The National Police on Monday said it had seized three metric tons of cocaine in the northwest of Colombia.
The drugs allegedly belonged to the Urabeños, Colombia’s most powerful drug trafficking and neo-paramilitary group that controls most of the drug exports along the country’s Caribbean and Pacific coastlines.
The drugs were found in a building the Uraba region from where the neo-paramilitary group is believed to operate and derived their name when the founders of the organization were still members of paramilitary group AUC.
|
The building in which the drug were found was used to “accumulate shipments of different drug trafficking groups who pay the Usuga clan [as the government calls them] to … embark them on a speedboat bound for Central America” from where Mexican drug cartels would transport the drugs to the United States for consumption.
According to General Rodolfo Palomino, the director of the National Police, officers also found a “sophisticated lab in the heart of the jungles” of the Choco province. This lab had the capacity to produce between two and three tons of cocaine per month, according to Palomino.
Both finds were made in the municipality of Acandi, where then-Urabeños boss “Giovanni,” the brother of the current boss “Otoniel,” was killed on new year’s day 2012.
According to the United Nations, Colombia’s illicit drug industry has the potential capacity to produce 487 tons of cocaine annually.
Potential cocaine production in Colombia up 52% to 487 tons in 2014