This week, InSight Crime explores the routes used by drug traffickers to move highly-potent “creepy” marijuana from Colombia’s Cauca department through Venezuela, a country that has historically served as a springboard to supply regional markets. Venezuela’s strategic location, and the corrupt authorities that protect trafficking groups like the Camacaro Cartel and the Acacio Medina Front, help marijuana reach the Caribbean, Central America, and Brazil, where it fetches a far higher price.
We also analyze the killing by Venezuelan security forces of “El Conejo,” one of Venezuela’s most wanted criminals, who had ties to politicians. We review the clashes between Chapitos and the Caborca Cartel in Sonora, Mexico, where both groups seek to control drug trafficking routes to the United States, and we examine criticism of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) operations by former and current US officials.
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Seizures of marijuana shipments on Venezuela's coast and along its border with Colombia have underscored the country's role as an important corridor for a particular type of Colombian cannabis flooding Latin America's markets.
In early March, Colombian National Police seized 2.5 tons of marijuana from a truck carrying kitchen utensils and plastic furniture in the municipality of Maicao, in the border department of La Guajira, on the Colombia-Venezuela border.
Read the investigation >
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Venezuelan security forces have killed one of the country’s most-wanted criminals, “El Conejo” (The Rabbit). Despite...
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A bloody confrontation between the Caborca Cartel and the Chapitos in Sonora, Mexico, has revealed the...
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The Venezuela Organized Crime Observatory Continues to Be a Benchmark in the Region
Our extensive coverage of criminal activity in the border areas between Venezuela and Colombia has been referenced in a report by the Colombia-Venezuela RADAR project of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the Venezuela Observatory of the Universidad del Rosario. In the border territories section, the report makes use on multiple occasions of our research on the presence of criminal actors in the states of Zulia, Táchira, Apure, and Amazonas.
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Profiles of some of the notable criminal personalities and groups that have marked this week.
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The now-jailed former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias “El Chapo,” reportedly had...
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The Acacio Medina Front is a dissident group that emerged from the Revolutionary...
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"Ecuador, which is sandwiched between Colombia and Peru - seen as the world's biggest cocaine producers - has become a focus of the global drug trade in recent years, according to the research group InSight Crime."
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