Major Colombian Heroin Ring Busted
A force of more than 1,500 anti-drug agents moved swiftly Wednesday in pre-dawn raids in four cities in Colombia, arresting 46 people and smashing what's said to be that country's "most powerful" heroin ring.
The raids were staged by Colombian authorities acting on U.S. intelligence information and backed by a fleet of planes and helicopter gunships.
"This is a job we have been doing and will continue. These mafiosos cannot hide," said Leo Areguin, chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Colombia, at a Bogota news conference with Colombian national police chief General Rosso Jose Serrano.
The massive sweep coincides with Colombian president Andres Pastrana's trip to Washington to lobby for a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package of mostly military aid to fight both the drug war and Marxist rebels.
Those arrested include the alleged ringleader, Nicolas Urquijo, cousin of Pablo Escobar, the kingpin of the notorious Medillin drug cartel who died in a 1993 rooftop shootout with police. Urquijo was captured Wednesday outside Medillin and was shown on Colombian television being bundled into a police airplane being flown to an undisclosed location.
Raids were also staged in Popayan and Cucuta. Authorities say the suspects in custody range from lookouts and couriers to money launderers and traffickers in heroin processing chemicals.
They stand accused of shipping up to 110 pounds of heroin a month stuffed inside false-bottomed suitcases, women's bras and sex toys.
Authorities say the heroin shipped out to the U.S., Spain, the Netherlands and Italy, and accounted for about a tenth of Colombia's six-ton estimated total annual production of cocaine.
Wednesday's sweep, dubbed "Operation Millennium II", comes exactly six months after a previous crackdown, "Operation Millennium", in which 31 people were arrested on charges of shipping up to $1 billion of cocaine per month to the U.S. and Europe. Most of those suspects are also wanted in the U.S. and are expected to be extradited.
No word yet on whether there will also be efforts to extradite any of the 46 suspects nabbed in this latest operation.
Sentences for drug crimes are much more severe in the U.S., with traffickers facing the possibility of multiple life terms behind bars, as compared to Colombia, where some major drug lords have walked free after less than ten years in prison.
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