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Authorities in the northwestern province of Bocas del Toro intercepted a number of ships carrying giant amounts of cocaine, a sign that traffickers are the archipelago as a component of long-distance routes in the Caribbean Sea, as pandemic border closures prevent land movements.
The National Naval Air Service of Panama (SENAN) seized only about 3 tons of cocaine in mid-September on a speedboat in the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, bordering Costa Rica, according to a tweet from the agency.
Between January and July 2020, 10. 5 tons of cocaine were seized in the waters of Bocas del Toro, a third of the almost 35 tons registered nationally, according to figures from the Public Ministry. Quoted through Metro Libre media. Speedboats were affected in more than part of the seizures, La Estrella de Panamá reported.
More complicated traffic strategies have also been found. In February 2020, SENAN intercepted a submarine with five tons of cocaine in Bocas del Toro. It had been “almost 10 years since the Caribbean noticed or detected the presence of a semi-summary. “a senior Colombian army officer told Di-logo the news of the U. S. Army.
Large-scale drug trafficking continues to plague Panama, with cocaine seizures reaching a record number of tons in 2019. On September 16, U. S. President Donald Trump included Panama in a memorandum identifying the world’s leading manufacturer of illicit drugs and transit countries.
Panamanian prosecutor Javier Caraballo that the accumulation in the number and volume of seizures in the Caribbean is a trend, “which we are still reading to see how we can adapt quickly,” he told EFE.
While maritime drug trafficking across the Pacific has long been a preferred direction across Panama, border closures with Colombia and restrictions since the start of the coronavirus pandemic have forced traffickers to make greater use of the Caribbean.
Although seizures are not the best indicator for measuring drug trafficking, it is very likely that several points have led to an increase in speedboat interceptions in front of Bocas del Toro.
On the one hand, maritime patrols have increased, according to Grisel Bethancourt, a freelance journalist in Panama. Traffickers are also increasingly the maritime direction “because it is less difficult to transport more tons of drugs because they come directly from Colombia,” he said. InSight Crime.
Panama has been described as “the mouth of the funnel” by its shared border with Colombia, the largest cocaine manufacturer in the world, in this funnel is preferably Bocas del Toro, its archipelago facilitates the cover-up and smuggling of drug shipments, and its inaccessibility – road links arrived only in the 1980s – complicates interdiction efforts. It also houses a porous border with Costa Rica that passes through a national park, where there is a history of drug trafficking.
According to Bethancourt, it is quite uncommon for fishing boats to head north in Caribbean waters off the coast of Panama. “As a general rule, traffickers prefer to free ships from the Colombian city of Turbo, off the Gulf of Urabá, for the province of Columbus in Panama,” he said.
The increase in cocaine seizures would possibly be related to the reopening of some drug routes through one of Colombia’s toughest drug groups: the Urabeos, also known as the Gulf Clan (Gulf Clan). and Corruption Project in May that many of these reopened roads cross Panama.
For Bethancourt, the resources told him that the Urabeos were probably the expeditions. It’s transparent that these drug dealers have reveled because they “use speedboats that have a lot of force in their engines and can bring three-ton drug loads,” he said. Additional.
Finally, increased traffic in the Caribbean also reflects a broader trend in Central America. Honduras has noticed a dramatic increase in cocaine seizures this year, basically on the Caribbean coast of Thanks to God province. Similarly, Guatemala continues to combat the volumes of cocaine passing through its Caribbean ports Costa Rica has noticed that its Caribbean coastal communities and larger port are located in the epicentres of drug trafficking.