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Almost 22 tons of cocaine packaged and labeled with the airlines they were destined to go to – Iberia, KLM, Qatar, AB, and JET2 – was seized this month by Ecuador’s Armed Forces.
“There are six different logos that make it clear what the destinations were,” police commander Cesar Zapata told El Pais.
The cocaine was wrapped up in 733 packages and buried at a pig farm in the province of Los Rios.
The operation involved a six month surveillance operation and around 150 soldiers who dug four meters underground to locate nearly 10 tons of drugs. Another 12 tons of cocaine was discovered in a sewer duct on the property. Also found on the property were 12 rifles and more than 5,000 pieces of ammunition.
With an approximate street value of around $50,000 per kilo, the drugs would have been worth an estimated $1.1 billion.
“It is presumed that this material could have been transported to the markets of Asia, Europe and North and Central America, using low-performance light aircraft,” the Ecuadorian Army wrote on X.
“This operation represents a strong weakening of the operational, logistical and financial capacity of drug trafficking worldwide, generating a loss of 50,000 dollars per kilo, approximately more than 1 billion dollars in the international market.
“The success of the military operation is the product of more than six months of the execution of observation and surveillance strategies carried out by our military intelligence.”
𝑨𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒛𝒂𝒄𝒊𝒐́𝒏
En el marco de la operación militar realizada en #EsteroLagarto, hasta el momento se ha contabilizado lo siguiente:
* Cerca de 22 toneladas de clorhidrato de cocaína distribuidas en 733 bultos.
Se presume que este material podría haber sido… https://t.co/aDAw44mhVK pic.twitter.com/y4LPfQiyyr
— Ejército Ecuatoriano (@EjercitoECU) January 22, 2024
Earlier this month, Ecuadorian authorities seized 14 tons of drugs, bring this year’s total seizures to 36 tons. In all of 2023, the country seized a total of 197 tons of drugs, according to InSight Crime.
Authorities believe this latest batch of seized cocaine belonged to the Fatales gang, a faction of the Choneros, one of Ecuador’s most largest criminal organizations.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports Ecuador has the third-highest amount of cocaine seizures in the world. They estimate there has been around 550 tons of illegal drugs seized in the country since just 2020.