Bogotá, June 17 (EFE).- Colombian authorities arrested a subject who was driving a vehicle with a ton and a half of cocaine hydrochloride on a highway in a rural area of the department of Cauca, in the southwest of the country, reported this Monday. the army.
The van had a hidden compartment in which the drugs were hidden “in order not to be discovered at the controls,” said the commander of the Third Division of the Army, General Giovani Valencia, who added that the driver was made available. of the competent authorities.
The arrest was carried out on Sunday during military operations in the rural area of El Bordo, in the municipality of Patía, in which soldiers from the High Mountain Battalion No. 4 intercepted the vehicle with the cocaine through one of the checkpoints.
“With this result, more than 10,000 million pesos (2.4 million dollars) are affected to the drug trafficking chains and the financing of residual organized armed groups that commit crimes in the southwest of the country,” Valencia noted.
In 2023, Colombian authorities seized 739.5 tons of cocaine, 450 of which were confiscated in international territories, according to official figures from the Ministry of Defense.
The areas of both cultivation and production of base paste and cocaine in Colombia have been concentrated on the borders with Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru. EFE
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