Tag: Colombia

Vet Sentenced For Surgically Implanting Puppies With Liquid Heroin

The 39-year-old Colombian vet’s role in the puppy-implanting plot dates back to 2004.

After a decade on the run and three years in federal custody, a Colombian veterinarian was hit with six years in prison for surgically implanting live puppies with liquid heroin in an effort to aid a South American drug-smuggling ring.

Andres Lopez Elorez appeared in Brooklyn federal court last Friday for sentencing, months after pleading guilty and admitting he conspired to import heroin into the U.S.

“I have made mistakes,” he told the judge, according to The New York Times. “I know I cannot justify my actions.”

Authorities hailed the outcome as a positive step in fighting the long-term rise in opioid overdoses.

“Every dog has its day, and with today’s sentence, Elorez has been held responsible for the reprehensible use of his veterinary skills to conceal heroin inside puppies as part of a scheme to import dangerous narcotics into the United States,” said federal prosecutor Richard P. Donoghue, who apparently likes bad puns in his press releases. “This office and our law enforcement partners will continue to investigate and prosecute drug trafficking organizations, operating here and abroad, to reduce the availability of opioids and save American lives.”

The 39-year-old Colombian man’s role in the puppy-implanting plot dates back to 2004, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. In September of that year, Elorez leased a farm in Medellín, where he “secretly raised dogs” that he used to aid in his drug smuggling efforts.

Police raided the place on Jan. 1, 2005, and found 17 bags of liquid smack, including 10 already implanted in the pups. All told, the drugs weighed in at nearly three keys, according to the feds.

Authorities surgically removed the dope, but three of the animals died from viruses they got after the operation. Twenty-two Colombian nationals were arrested in connection with the case the following year, according to NBC News.

One of the dogs was adopted by an officer with the Colombian National Police and another—named Heroina—became a drug dog for the agency.

Elorez, meanwhile, went on the run. Police didn’t catch him until 2015, when he was arrested in Spain. Three years later, he was finally extradited to the U.S. to face charges.

“Traffickers will go to great lengths,” DEA Special Agent in Charge James Hunt said at the time. “These guys are evil geniuses in ways to think and hide the drugs, secret them. This case was exceptionally heinous.”

After the 39-year-old finishes his sentence, he will be deported.

View the original article at thefix.com

11 February 2019
Program Gives Colombian Farmers An Alternative to Cocaine Crops

A former government official has spent seven years helping the farmers of the coastal town of Chocó – where he grew up – transition their efforts from cocaine to cacao.

A new feature on NPR profiles Joel Palacios, a former member of Colombia’s Ministry of the Interior who is working with farmers in his country to replace their financial dependence on growing coca – a primary ingredient in the manufacture of cocaine – with a safer, legal alternative: cacao, which is used to make chocolate.

Palacios has spent seven years helping the farmers of the coastal town of Chocó – where he grew up – transition their efforts to cacao, and pays them for their efforts through sales of chocolate from his artisanal chocolate company, Late Chocó.

But, as NPR noted, Palacios’ efforts face steep competition from cocaine production, which increased significantly in 2017, and lack of government support for farmers who give up their coca crops.

Palacios grew up in the region of Chocó, which is comprised predominately of Afro-Colombians; more than half live below the poverty line, which makes the cultivation of coca difficult to turn down for basic sustenance.

After his tenure with the government, he returned to the region in 2010 to implement the cacao-for-coca project – or as Palacios described it, “Mas cacao, menos coca” (more cacao, less coca) – and in the past seven years, has persuaded enough Chocó farmers to grow cacao for his chocolate company. As the NPR feature detailed, his campaign faced a host of challenges during that period.

The region is extremely poor and remote, with no roads and virtually no cellphone reception. Palacios said that his operation also lacked practical know-how about managing and harvesting cacao crops. “We didn’t have technical knowledge – how to manage the harvest, how to make it more productive or how to control diseases,” he said. “We’d only collected what nature, in its generosity, would leave for us.”

With the help of the National Cacao Producers Federation and cacao growers in the western region of the country, Palacios learned about cultivation and purchased a plot of land outside of the area’s capital, Quibdó. There, he established a training center for local farmers and, more recently, Late Chocó, which uses nearly 1,000 pounds of cacao per month to make its chocolate bars. The profits from sales of its bars are used to fund the training center and pay farmers a better rate per pound for their crops.

Despite these efforts, Palacios still faces an uphill battle in converting coca crops to cacao.

As the NPR piece explained, farmers in the region felt abandoned by a similar federal program, which was established as part of a 2016 peace treaty between the Colombian government and FARC, a revolutionary group that controlled much of the country’s cocaine industry. More than 83,000 families joined the program, but lack of support by current president Iván Duque has left available funding limited.

