SAN JUAN, (Reuters) – A 1.8 ton cocaine shipment worth an estimated $50 million that was thought to be destined for the U.S. market was seized off the coast of Puerto Rico, federal authorities said yesterday, in one of the largest drug busts there in recent years.
The shipment was intercepted on Monday evening on a 30-foot boat that was 12.5 miles off the resort town of Dorado on Puerto Rico’s north coast.
“We have seized more than three tons of cocaine over the last month,” Angel Melendez, head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations office in San Juan, said on Wednesday.
The great majority of cocaine destined for the U.S. market is smuggled via Mexico, but U.S. officials have said that joint U.S.-Mexican counter-drug efforts have begun to push some of the traffic back into the Caribbean, an historically popular corridor during the heyday of Colombia’s Medellin cartel in the 1980s and 1990s.
About 14 percent of U.S.-bound cocaine shipments, roughly 42 tons, was trafficked through the Caribbean in the first six months of 2013, and Puerto Rico and the neighboring Dominican Republic have emergied as hubs of the burgeoning trade, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
