BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombian police on Tuesday seized cocaine with an estimated value of $265 million in shipping containers at the Pacific port of Buenaventura, a city on the Andean country’s Pacific coast, a senior official reported.
Some 4.9 tonnes of the drug were seized in two containers at Colombia’s most important Pacific port, anti-narcotics police director General Jorge Luis Ramirez said.
While there were no arrests, the operation represents the largest cocaine seizure in Colombia this year.
Authorities did not disclose the owner of the seized cocaine.
Colombia is a leading producer of cocaine, with output of around 951 tonnes a year and cultivations of coca – the drug’s main ingredient – covering more than 200,000 hectares (494,211 acres), according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Drug trafficking has long fed the Andean country’s internal armed conflict. Leftist rebel group the National Liberation Army (ELN), dissidents from the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas – who demobilized under a 2016 peace deal – and criminal groups all make money from the trade, according to security sources.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta; Writing by Oliver Griffin; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
