They sent cocaine to Europe and, with the profits, imported ecstasy in industrial rollers

Virginia Messi

02/20/2020 - 16:15

• Clarín.com
• Police

" Malena sings tango like no other, " says tango. And apparently his letter impressed the Spanish National Police so much that he decided to baptize "Operativa Malena" to an anti-drug procedure that ended with a particularly professional band: through private mails, he sent cocaine from Buenos Aires to Europe and, to optimize logistics , I bought ecstasy there and imported it to Argentina hidden in machinery.

A round business that the narcos had oiled. But as everything that can fail eventually fails, one of the packages that should arrive in Spain through the DHL company, with almost 20 kilos of cocaine, was detected by the inspector of the courier company at its headquarters in the Mataderos neighborhood .

This was on September 13, 2019. What followed was a joint investigation between Spain and Argentina, work coordinated by the Procurator of Narcocriminality (Procunar) with the judge in the Economic Criminal Court Ezequiel Berón de Astrada and the prosecutor Jorge Dahl Rocha.

In total there were 12 detainees in Argentina (the last five in January) and three in Spain ( two Colombians and one Romanian who said they had been hired to pick up the shipment).

A narco organization exported cocaine and the profits mattered ecstasy.

The cocaine discovered in September in Buenos Aires was replaced by a similar substance and was allowed to continue on its way to the recipient, in what is known as a controlled delivery . On October 30 he arrived in Spain on an Air Europa flight.

It is believed that it was not the first shipment of this type that the band made because the sender of the package (which contained a black metallic cylinder) was the same as that of two other parcels previously detected, also in 2019: an alleged company located in Buenos Aires downtown and registered as a customs transport agent. The two previous shipments had been intercepted by the Australian Police, when they arrived in that country.

A narco organization exported cocaine and the profits mattered ecstasy.

Shortly after this controlled delivery to Spain it was discovered that the band had sent to Buenos Aires months before (in July) a merchandise that had been locked in the Port due to administrative problems : the owners were not registered as importers and could not withdraw it from Customs, so its blockade was issued on August 20.

When reviewing that package, an industrial roller , the most important thing was found: 31.5 kilos of MDMA (ecstasy) in the form of valuated glass - without manufacturing - in half a million dollars.

It is a record shipment, so large that "with the kidnapped material 1,100,000 pills could be manufactured, worth 18 million dollars in the market," said Commissioner Inés Cecilia Martínez, head of Dangerous drugs of the Federal.

A narco organization exported cocaine and the profits mattered ecstasy.

As it had been done previously with the shipment of cocaine through DHL, the ecstasy was replaced by stones and delivered to the buyers, who were followed and detained in a warehouse of Isidro Casanova, in the province of Buenos Aires and in different Federal Capital addresses.

Developer Agent

The work to reach the owners of ecstasy was not done in a single step and to achieve the objective the figure of "revealing agent" was used. This man - a police officer in the Federal Operations Division of the PFA - was posing as a representative of the company that the band used as a customs agent for cocaine shipments.

Under this facade it became the nexus between the narcos and the shipment of ecstasy stranded making them believe that, through it, they could take the drug out of Customs. Finally on November 15, the drug owners showed up to take her out of Customs.

But that day they failed to take her because they were told that the assigned verification dispatcher had health problems and had not gone to work. That gave time to Customs and the Federal Police to follow up and intervene phones and the judge to replace the ecstasy with stones.

Everything was done fast, between November 15 and 19, the day the roller that had contained the ecstasy left Customs. But he didn't carry only stones. Inside they had also placed a GPS that sent their geolocation every hour.

EMJ