Uruguayan navy, coast guard and customs have uncovered a major operation to smuggle cocaine “bricks” hidden in wool bales, in a container, from the port of Montevideo to Antwerp, Belgium. The volume discovered according to the Navy report amounts to 417 kilos of high quality cocaine hydrochloride and is considered one of the largest recent successes in the fight against the narcotics gangs.
Bolivia passed a controversial measure on Wednesday to expand production of coca, the raw material for cocaine. Leftist president Evo Morales dismissed warnings that an increase in coca crops would fuel the illegal drug trade.
A wanted Colombian drug lord who had a $5-million price on his head from the United States has been killed in a military operation, authorities said Friday. Victor Megateo Navarro, a former guerrilla fighter accused of running a cocaine supply route along the Colombian-Venezuelan border, was first reported killed in August.
With more arrests and airline workers suspected, Venezuela's top police official said that the smuggling of 1.5 tons of cocaine in 31 suitcases on an Air France flight from Caracas to Paris has led to nine arrests on two continents.
The global war on drugs has failed and international policy requires radical reform to remove outmoded, unscientific thinking, according to a major new report from the London School of Economics and Political Science which has been endorsed by President Santos of Colombia.
Brazil is the world's largest market for crack and the second for overall cocaine use, researchers from the Federal University of Sao Paulo (UNIFESP) said on Wednesday.
Peru has temporarily halted the eradication of coca plants used to make cocaine as it works to redesign its anti-drug programs, the country's interior ministry announced this week.
Argentina’s Coast Guard reported that a total of 444 kilos of cocaine were seized on Saturday, after being found on a sailing boat manned by a Spanish crew, close to the main port of the Olivos. The vessel was heading for Piriápolis, in neighbouring Uruguay.
Two Spanish seamen serving imprisonment sentences for drugs related crimes in the Falkland Islands have been deported and since last Sunday are back in Spain, reports the Islands Police Headquarters.
Civil Guard officers based at Barcelona’s El Prat Airport have seized almost one ton of cocaine from a private medevac plane which recently landed at the airport, on a flight from Cabo Verde.