Authorities in Colombia recovered eight tons of cocaine in a recent raid targeting the Clan Úsuga gang.
Dozens of commandos backed by helicopters seized the drugs from a banana plantation near the country’s northwestern coast, police said, according to the Associated Press. The drugs were apparently bound for the United States by way of the Caribbean.
President Juan Manuel Santos congratulated his police force in a Sunday tweet, casting the operation in the coastal town of Turbo in historic terms and calling it a blow to criminals.
Nearly 1.5 tons were ready for export, Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas said, according to the BBC. The seizure was the largest on Colombian territory, though authorities may have seized slightly larger amounts at sea, Villegas said.
While prices are fluid and vary by and even within cities, a kilogram of cocaine can sell for roughly $30,000 to $40,000 in the Washington, D.C., area, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. At that rate, eight tons of the unadulterated drug is worth a quarter-billion, more or less.
Three suspects were captured, while another three evaded police. Police say they have captured 6,700 members of the brutal gang over the past five years, according to the BBC, but 2,000 members remain active.
For more than a year, U.S.-trained Colombian commandos have been scouring the jungles in search of the gang’s leader, Dario Antonio Úsuga, eager to head off a turf war if and when the government completes a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. FARC, the country’s biggest rebel group, sells drugs to fund its operations.
The campaign against Clan Úsuga is called Operation Agamemnon, borrowing a name from the king of Greek myth who commanded Greek forces in the Trojan War and died at the hands of his wife’s lover. The U.S. State Department has a $5 million reward for information leading to Dario Antonio Úsuga’s arrest.
On the streets, the gang is known as the Urabeños, an organization that the State Department describes as using “violence and intimidation to control the narcotics trafficking routes, cocaine processing laboratories, speedboat departure points and clandestine landing strips.” During a turf war with a rival gang over trafficking routes, homicides shot up nearly 450 percent over two years, it notes.
Colombia cultivates more illegal coca – the plant from which cocaine is derived – than any other country. Should a deal be reached with the FARC rebels, the government intends to encourage farmers to replace coca with legal crops.
“We have a golden opportunity,” Santos told The Washington Post in the fall. “But if we don’t give the farmers an alternative, they’re going to keep growing coca.”
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