Surf’s Up! Uruguayan Authorities Find Cocaine Smuggled Inside Surfboards

Uruguay law enforcement officials said last week they had cracked down on an international drug cartel that was smuggling contraband in a dangerous way – inside a surfboard.

BBC reports Uruguay police said they had arrested three Italians “with the help of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian anti-narcotics police”.

A sniffer dog reported to Uruguayan police that six surfboards contained a total of 50kg of cocaine. According to the outlet. “Police authorized the dispatch of a commission to track down those who received the information.”

Details from the BBC:

“The dogs alerted their owners to a suspicious package on May 23. Officers said the board was unusually heavy and were run through a scanner, which revealed a hidden package inside. A photo provided by Uruguay’s interior ministry shows white powder spilling from one of the boards after it was cut open. Two Italians have been arrested by police, and a third Italian has been detained in Italy, police said, for smuggling drugs from Uruguay to Europe.”

A report released earlier this year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that cocaine production has surged to a record high.

While the pharmaceutical market has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, “latest data suggest this downturn has had little impact on long-term trends,” the report said. Stated.

“The global supply of cocaine has reached record levels. It was less than half of today’s levels,” the UN report said.

The report said the surge in cocaine was “partly a result of the expansion of cocabush cultivation, which doubled from 2013 to 2017, peaked in 2018, and surged again in 2021.” Says.

“But it is also due to improvements in the conversion process of coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. In parallel, demand is also continuously increasing, with most regions seeing a steady increase in the number of users over the last decade. These increases are partly explained by population growth, but the prevalence of cocaine use is also increasing.Law enforcement arrests are also increasing at a faster rate than production, which This means that the increase in the global amount of cocaine available to the public is being held back by the embargo,” the report said.

reported by the BBC Drug traffickers are “increasingly using Uruguay, which borders Brazil and Argentina, as a transit country to transport drugs from drug-producing regions in South America to Europe,” he said.

Earlier this year, New Zealand authorities seized $300 million worth of cocaine floating in the Pacific Ocean, claiming it was a “grave economic blow” to traffickers.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Koster said it was “one of the largest seizures of illegal drugs ever by the authorities in the country”.

“There is no doubt that this discovery will have a major economic impact on everyone from South American producers to distributors of this product,” Koster said. “While this disrupts the activities of the Syndicate, we remain vigilant given how much effort these groups will go to to evade the attention of law enforcement.”

New Zealand Customs Commissioner Bill Perry said the bust was “a huge example of the length of an organ”.[z]Edward Crime Participates in Global Drug Trafficking, Shows We’re Not Exempt From Major Organizations[z]Investigated drug smuggling criminal activity in this part of the world. “