A months-long CNN investigation traced the northward route of cocaine from the farmlands where much of it is grown in Colombia, and found that the number of suspected drug flights from Venezuela has risen by up to 50 % from 2017 to 2018, according to one US official – from about two flights per week in 2017 to nearly daily in 2018. This year, the same official has seen as many as five nighttime flights in the sky at oncePlanes loaded with Colombian cocaine used to depart from Venezuela's remote southern jungle regions. Now they take off from the country's more developed northwest region to reduce their flying time, US and regional officials also saidt.Officials involved in combating the deadly trade describe a ridiculously profitable courier system for the Venezuelan government. "Drug smugglers are more and more exploiting the complicity of Venezuelan authorities, and more recently the vacuum of power," said one US official. Every shipment of cocaine from South America is so lucrative that the planes flown by traffickers are cheap in comparison; most are used only once and then discarded or set on fire upon arrival.A sizeable fraction of the profits go to countries through which the drugs pass, from the jungles of Colombia through Venezuela and often to the Honduran coastline. A confidential 2018 US radar map of the plane routes seen by CNN, shows their departure from north western Venezuela's Zulia region, their passage north to the Caribbean, and then their sharp turn West towards their destinations in the remote farmlands of Guatemala, on the Honduran coastline, and some in the Caribbean. From there, the drugs are shipped up to Mexico and then distributed to American cities.One US official estimated that in 2018 alone, 240 metric tons of cocaine crossed into Venezuela from Colombia to be flown out of the country. Other officials involved in combating the drug trade said that estimate was conservative. So much pure Colombian cocaine, when cut and distributed, could fetch around $39 billion on the streets of the United States, according to an estimate by the United Nations Office for Drug Control for CNN. This week, US officials also expressed concern that a proposed ban by President Donald Trump on all types of aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador would create a "bonanza" among the Venezuelan-led traffickers, as US aid to these three Central American countries specifically targeted the cocaine trade. "Right now, it's wide open", said one US law enforcement officer in the United States, "then it'll just be a free for all".
Years of allegations
For years, the US has accused high-ranking Venezuelan officials of drug trafficking. Today's accelerating drug trade is a symptom of the urgent need for cash inside Venezuela's crumbling hyperinflation economy, and rampant corruption among the Maduro government's senior officials, multiple officials said. Colombian officials who would rarely be quoted on the record also say that the drug smuggling has recently involved Colombian leftist guerrilla group ELN working with the Maduro military.In 2017 Former Vice President Tareck El-Aissami was sanctioned by the US Treasury in 2017 for overseeing or partially owning "narcotics shipments of over 1,000 kilograms from Venezuela on multiple occasions." In March, El-Aissami, now Venezuela's minister for industry, was indicted in New York for facilitating drug trafficking. He did not respond to the new charges, but tweeted two days after they were unsealed: "LOYAL always! ANTIIMPERIALISTS always !! PATRIOTS always !! CHAVISTAS ALWAYS !! WE WILL OVERCOME!!" Diosdado Cabello, the leader of Venezuela's National Constituent Assembly and embattled president Nicolas Maduro's number two, was also sanctioned in May 2018 for being "directly involved in narcotics trafficking activities". He has replied there is no evidence of his involvement in trafficking, and said of sanctions against him in general: "If there are persecuted politicians, those are the Venezuelan officials sanctioned by the US. You can keep your sanctions."Many other Venezuelan officials have faced similar US accusations, which the Venezuelan government has outright rejected. They did not comment for this report, despite several requests.Venezuela's scramble for cash owing to hyperinflation caused by economic mismanagement, has led to an increase in the risks taken by pilots, who another US official said, were often former commercial airline pilots who use to fly passenger jets. "Thirty planes roughly have crashed in the last three-month period, according to some reports", said one American official. The scale of the operation was confirmed by a government official in the region, who said the flights use around fifty clandestine runways in the northwestern region of Zulia in Venezuela. The drug cargo planes usually fly with the transponders switched off that usually emit a signal identifying them to radar systems.
Secret runways
CNN gained access with the elite Honduran military force known as FUSINA to visit areas of Hondura's Moskitia region where the drug-smuggling planes from Venezuela land on secret runways. Tail-fin markings on nearly all the planes found by CNN in Moskitia show they originated in the United States. The first US official told CNN that dozens of planes had been bought at US auctions by shell companies, and then shipped south.Some of the planes lay damaged, rusting and exposed on the edge of makeshift former airstrips, rendered unusable by large craters created by Honduran military explosives. Others were hidden, submerged in the bend of a river, yet visible from the helicopter.Honduran military officers told CNN the traffickers had managed to reach an understanding with local fishermen on how to recover cocaine lost in accidents or interceptions by law enforcement. If a smuggler anticipates he might be caught, he throws the cocaine overboard, attached to a flotation device. Such bundles usually weigh 30 kilos, and fishermen are paid $150,000 if they hand them back to the cartels.While US technological assistance has helped reduce the number of illegal drug flights coming out of Colombian territory to almost zero, traffickers have an easy alternative just across the border in Venezuela. "One of the problems we face is that the border area is very large," Colombian Colonel Mauricio Gonzalez told CNN. "We've stopped the flights that try to depart Colombia with drugs, but narcotraffickers take advantage of the areas we cannot control."
Crossing the border
Ongoing tensions, in which Colombia has recognized Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaido as its interim president, meant few Colombian officials would mention Venezuela by name. But it was clear that most of the cocaine grown in Vichada is trafficked across the long porous border East. The Colombian Air Force flew CNN over the Colombia's Vichada border region, to see the dozens of "trochas", or tiny pathwaysRead More – Source
