Spanish customs struggle to hunt down weeks-at-sea smuggling vessels
Drug traffickers are switching up their tactics to import record amounts of cocaine into Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. Instead of smuggling the drug in massive shipping containers at major ports, they are increasingly relying on swarms of high-speed boats known locally as narcolanchas.
In a video report, the Journal explained how drug traffickers can spend weeks at sea aboard what it described as “superfast” vessels, and how Spanish customs agents are struggling to hunt them down.
The reporting was produced by foreign correspondent Sune Engel Rasmussen and video journalist Conor Finnegan, both based at the Journal’s London bureau. Rasmussen’s reporting focuses on European security, terrorism, transnational organized crime and the shifting security landscape in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He previously spent nearly a decade reporting from Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon, including for the Guardian before joining the Journal in 2018. His 2025 book about the Afghan war, “Twenty Years: Hope, War and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation,” won an Overseas Press Club Award for best nonfiction book, and his reporting on the fall of Kabul in 2021 was part of a package collectively nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He has also written for the Economist, GQ, Harper’s, National Geographic, Newsweek and Time.
Finnegan covers international news for the Journal’s London bureau. He joined from ABC News, where he was based in Mexico City, and previously spent a decade in Washington, including five years covering the State Department and reporting from nearly three dozen countries.