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This content was published on 02 August 2019 - 17:48

Porous borders, lack of control personnel and little experience: after record seizures of cocaine from Uruguay in Europe, the last for more than 1,000 million dollars, experts and customs officials affirm that the conditions are right for the South American country to be a drug transit.

"We have been warning that there are fewer and fewer controls because customs controls are dismantled, the staff (of officials) is not renewed, and people are hired who are at a desk (...) and do not work on the field, in the field , where you have to work," the general secretary of the Uruguayan customs union, Basilio Pintos, denounced this Friday in an interview with radio Sarandí.

Complaints from customs unions about vulnerabilities multiplied after two gigantic seizures of cocaine in Europe. Target of criticism from unions and experts, the director of Uruguayan Customs Enrique Canon resigned on Friday night.

Earlier in the day, German customs announced a record seizure for the country of 4.5 tons of cocaine worth 1.1 billion dollars in a container from Uruguay in the port of Hamburg. The container with soy carried the drug hidden in sports bags and had Antwerp, in Belgium, as its final destination.

In mid-May, French authorities confiscated more than 600 kg of extremely pure cocaine on a private jet from the South American country that landed on French soil. There were several arrests at the destination. The Uruguayan Justice investigates the case.

- Boarding point -

According to the independent crime analysis site Insight Crime, these seizures, added to a series of large volume shipments seized in the last year coming from Uruguay or on Uruguayan soil, "reveal that traffickers could be increasingly using the Southern Cone country as a major shipping point for drugs destined for Europe".

"We see this as the continuation of a diversification of final markets in Europe and transit areas in South America. Uruguay was, in a way, the last frontier (...) but it was inevitable" that it would become a country of traffic, Steven Dudley, co-director of Insight Crime, told AFP in Washington.

Amid twists and turns about the responsibilities and powers of customs officers and police control officials, the customs unions, harshly confronted with their now resigned director, insist that "a part of customs surveillance has been dismantled."

In ports, container checks are, as in many countries, random. A traffic light with red, orange and green lights determines total control including documentation and container opening, paperwork control or direct exit.

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According to the union leader, in Uruguay only 4 to 5% of the containers go through the red channel.

AFP contacted Interpol in Montevideo for information on how these seizure operations are working, but the agency declined to comment.

- Country of transit and "fragile" -

Security specialist Robert Parrado, a retired chief commissioner with a degree in Public Security, told AFP that the country has "porous and very fragile borders in terms of controls, without high specialization" of the personnel in charge of drug trafficking.

"We are a country of transit" and it is necessary to know which are the "stockpiling" places and "how (the drug) travels through national routes," said this expert.

According to Parrado, "criminal operational intelligence" detects "weaknesses in control structures."

Uruguay is a country "fragile for the exit and fragile for the entry" of drugs, said Parrado, for whom the recently seized volumes are "the tip of an iceberg" in a local context in which "coordination is lacking" among the involved in combating illicit drug trafficking.

Drug trafficking once again appeared on the front pages of Uruguayan newspapers last June, with the notorious escape from the Montevideo Central Prison of Italian drug lord Rocco Morabito, who has remained at large ever since.

According to Insight Crime, the demand for cocaine in Europe "is growing", with prices higher than in the United States, so "traffickers will probably look for ways to increasingly use Uruguay as a platform to feed shipments" to the old continent. .

Uruguay returned is not a cocaine producing country.

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