A 42-year-old man, residing in the City of Mendoza, was detained in Chili after trying to enter the neighboring country aboard a car overflowing with packages of cigarettes. The fact, logically, caught the attention of Carabineros in the Los Libertadores Complex. They claim that he had evaded a previous control. The incident occurred this Thursday morning. The subject was detained.
Chilean authorities indicated that around 11:30 a.m. on Thursday the 6th, they warned that a Chevrolet Cobalt model car was entering the country “towards the opposite lane and against the direction of traffic, and then passed by the side of the old complex and returned to the international route, without having accessed the current complex, thereby evading immigration and customs controls.
Faced with this situation, Carabineros mounted a quick operation to catch up with the subject, who was quickly signaled to stop his march, indicated the Chilean site Los Andes Online.
“When carrying out the vehicle check, we immediately realized that the driver was carrying a large number of bundles of cigarettesbeing consulted about this fact and responded that they were for him to smoke,” explained Giovanni Tamburrino Baeza, deputy commissioner of the Carabineros of the Los Libertadores Complex.
But there were not only packages of cigarettes in the passenger seat. When they asked him to lower the rear windows, which were tinted, those in charge of the operation found that the packages were not hundreds, but multiplied by thousands. After asking him to open the trunk, the same thing happened. This led to the immediate arrest of the subject, identified as GRM, with an address in the City of Mendoza according to his DNI.
Carabineros immediately took the man from Mendoza and his particular cargo to a police station. There, a more detailed search was carried out on the merchandise that wanted to enter from Mendoza to Chile and the result showed that it was carrying 14,960 packages of cigarettes of the Pall Mall brand, whose approximate value exceeds 52 million pesos. In addition to the thousands of packages, they seized 16,740 Argentine pesos, 6,100 Chilean pesos, 20 dollars and 10,000 Venezuelan bolivars, in addition to his cell phone.
In his statement, the man – who also received a traffic ticket because he drove the wrong way at the international border – assured that he had been hired only to carry the merchandise and that in the Chilean town of Los Andes he had to meet another person who was to receive the cigarettes.
