Costa Rica has shipped close to twenty-four tons of cocaine — collected over a two-year period — to the United States for destruction, San José’s Tico Times has reported.
Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ) requested the “extraordinary” help on worries that this amount of drugs, with an approximate US$5 billion street-value, would overload established processes at the Holcim cement plant and contaminate the environment.
“Right now we do not have a place to destroy the drugs,” an OIJ official said.
OIJ and the US Embassy said Costa Rica worked with the US Drug Enforcement Administration to send the drugs secretly on a military cargo plane to Miami. A five-hour process destroyed the twenty-three tons and 780 kilograms of cocaine on Monday.
US Embassy spokesman Eric Turner said in a release “the removal. . . demonstrates the successful joint operations the [United States] and Costa Rica undertake in the fight against organized criminal networks.”
Source: Tico Times. Read more>>