Finding of a drug laboratory on the border with Colombia focuses on whether there is production in Ecuador

2024-03-16 00:10:03

QUITO (AP) — The Ecuadorian Army reported on Friday the location and destruction of an infrastructure used as a laboratory for drug production on the border between Ecuador and Colombia, a day after a military helicopter was attacked by gunfire without stopping. injured or dead.

The head of the joint task force, General Milton Rodríguez, in statements to the press, detailed that an infrastructure destroyed the day before had been built on the banks of the Mira River, “on the international political boundary” with Colombia, and pointed out that “the production estimated from this giant laboratory is 15 tons per month.”

The value that said processing capacity would represent would be around 150 million dollars, according to a statement from the Armed Forces released on Friday, which specified that there were five production areas with 1,000 square meters that included “bedrooms and food for approximately 80 people.” ”.

The discovery of this infrastructure, in a country that has been classified by the authorities for years as a transit point only for drugs produced by neighboring countries, put the focus on whether there would now also be production activities in Ecuador.

According to information provided to the AP by the Ecuadorian police, between 2021 and 2023 “six drug processing laboratories have been identified, intervened and dismantled” on the northern border, whose production capacity was not detailed.

A month ago, on February 10 and 14, the armed forces reported that they destroyed two artisanal crude oil refining laboratories used to process drugs, in the middle of the jungle, in the Putumayo canton of the border province of Sucumbíos.

Security experts consider that Colombian drug trafficking groups intend to extend cocaine laboratories to Ecuador, but they deny that the country has taken a step towards prosecution.

The former head of the Army and former Secretary of Public Security, Wagner Bravo, told The Associated Press that due to the increase in production of coca leaf and cocaine base paste in Colombia, criminal groups, mainly dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, “Eventually they cross the border (of Ecuador) and have placed some discovered laboratories in the jungle part.”

Bravo clarified that this does not mean that Ecuador has moved on to the drug production or processing phase.

To produce one kilo of refined cocaine, at least 150 kilos of coca leaf would be required, which ties processing in laboratories to the proximity of the plantations, which provide the raw material. “Imagine the number of trucks that would have to go to the laboratories” in Ecuadorian territory, also running the risk of being located, the former official ruled out.

For the former director of military intelligence, retired colonel Mario Pazmiño, “laboratories have begun to appear more frequently on the northern border,” but Ecuador “continues to be supplied mostly from Colombia” through whose border, he details, up to 700 tons of drugs pass. .

The objective of the groups linked to drug trafficking, he noted, is to remove 75% of Colombian cocaine production through the area between the Colombian departments of Nariño and Putumayo and the Ecuadorian provinces of Esmeraldas, Carchi, Imbabura and Sucumbíos, where there are countless crossings. irregular borders.

The location of the first processing laboratory of such magnitude in Ecuador occurs two months after the country’s largest drug seizure in a single coup, with 22 tons of cocaine, which were hidden in underground tunnels under a pig farm in the province of Los Ríos.

The rector of the Institute of Higher National Studies (IAEN), Patricio Haro, agreed that the capture “demonstrates the activity and intensity of cocaine trafficking in our country, which has become a platform for the exit of drugs produced in Colombia.” ”.

According to a situational assessment of the strategic environment of drug trafficking in Ecuador, prepared by the police in collaboration with the Ecuadorian Organized Crime Observatory (OECO), the increase in the production of coca leaf crops in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, in more of 300,000 hectares in 2021, is decisive for a country located in the middle of the largest producers.

Renato Rivera, coordinator of the Observatory, pointed out that there is a “transformation in the logic of the processing laboratories” that have been located in Ecuador. “Before they were refinement laboratories, but now there are crystallization laboratories.” In the former, the base paste obtained from the coca leaf was made and, in the latter, cocaine was obtained.

According to him, although coca leaf crops in Ecuador and the presence of laboratories “are incipient,” the Andean country “already occupies a privileged role in the growing drug trafficking value chain.”

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