Desperate Venezuelan migrants turn to Colombia coca plantations
They were once manual laborers, taxi drivers, fishermen and merchants. But Venezuelan migrants fleeing poverty and shortages of basic necessities have been forced into new work: picking coca leaves for Colombia's drug traffickers. Hundreds of Venezuelans work grueling days on coca leaf plantations, seduced by ...
Reputation precedes Mexican drug lord 'El Chapo' as U.S. trial nears
He is accused of having a hand in dozens of murders, of using his drug cartel to smuggle more than 200 tons of cocaine into the United States, even pulling off running the massive operation from behind bars. That's when he wasn't busy escaping ...
Former All-Star pitcher Esteban Loaiza pleads guilty to drug charges
Former All-Star pitcher Esteban Loaiza, who earned more than $43 million over 14 seasons, pleaded guilty Friday to federal drug charges in California. Loiza acknowledged that he possessed about 20 kg of cocaine with intent to distribute. He faces a minimum of 10 years in ...
British tennis player Dan Evans admitted Friday that he tested positive for cocaine in April and now faces a suspension. The 27-year-old Evans, who reached a career-high ranking of No. 41 in March, organized a news conference in London and read a statement but took ...
China's execution of 72-year-old Colombian drug mule riles Bogota, stuns family
A retired journalist who joined the criminal underworld while researching a book on South America's drug cartels became the first Colombian, and possibly the first Latin American, to be executed in China for drug offenses. The execution Monday night of Ismael Arciniegas occurred amid a ...
Britain's world heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury has been drinking and using cocaine to help him deal with depression, he told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview released on Tuesday. "I've been out drinking, Monday to Friday to Sunday, and taking cocaine. I can't deal ...
Half-mile Tijuana-San Diego tunnel turns up, along with ton of cocaine, vast pot trove
U.S. authorities said Wednesday that they discovered a cross-border tunnel that ran a half-mile from a Tijuana house equipped with a large elevator to a lot in San Diego that was advertised as a wooden pallet business, resulting in seizures of more than a ...
Flight attendant flees screening at L.A. airport, leaves cocaine-filled bags
A flight attendant fled when she was selected for a random screening at Los Angeles International Airport, prompting a search that turned up 66 pounds (30 kg) of cocaine in her carry-on bags, a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman said on Monday. The woman, who had ...
Narco-flights ply Peru's cocaine corridor unhindered by military, bribes ready if needed
Three years after Peru became the world's leading cocaine producer, small planes are ferrying more than a ton a day to Bolivia right under the military's nose. While drug corruption is rife in Peru, the narco-flight plague represents a failure of its armed forces, which ...
Dog's discovery leads Colombia, Mexico airport cops to 2 metric tons of cocaine disguised as toner
Authorities in Colombia and Mexico said they seized as much as 2 metric tons of cocaine disguised as printer toner in joint operations on Monday at the countries' two main airports. Police in Bogota's El Dorado airport were tipped off when a drug-sniffing Labrador named ...
Coast Guard, after budget restored, logs record cocaine busts in Pacific
The U.S. Coast Guard has seized more cocaine off Latin America's Pacific coast over the past 10 months than in the previous three years combined as it rebounds from budget cuts and combats smugglers increasingly moving drugs on the high seas, officials said Monday. The ...
U.S. Coast Guard crew bags semi-submersible off Mexico with $181 million in cocaine
The U.S. Coast Guard has seized 12,000 pounds (5,440 kg) of cocaine from a vessel in the Eastern Pacific in one of the largest busts of its kind. The drugs are valued at $181 million. About 4,000 pounds of the cocaine was lost when the vessel ...
