Gendarmerie and Prefecture personnel seized more than a ton and a half of cocaine that was to be shipped to Europe. The drug shipment was found during a series of raids carried out in Escobar and Canning, within the framework of “Operation Atlantis”, in which six people were arrested.
The operation was the result of a series of investigative investigations that have been carried out since 2018 on a criminal organization with national and foreign actors that planned to transport the drug by sailboat to international waters and, once in the open sea, load it onto a ship that would take it to Europe, where the reverse maneuver would be carried out, sources from those federal security forces explained.
The monitoring of geographical locations alerted the investigators to the movements of the main suspects. They sailed in three boats on the Paraná River, interspersing stops at two homes on the banks.
The uniformed men observed how people made handrails from heavy bags, from the houses to the boats. This maneuver determined to carry out a controlled follow-up in the water, where it is verified how the boat “elbows” next to a sailboat identified as “Quo Vadis”. The boats were immediately intercepted, managing to arrest five Argentine citizens and one citizen of Spanish nationality.
After this procedure, the Federal Criminal and Correctional Court No. 2 of Lomas de Zamora ordered a series of searches.
Most of the shipment was seized in a house with a dock on the Paraná River, in Escobar. There, they seized 34 “watertight bags” (these provide total protection against water, dust and mud) with 800 packages sealed with plastic and wrapped in pink piñatas. They contained 889.2 kg of cocaine. In the closet of a changing room of a house located in a country in Canning they found another 660.7 kg of the same drug.
To find the organization, in the investigation, in which the Narcocriminality Prosecutor’s Office (Procunar) also intervened, the maneuvers carried out by the criminal gang were analyzed, which included money laundering and logistical contributions of transport, in addition to the distribution of narcotics.
The main investigated, to whom the six detainees responded, is an Argentine citizen who was arrested in April 2020 in Spain, the spokespersons added.
Within the framework of “Operation Atlantis”, in which new arrests and operations are not ruled out, six trucks, five cars -two of them high-end-, three boats (sailboat, speedboat and semi-rigid) have been seized for the time being. , six motorcycles, logistics elements, 650,000 pesos, 38,000 dollars, 53,690 euros and 11,300 reais, a bitcoin storage device, a money counting machine and documentation of interest to the cause, in addition to 1,549 kilos of cocaine.