The Associated Press
BOGOTA, Colombia (May 18, 2000 10:10 a.m. EDT -
A police search of a farm near Colombia’s Caribbean coast turned up more than five tons of cocaine stashed in an underground cellar, authorities said Wednesday.
Six men were arrested in the operation, one of the largest single cocaine seizures ever in the South American country that produces an estimated 90 percent of the world’s cocaine.
The search involving police and naval units occurred Tuesday in San Onofre, a town 240 miles north of Bogota near the Gulf of Morrosquillo.
Before the raid, cocaine warehoused on the farm was moved by speedboat to larger ships that carried the drugs toward the United States, said Jorge Lagos, the state security police director in Bolivar State.
The huge drug seizure comes as the U.S. Congress debates a Clinton Administration plan to give Colombia more than a billion dollars to combat cocaine and heroin trafficking.
President Andres Pastrana flew to the nearby port of Cartagena on Wednesday to inspect the 5.2-ton stash, which was brought by helicopter from the farm where it was found.
“Once again we are dealing blows to the great financiers of violence in Colombia,” the president said.
The cocaine bricks laid out at the president’s feet represent one percent of Colombia’s 520 ton annual production of the drug. Pastrana put the drug’s street value at $1.2 billion, about what his government hopes to receive from Washington.
In December, 1998, police in Cartagena discovered more than 7 tons of cocaine hidden in shipping containers modified to conceal it. Officials called it the largest cocaine seizure ever on Colombia soil.
Friday, May 13, 2005 Posted: 2:16 PM EDT (1816 GMT)
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) — Colombian authorities seized $300 million worth of cocaine that far-right paramilitaries had stashed on a jungle riverbank, the police said Friday, in their biggest drug bust in five years.
Police and the Navy confiscated 12 tons of cocaine hidden on the banks of the River Mira, near the Pacific Ocean port of Tumaco in southern Colombia, in an operation lasting several days that ended early Friday.
With a street value of about $25,000 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) in the United States, where police think the drugs were headed, the cocaine would sell for a total of about $300 million.
“This is the biggest seizure in the country in the last five years,” [see Act 1] the head of Colombia’s judicial police, Col. Oscar Naranjo, told Reuters.
The drugs belonged to members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, an outlawed far-right militia known by its Spanish initials AUC that has killed thousands of people in its brutal campaign against Marxist rebels, Naranjo said.
The seizure came just as the U.S. Congress debates a Bush administration request for $600 million in aid money for Colombia’s anti-cocaine effort.
Some congressmen have complained that there is no evidence showing the amount of cocaine on U.S. streets has declined despite more than $3 billion in assistance to Colombia since 2000.
Armed agents made five arrests and seized nine assault rifles, communications equipment and eight boats in the operation.
Working with the United States, Colombian authorities have significantly increased seizures in recent years, and confiscated 148 tons of cocaine last year.
The lawlessness caused by a four-decade-long guerrilla war has helped make Colombia the worlds largest producer of the drug, with the U.S. government estimating the countrys criminals produced about 430 tons in 2004.
But this is down from about 700 tons in 2001, thanks to a U.S.-backed program of spraying illegal coca crops.
Critics of the program point out that U.S. street prices for cocaine have hardly budged over the period, indicating that just as much is probably flowing into the country as ever.
Both the AUC and Marxist rebels draw on cocaine money to buy weapons in a conflict that claims thousands of lives a year. But, while they are bloody rivals on the battlefield, the AUC often cooperates with the rebels in the drug trade.
The paramilitaries probably bought the cocaine found on the River Mira from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Naranjo said.
No Comments » | 
Human Rights | 
Permalink
Posted by relcom
