Colombia said Jimenez violated a peace agreement by continuing to organise cocaine shipments and run a criminal empire from prison.
Jimenez is wanted in the US on drug trafficking charges
[…]
He is the first jailed warlord to lose benefits agreed under a 2024 peace deal which led paramilitary leaders to surrender and demobilise 31,000 of their men in exchange for reduced jail terms and extradition protection.
The Uribe administration has been quite willing to extradite such persons to the US, so the track record suggests that they will do so here. Further since, Jimenez was caught breaking the demobilization agreement, I suspect that the Colombian government will want to make an example of him. Given that one of the things that narcos have wanted to avoid is extradition to the US this situation will give Uribe a chance to send a signal to the other AUC commanders: behave or be sent to the US for trial.=.
Colombia’s navy seized a 65-foot submarine that likely was used to haul tons of cocaine on part of its journey to the United States, officials said Tuesday.
No drugs were found or arrests made when the fiberglass submarine was discovered Sunday in a swampy mangrove about six miles off the northernmost point of Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
The blue-colored, diesel-powered vessel had sophisticated communications systems and was capable of carrying up to 11 tons of cocaine
I say “another” in the title, as there have been several of these types of thing seized over the years. It is always an excellent illustration of the lengths to which smugglers will (and can, given the profits) go to move their product.
Drug traffickers and guerrillas have infiltrated senior levels of the Colombian armed forces, seriously compromising their work, officials say.
Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos said the Farc rebels and the main drugs cartel had bribed officials to get information and so avoid capture.
His admission confirms the suspicions of many Colombians, correspondents say.
[…]
Mr Santos’s comments come after two incidents pointed to serious leaks in the security forces.
The first was the arrest of a senior defence department official for allegedly passing information to the powerful Norte del Valle drug cartel.
[…]
The second was earlier this year when sensitive government material was found on guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) who had been killed in combat.
The computer files contained classified information going back several years that would be available only to an informant with very high-level access, officials said.
Sadly, none of this is surprising. The amount of money available to use in bribes in so immense in Colombia that it is miracle that there isn’t more of this going on.
Colombian investigators have arrested three people allegedly involved in recruiting recently retired army officers to work for the country’s largest drug cartel, authorities said Thursday.
The allegations are an embarrassment to an army receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid for arms and training to fight the world’s largest heroin and cocaine industry.
True, although hardly surprising. The amount of money at the disposal to the drug traffickers is so immense that they are able to lure people to their payrolls is hardly a shocker.
The capture of Herrera was one of the most important drug trafficking arrests in Colombia in recent years, a U.S. law enforcement official said Tuesday. Herrera is thought to have worked for various Colombian and Mexican cartels, he said.
[…]
A 2024 indictment in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., alleges that Herrera annually managed the shipment of several multi-ton loads of Colombian cocaine, ferrying it by air, land or sea to U.S. markets via Central America and Mexico.
After escaping from the Mexico City jail, Herrera allegedly did anything but retire. Authorities say he became instrumental in repatriating hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profit from Colombian drug traffickers.
Sources said that Herrera was seized while arranging for a single-engine aircraft to carry $25 million from Central America to Colombia.
The piece starts with a story about how he tried to bribe the cops with $5 million. Apparently he can afford it:
After Herrera’s arrest in Mexico in April 2024, police searching his house in Guatemala found $14 million in cash. Herrera has “many properties” in Colombia and was heavily involved in laundering the drug profits he helped bring back here, DAS detectives said.
Despite record drug eradication efforts, a White House survey found production of coca in Colombia rose for the third consecutive year in 2024, President Alvaro Uribe said.
Uribe, who travels to Washington on Wednesday to secure the continued flow of U.S. anti-drug aid, revealed the findings of the still unreleased report at the end of a long speech Friday. A transcript was posted Sunday on the president’s Web site.
Uribe said the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy survey, which is based on satellite imagery, found that production rose 8 percent last year, to 156,000 hectares (385,484 acres) — an area twice the size of New York City.
I mean, really, who could’ve seen that coming?
This also contradicts statements from the US government from about a month ago.
Certainly when compared to the stated goals, the current policy is an abject failure:
One of Plan Colombia’s main goals was to halve production of coca within five years, but the latest estimate indicates 27 percent more coca is being produced than in 1999, the year before the anti-drug effort went into effect. A recent dip in the U.S. street price of cocaine, and rise in purity, also points to abundant supply.
Despite this: the response is predictable: there will be a call for more money to be spent to try and eradicate more hectares and yet regardless of how much money we spend we are going to be in the same place a few years from now, looking back and saying “well, we just need a few more million, and then we’ll get ‘em”–and meanwhile the cultivation of the coca plant with continue as will the consumption of the drug.
One wonders at what point we stop and actually reassess if this is a smart way to spend the taxpayers’ money.
US aid to Colombia is helping stem the flow of cocaine coming out of the South American country, the head of Washington’s top anti-narcotics agency said here Tuesday.
“Plan Colombia is working. The amount of land used for the cultivation of coca is at an historic low in Colombia,” the head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, Karen Tandy, told a drug law enforcement conference in Madrid.
Of course, the cultivation metric is a favorite amongst drug warriors, never mind that it doesn’t really mean much.
Two problems:
1) Even if the numbers of hectares under cultivation are as “historic low[s]” that doesn’t mean that a) the overall number of hectares under cultivation are at similar lows (it can be grown elsewhere, and cultivation has been increasing in Peru), and b) that still doesn’t mean that the actual supply of cocaine has been substantially altered. (Note, also, a careful reading of the first paragraph that aid is “helping”–hardly as definitive an outcome as the headline suggests).
and
2) There is still the problem that price isn’t going up, a key metric for determining if interdiction policies are actually working.
Billions of dollars in aid to Colombia have failed to drive up the price of cocaine on American streets, the head of the top U.S. anti-narcotics agency said on Tuesday.
Officials in Washington have said crop spraying and military pressure on drug-smuggling guerrillas and paramilitaries would make cocaine more expensive in the United States following a U.S.-backed offensive launched in 2024.
But the Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief said that a higher price — a key indicator of success in the war on drugs — had failed to sustain itself for long.
And I am sorry, but this is perhaps one of the saddest examples of rationalization that I have seen in a long time:
U.S. and Colombian officials say the failure of the cocaine price to move may be due to effects including hidden stashes of cocaine coming on to the market.
Yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket: the policies really are working, but it is just those secret stashes that are keeping prices down.
Colombia’s navy made the largest drug seizure in the nation’s history when it uncovered up to 27 tons of cocaine buried along the Pacific coast, the defense minister said Monday.
The cocaine, with a wholesale value of more than $500 million, was found Sunday buried in 1,000 packages of 55 pounds each near the coastal town of Pizarro, 250 miles west of Bogota, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a news conference.
Later, Navy Adm. Guillermo Barrera told The Associated Press by telephone that 919 packages of cocaine had been found. The different numbers could not be immediately explained. The figures put the cocaine seizure between 24 tons to 27 tons.
That’s half a billion dollars worth of cocaine. Amazing.
And the truly amazing thing is that this seizure will not significantly affect the supply of cocaine on the streets nor the price of the drug–it never does.
