More than one hundred kilos of cocaine were seized in Ecuador within a shipment of bananas destined for Belgium, as reported this Sunday by the National Police in a statement.
The seizure was made on Saturday, March 2, in the port of Machala, capital of the southern province of El Oro, bordering Peru, when agents inspected the container with the help of an anti-drug dog.
Inside the container, they found more than one hundred rectangular blocks of cocaine wrapped in packaging tape, camouflaged between banana boxes, weighing a total of 111.8 kilos.
According to the Police report, the agents began to carry out a thorough search of the container and found “a thousand camouflaged rectangular packages in the ceiling area, so they used appropriate tools to remove the alkaloid.”
The legal representative of the exporting company that shipped the banana was arrested in flagrante delicto and placed under the orders of the Prosecutor’s Office, to determine responsibility for the events.
Surrounded by Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Ecuador has become a key point in global trafficking in recent years as mafias take advantage of its ports and coasts to send tons of this drug to Europe and North America.
This has made Ecuador also the third country in the world that seizes the most drugs, only behind Colombia and the United States, since annually it has exceeded 200 tons of narcotics seized in the last three years.
The organized crime gangs that operate in Ecuador have forged links with the Mexican Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartels for the shipment of cocaine to the United States, as well as with the Albanian mafia, in the case of shipment of drugs to Europe, according to the Ecuadorian authorities. EFE
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