his vuelta, Lorena Mendoza walked with her newborn in a stroller from Jaramijó to the nearby port city of Manta as part of a procession of the Virgen de Montserrat. Amid a crowd of thousands of people who had packed into the streets with brass bands, she prayed for her husband, imagining what her life would be like if he was really dead.

When she returned home, Mendoza saw that she had missed a series of phone calls from the United States. At 11 the next morning the phone rang again. “I am here,” Arcentales said. “I am alive.” Mendoza cried, overcome by a great swell of relief. “Thank God I can hear my family again, thank God you are all okay,” Arcentales said.

Several days before, the American ship had taken yet another trip to port, this time on the coast of Panama. This time the detainees were told to stand up. Guards unlocked their ankle cuffs and led them off the ship. He would see his family soon, Arcentales thought. Then he heard a guard announce: “Gentlemen, okay. agents are waiting for you outside. You are going to the United States.”

Orlando do Campo, a private defense lawyer in Miami, has been assigned by the courts to handle 23 cases of maritime smuggling. “It’s like a nature documentary where you see the hawk grab the fish out of water, and the fish is there saying, ‘What the hell am I doing in the air?' ” do Campo said.

Arcentales, Quijije, Payan and the four Guatemalans were put on a flight to Florida. On Nov. 19, they were formally arrested. Arcentales says he told a federal agent all he knew about the operation. “But the truth is,” Arcentales told me, “I don’t know anything about it at all.” All seven accepted plea agreements. No motions were filed challenging the conditions of their extended detentions.

On July 2, 2015, Arcentales and Castillo were taken to court for a sentencing hearing. In testimony before Congress this year, John Kelly attested that “suspects from these cases divulge information during prosecution and sentencing that is critical to indicting, extraditing and convicting drug-cartel leadership and dismantling their sophisticated networks.”

But the judge presiding in the Arcentales case, Virginia Hernandez Covington, made it clear that the two men were of little use. Defendants charged under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, even mules like Arcentales, are rarely provided reduced sentences on mandatory minimums, as a suspect caught on US shores with the same quantities of drugs might be. Covington sentenced Arcentales to 10 years in federal prison and Castillo to just over 11.

I met Arcentales for the first time at the Fort Dix federal prison in New Jersey in late 2016. Speaking slowly and precisely, he told me he had never considered before he was charged that by smuggling drugs he might be committing a crime against the United States. He wondered repeatedly why the United States would not let him serve his time in Ecuador. At least then he would have contact with his family, beyond a time-limited call every few weeks. He thinks about them constantly. And of the Coast Guard cutters he was detained on.

“I had a terrible nightmare about the chains,” Arcentales told me in the visitation room. “I would wake up feeling the chains digging into my ankle and jerk my leg thinking I was shackled, and feel my leg free and be relieved that I was not chained there on the boat. I would wake up sweating; almost crying, thinking I was still chained. Over time it passes. But a thing like this, it never leaves you.”