Farmers like Francisco Ramírez want to participate in the program.

“We don’t want to grow more coca,” he said. But the government and outside organizations needed to give them a replacement crop, and aside from efforts like the one established by Palacios, that has yet to happen.

Support from the sales of Late Chocó has made a small but significant impact in filling that gap, one that Palacios hopes to keep active. “Projects in Chocó fail because the [nongovernmental organizations] go and donate money and leave. I went and got them in this cacao project – it’s all of our project.”

View the original article at thefix.com

4 January 2019
Narco Submarines Give Coast Guard A Run For Their Money

The DEA estimates that 30 to 40% of narcotics coming into the country are hauled on the homemade submarines.

Narco subs seem to be on the rise as a stealthy method of smuggling drugs, a shift that comes amid booming cocaine production in the South American country most known for it.

In the first nine months of 2018, the Colombian navy caught 14 drug-hauling vessels, three times as many as they intercepted the year before according to Business Insider.

In 2017, the U.S. Coast Guard offered similar observations, reporting a “resurgence” in low-profile vessels like subs.

But those captures likely represent only a small fraction of the drug-laden subs headed stateside, according to the online news outlet. The DEA estimated that 30 to 40% of narcotics coming into the country are hauled on the homemade submarines – and authorities are probably only catching 5% of them, Insider reported.

The shift comes amid a boom in the coke-making industry in Colombia, where there is now more land dedicated to coca-growing than ever before in the nation’s history, according to the New York Times.

“It’s a curve that’s permanently going up and hasn’t reached its inflection point,” the Colombian defense minister, Guillermo Botero, told reporters this year.

The first time U.S. authorities snagged a drug-running sub wasn’t until 2006, when law enforcement intercepted a homemade vessel hauling 3 tons of blow near Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast.

Five years later, American authorities encountered their first stealth sub on the other side of the isthmus, in the Caribbean. Though the traffickers tried scuttling the vessel to ditch the load, authorities ultimately recovered 14,000 pounds of coke from the craft.

Since then, Colombian crime rings have pumped out an estimated 100 drug subs per year, launching them in the country’s rivers where there is relatively little policing to stop them. And, as the blow industry continues booming, traffickers have more and more money to pour into making sure their underwater vessels are ever more sophisticated and able to escape detection.

But the recent uptick in intercepted subs may not mean that there’s more of them. Coast Guard officials told Business Insider that’s actually a sign of anti-trafficking success. Yet, Mike Vigil, former chief of international operations for the DEA, chalked it up to the sheer volume of drug trafficking on the high seas.

“They may be capturing more,” he said, “but again, that’s because there’s a hell of a lot more being using to smuggle drugs.”

View the original article at thefix.com

15 October 2018
Colombian Peace Deal Leads To More Drugs & Violence In Rebel Zones

“When the peace process started, we saw a great future for Ituango, but now, my God, things are worse than they were before.”

When the Colombian government reached a deal with the guerrilla group, FARC, in 2016, it was supposed to usher in a new era of peace for the South American nation, and transform an economy that relied heavily on cocaine production.

However, according to a report by SF Gate, the agreement has led to increased violence in some territories as new guerrillas move in to take the place of the FARC.

“When the peace process started, we saw a great future for (the town of) Ituango, people started coming back after many years,” said Gladys Zapata, who works in a local school. “There was a lot of hope, but now, my God, things are worse than they were before.”

As part of the peace settlement, the government was supposed to come into areas like Ituango, which were long controlled by the FARC. The government promised to provide security and crop replacement for farmers who grow coca. However, that hasn’t come through.

“What’s happening is a criminal reconfiguration for the control of territory and illegal economies,” said Ariel Avila, a political analyst at the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation in Bogotá. “No one counted on the government being so slow in arriving in this area.”

This has frustrated former FARC fighters, some of whom have aligned with new guerrilla groups when promised work on government projects did not come through.

“They left us with nothing but our underpants,” a former fighter said.

The Gulf Clan, a group known for trafficking cocaine, has taken hold in Ituango, bringing in intense violence, including roadside executions.

“We decided to continue the struggle due to the government’s failure to comply with the peace accord and due to the murders of ex-combatants and social leaders,” one fighter who joined the group said.

People working toward peace in the district have received death threats and many have left the area. In addition, local farmers who were used to paying a tax to the FARC often have crops or animals seized by the new group without compensation.

“I want to get out of this hell,” said a woman whose 18-year-old son had been murdered.

In the meantime, without efforts to eradicate coca, cocaine production continues to surge. Last year, officials warned of a “tidal wave” of cocaine coming into the U.S., noting that Colombia was producing more cocaine than ever before. The drug is increasingly being laced with synthetic opioids like fentanyl, officials report, making it even more dangerous for users.

View the original article at thefix.com

9 August 2018