Drug smugglers, rebels join hands

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Brazilian drug traffickers have teamed up with Colombian rebels to smuggle narcotics through Paraguay, creating a lucrative new channel for distribution to the United States and Europe.

That's the word according to Brazilian and Paraguayan officials and the recently released U.S. State Department report on illegal activity along the Paraguay-Brazil border.

Using a precisely orchestrated system of flights from the Colombian jungle, Marxist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are shipping 40 to 60 tons of cocaine annually to farms in Paraguay owned by Brazilian drug lords, who then put the cocaine in cars and small trucks and drive them across the nearly unmonitored border into rural western Brazil.

Cocaine for Brazil

From there, the drugs make their way to major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, where they are then distributed by drug syndicates.

Before his arrest in November in Paraguay, Brazilian drug lord Ivan Carlos Mendes Mesquita was the main link between the FARC, which uses drug profits to fund its four-decade-long battle against the Colombian government, and the Brazilian drug trade.

Mesquita oversaw the exchange of cocaine from the FARC in return for arms, dollars and euros from Brazilian traffickers.

The State Department's 2005 International Narcotics Strategy Report called his capture "a significant accomplishment."

"The United States has initiated an extradition request for Mesquita, and the government of Paraguay has indicated its willingness to expedite the process," said the report.

State Department officials declined to elaborate for The Washington Times on their efforts to stymie this lucrative new drug transit system in the region.