The Colombian Navy says it has uncovered a clandestine shipyard housing two “semi-submersible” vessels and different gear for transport tons of unlawful medicine in a rural village of a municipality alongside the Pacific Ocean.
The makeshift shipyard was positioned in a rural space of Tumaco within the Nariño Department, the Navy stated in an announcement that alleges the Ivan Rios dissident group of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC) ran the operation.
The FARC had been concerned in a battle with the Colombian authorities that started in 1964. A treaty in 2016 referred to as for the tip of a decades-long conflict, and in June 2017, FARC formally ceased to be an armed group, supposedly disarmed and handed over its weapons to the United Nations.
But parts of FARC stay lively and “drug trafficking, mainly cocaine, is almost certainly their largest income source,” a report on FARC dissident teams by the WOLA (Advocacy for Human Rights within the Americas) group stated.
In the Tumaco discovery, the Colombian Navy stated “units of the Marine Infantry Brigade No. 4, with the support of troops from the Battalion Against Drug Trafficking No. 4, carried out a military operation to search and control the territory in the village of San Jacinto, located at the mouth of the Mira River, where they located the Illegal shipyard of 380 square meters [4,090 square feet], used by the Farc dissident group ‘Estructura Iván Ríos’ under the criminal command of alias ‘Uriel,’ for the construction of semi-submersibles in the Colombian-Ecuadorian border area.”
Colombian Navy/Zenger
The Navy stated the alleged drug traffickers had been constructing two 82-foot semi-submersible vessels on the Colombian-Ecuadorian border and that they’ve a “capacity to transport up to four tons of narcotics each.”
“The first one was 80 percent completed, and the second one was completely finished and ready to transport illicit drugs, which would be destined for drug trafficking cartels in Mexico,” the Navy assertion stated.
The Navy stated it seized a “boat, communication equipment and different tools used for the manufacture of these illegal means of maritime transport” and that the “material was destroyed according to established protocols.”
“With this finding, the Colombian Navy manages to weaken the financial and logistical structures of the organizations at the service of drug trafficking that commits crimes in the Pacific of Nariño,” the Navy assertion stated.
Nariño is taken into account Colombia’s principal coca-producing space, and due to this fact additionally the world’s.
“Perhaps nowhere else in the country are the challenges of a post-conflict Colombia more evident, and perhaps no other part of the world is more indicative of how an economy can be fueled by the production and trafficking of cocaine,” Insight Crime stated in a 2017 investigative report titled “Nariño, Colombia: Ground Zero of the Cocaine Trade.”
Colombian Navy/Zenger
This story was supplied to Newsweek by Zenger News.