The men were negotiating the transport of 800kg of cocaine to New York.įollowing his 2013 election, President Maduro’s government created a special homicide police unit and the deployment of the armed forces to fight crime.īut it remains an uphill battle, with criminal organisations from Colombia, Brazil and Europe as well as homegrown groups all operating in Venezuela. In 2015, the two nephews of Venezuelas’s President Nicolas Maduro’s wife were arrested in Haiti in a sting by the US Drug Enforcement Agency. “Its long Caribbean coastline, sparsely populated jungles and plains and proximity to other Caribbean drug transit points like Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Honduras and the Dominican Republic have also contributed to Venezuela becoming a major narcotics smuggling route,” Insight Crime reported.Ī relative cries outside prison in Barquisimeto, Venezuela where inmates die of drug overdoses in the crowded jail. Insight Crime described the shared border as “a hub of criminal activity” for drugs, human trafficking and money laundering. The New York Times has reported previously that drug traffickers can “make an airstrip on the flat prairie in a few hours by dragging a log behind a pick-up truck to smooth the ground”. Mexican drug cartels, if viewed as a combined entity, control most of the cocaine entering the US via a number of trafficking routes.Ī report last November by, an analysis group of Latin American organised crime, described Venezuela as “a key transit country” for drug shipments to the US and Europe.
Last year, reported that Mexico was experiencing one of its worst moments in the field of drug trafficking, with authorities unable to keep up. In a decade of drug violence, about 26,000 have gone missing. The cartels of Tijuana, Juarez and the Gulf have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Mexicans.