A boat with more than 3.6 tons of cocaine It was intercepted this Friday in Ecuadorian waters and will be transferred to the United States along with its three crew members, who were detained, as announced by the general commander of the Ecuadorian National Police, Fausto Salinas.
The interception of this vessel, which had 73 large volume bags on board, occurred 129.64 kilometers northwest of the coastal city of Manta, capital of the province of Manabí.
The operation involved National Police and the Ecuadorian Navy in coordination with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)for its acronym in English) of the United States and with the Coast Guard of the same North American country.
“Due to international conventions and agreements in the maritime field, the detainees and the 3,650 kilos of drugs, the product of this intelligence work, are being transferred by the Coast Guard to the United States to continue the investigations,” Salinas said in a statement. message published on social networks.
Ecuador and the US maintain an agreement to combat drug trafficking
In August, Ecuador and the United States signed a Cooperation agreement to expand the fight against drug trafficking.
Surrounded by Colombia and Peru, the two main cocaine producers in the world, Ecuador has become a key point for the trafficking of this drug controlled by different criminal gangs, based especially on the country’s continental coast.
From there they have turned the ports into great springboards for cocaine that comes to Europe, while the authorities have also recently dismantled a mafia that received drugs from Colombia to take them in high-powered boats from the Ecuadorian coast to Mexico, where they were received by cartels.
In parallel, violence has skyrocketed, going from 5.8 to 25.32 intentional homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in the last five years, the highest number since records have been recorded.
Since the beginning of the year, Ecuador has seized 155 tons of drugs, the vast majority cocaineso for the third consecutive year it is on track to exceed 200 tons seized annually, which makes it the third country in the world with the most drug seizures, surpassed only by Colombia and the United States.
