'It's a crazy, pirate's life'

Inside the drug lords' narco-subs

- Tom Phillips

What was going through the mariners' minds, embarking on a voyage they must have feared they would not survive? How did they bid farewell to their loved ones before setting off? The answers to those questions, like the identities of the sailors, remain a mystery to Brazilian police.

What investigators are certain of is the purpose of the vessel: a dungeon-like “narco-submarine” they say was days away from a hellish three-week odyssey across the Atlantic carrying hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of cocaine to Europe.

“You could pay me as much money as you liked and I confess I wouldn’t go ... on such an insane journey,” said Fernando Casarin, the federal police chief whose special forces recently captured the narco-sub on the eve of its departure from the Amazon.

“You ask yourself if [for these sailors] it’s a question of great courage or a total lack of awareness of what they’re getting into,” added Casarin, who is responsible for the vast state of Pará, where the sub was found in May in a secret dockyard on the island of Marajó.

Colombian drug lords first started using narco-subs - handmade semi-submersibles that travel just under the surface of the water with only their cockpit sticking out - to smuggle cocaine through the Caribbean towards Mexico and the US in the 1980s.