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Bolivia seizes 2.5 tons of Peruvian cocaine

Written by EFE Friday, 19 March 2010 00:00

Bolivian police carried out an operation Friday in which it arrested one person and seized 2.5 tons of cocaine shipped from neighboring Peru, authorities said.

Col. Jorge Romero, regional chief of the elite FELCN drug squad in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, told Efe that the cocaine was confiscated in the working class neighborhood of Plan 3000.

"The quantity of drugs seized is incredible and is far beyond what many other operations have achieved in the last two or three years," he said.

Besides the Peruvian placed under arrest, suspected of "belonging to the gang of drug traffickers," the police raided seven houses where two Bolivians were arrested and are being interrogated for their presumed involvement with the shipment, Romero said.

"One hundred percent of the drug comes from Peru. Now we see our country being used as a transit zone for drugs. We don't know if it was going to be exported to another nation or it was going to a laboratory for crystalization," Romero said.

"Crystalization" is a word used in Bolivia for a process that improves the purity of the drug, making it more valuable.

With this seizure in the Plan 3000 neighborhood, the total amount of cocaine confiscated in Bolivia during the year is close to seven tons, while the volume of marijuana appropriated has reached 423 tons.

Bolivia, like neighboring Peru, permits limited cultivation of coca - the source of cocaine - for legal use in teas, folk remedies and Andean religious rites.

Under leftist President Evo Morales, himself a former coca grower, Bolivia has sharply stepped up seizures of cocaine.