Full circle

摘要

On may 9th American customs and border-protection officials launched an aerostat-a fat, tethered balloon-above the coast of Puerto Rico. Its job is to use radar to detect low-flying aircraft, ships and smaller vessels carrying drugs across the seas to the south. This is not the first time the island, a territory of the United States, has been home to an aerostat: an earlier one crashed in a storm in 2011. Now it needs one again. William Brownfield, the State Department's senior anti-drugs official, says that 16% of cocaine imports into the United States came through the Caribbean islands last year. That is up from 4% in 2011 For European cocaine imports, the proportions are even higher.