U.S. breaks up international drug ring

U.S. agents have disrupted an international heroin and cocaine smuggling ring that shipped Colombian heroin in car batteries from Guatemala to Mexico and the United States with more than 100 arrests.

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Karen P. Tandy yesterday said the multi-jurisdictional, multinational investigation included the arrest of Colombian national Humberto Palaez Escobar, also known as "Beto," a key player in the smuggling ring, who was captured yesterday in Colombia.

"Law enforcement has drug traffickers on the run, forcing them to find new routes and smuggling methods. This time, it was a new trafficking route to smuggle heroin out of Colombia through Guatemala and across the Southwest border concealed in car batteries," Mrs. Tandy said.

"In Operation Jump Start, we brought an entire operation that was using this route to move Colombian heroin to a dead end and closed another avenue to traffickers hoping to peddle this potent and addictive poison in America," she said.

Other key players captured in the two-year probe were Guatemalans Manuel Linares-Sandoval and Javier Reyes, and Alirio Munoz-Munoz, a Colombian, all arrested on provisional warrants yesterday in Guatemala; and Carlos Enrique Gonzalez-Hoyos and Edgar Nicolas Romero-Ganan, also arrested yesterday on provisional warrants.

Mrs. Tandy said the removal of the organization's leaders effectively dismantled the cartel, adding that they would be the first persons extradited from Guatemala for federal narcotics violations since 1992.

The DEA administrator also said Operation Jump Start represented a first for the agency: disrupting an established trend involving the flow of Colombian heroin on a specific route from Guatemala through Mexico to Texas, New York and other parts of the United States.

Operation Jump Start began in October 2003 when a drug seizure made by the Louisiana State Police was connected by DEA's special operations division to an ongoing drug investigation begun in 2002 by the DEA's field office in Greenbelt, along with Maryland's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force and the Montgomery County Police Department.

A grand jury indictment in the probe, handed up in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, said much of the heroin was routed through stores in Hyattsville, Waldorf and Brandywine.

Over the course of the investigation, Mrs. Tandy said, 100 people linked to the drug trafficking organization were arrested, in excess of 48 pounds of heroin and 176 pounds of cocaine were confiscated, and more than $1 million in U.S. currency was seized.