TEGUCIGALPA, (Reuters) – Honduran police discovered a Mexican-run cocaine lab yesterday, the first ever found in the Central American country, in a sign Colombian-dominated production of the drug is moving north.
Police found the lab — a crude shack with a metal roof — in a mountainous area around 100 miles (175 km) north of the capital Tegucigalpa. An electricity generator, barrels of chemicals, filters, scales, and tools to process cocaine were all found at the site but no one was arrested.
“The townspeople in the region say a helicopter would land here operated by guys with Mexican accents. This is not a Colombian lab, it has to be a Mexican lab,” Security Minister Oscar Alvarez told Reuters.
Colombia has long been the world’s top producer of cocaine, but powerful Mexican cartels now largely control the trafficking of the drug north to the United States.
Central America is a strategic smuggling corridor and is increasingly a staging ground for Mexican drug gangs.
But the lab would be one of the first signs Mexicans are manufacturing cocaine themselves.
“What we have here is a top notch, Colombia-style, laboratory which is very worrying because it’s the first time we have found cocaine processing in Honduras,” Alvarez said.
Coca leaves, often grown in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia are first made into a paste and then turned into a powdered drug. Alvarez said Honduras is probably not growing coca plants but processing the paste smuggled from South America.
The growing presence of Mexican drug gangs in Central America is increasing violence in an already dangerous region overrun by youth street gangs and recovering from decades of civil war in the 1980s.
