Ecuador destroys the largest drug seizure in its history, 21.5 tons of cocaine

The authorities of Ecuador began this Thursday to destroy the largest drug seizure in the country’s history, which amounts to 21.5 tons of cocaine found last weekend in an underground warehouse on a rural farm.

The record seizure from Ecuador, with an approximate value of about one billion dollars in international markets, will be destroyed using the encapsulation technique, where cocaine is mixed with cement, sand and other elements until its properties are neutralized.

The process to eliminate the 21.5 tons of cocaine will take around eleven hours, at a rate of about two tons of drugs that go through this process, a pace that according to the Ministry of the Interior is sixteen times faster than incineration and friendlier to environment.

The drug arrived at the point where it will be encapsulated and neutralized early this Thursday morning, after being transported in a heavy trailer from the place where it was found, in the canton (municipality) of Vinces, in the tropical province of Los Ríos. .

The seizure was carried out during an operation by the Armed Forces, which took several hours to extract the bags from the warehouse where this large shipment of drugs was stored, which exceeded the nearly 12 tons of cocaine seized in Guayaquil in 2016.

In the same operation, they also seized seventeen firearms, almost 5,400 bullets of different calibers and fourteen magazines, among other items.

Because it is a transit point to the port city of Guayaquil and other points on the coast of Ecuador, the authorities presume that this warehouse was a key drug collection point for some drug trafficking structure, which would later transfer it to the collection points. Shipping to North America or Europe.

They do not rule out that even this organization used ‘narcoplanes’ to send drugs to North America.

Surrounded by Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest cocaine producers, Ecuador In recent years, it has become a key point in the global trafficking of this drug, as mafias take advantage of its ports and coasts to send tons of this drug to Europe and North America.

This has also made it 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 seizure of the 21,499 kilos of cocaine seized last weekend occurred within the framework of the “internal armed conflict” declared by the Government of President Daniel Noboa since the beginning of January against organized crime gangs, mainly dedicated to drug trafficking, which have come to be considered terrorist groups and non-state belligerent actors.

This after these gangs, some with links to Mexican cartels and Eastern European mafias, were allegedly behind a wave of attacks and violence that included kidnapping of police officers, murders, explosion alerts, burning vehicles, riots in prisons with some 200 hostages who were released and the takeover of a television channel by an armed group.