On March 31, Argentina’s Misiones Province Police reported dealing a blow to narcotrafficking in the city of Eldorado. Local authorities seized 9,449 kilograms of marijuana, the largest in its history, the Misiones Police said.
“As part of the fight against narcotrafficking in the north of Misiones, personnel from the Regional Unit III’s Rural Crimes Division, [and from] the Dangerous Drugs Directorate, caught three men who were guarding a significant amount of drugs stored inside a supposedly abandoned property,” the Police said.
Authorities described the seizures as a “historic blow to narcotrafficking,” and stressed that the intervention was the result of interagency intelligence work.
“Argentina is a country with a high consumption of drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, but most of the marijuana distributed in major cities is produced in Paraguay and brought into the country through the border provinces of Misiones and Corrientes,” said InSight Crime, an investigative journalism organization that specializes in organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean, in a February report.
In early February, however, the Argentine National Gendarmerie seized more than 10,000 marijuana plants in the city of Salta, Jujuy province, reported Argentine newspaper La Nación. According to the federal prosecutor in charge of the investigation, Eduardo Villalba, this was the country’s largest seizure of marijuana crops, “which is a warning sign that planting, sowing, and cultivation is beginning to take place in our country,” he said at the time.
So far this year the Misiones Police has seized some 12 tons of drugs, reported Argentine news site Clarín. The local Police’s previous record for marijuana seized in a single operation was in November 2017, with 8.3 tons in Montecarlo, Misiones, Clarín reported.