Justice condemned this week to a Uruguayan businessman for assistance to drug trafficking and imposed a sentence of two years in prison after a shipment of 265 kilos of cocaine. Besides, charged seven other people who were arrested in simultaneous raids in Cerro, Rivera and Canelones, and sent to pretrial detention until December.
The organization, which had been under investigation since April, collected the drugs in a house on Haiti and Filipinas streets, in El Cerro, and there they placed inside wooden planks that were exported to Europe from the port of Montevideo.
The Narcotics Prosecutor Mónica Ferrero is also investigating the link between the shipment and the drug lord Sebastián Marset, given that she has information that the businessman knew him. In addition, she asked the Justice file reservation as the investigation continues and others are sought two people who remain fugitives.
The only one convicted so far is Uruguayan businessman Jorge Pérez Bentancor, owner of a timber import company, as confirmed by El Observador with sources of the investigation. The Bien Informados Twitter profile had published that information and the photos of Pérez. The wood was imported by the company whose trade name is Pérez Bentancor, Jorge Silvio. The businessman was arrested at his house in La Tahona.
The drug was packaged in the wood that the businessman imported to be exported to Europe
Operation Mintaka
The businessman has a record from 2012, when the same prosecutor prosecuted him for drug trafficking. At that time, in the operation called Mintaka, he allowed the seizure of a shipment of 286 kilos of cocaine and 47 kilos of base paste. The drug had been found in a car in a garage of a chalet located on the Atlántida promenade.
After less than a month of wiretapping, it was discovered that an Italian drug trafficker based in Uruguay had purchased a shipment of cocaine from a supplier in Misiones, Argentina.
An active Argentine gendarme at that time led the crossing of the drug shipment divided into two vehicles, hidden in a false bottom. He was traveling in a car with a Paraguayan citizen. In the other, two Argentine citizens. They were unaware that they were being followed by the Police who let them reach Atlántida. There the four were arrested, together with the Italian, Pérez and another Uruguayan.
Along with the drugs, a BMW van with Paraguayan registration was seized; an Argentine Ford Fiesta; two Honda Civics; two BMWs; a Toyota truck (registered in Uruguay), money and weapons.
On that occasion, the cocaine was going to be sent to Europe, just like it is now, whose value was estimated by the Ministry of the Interior this week at 9 million euros.
According to customs information obtained by El Observador, the items in which it works are raw wood, but also debarked, or squared; bran, sharps, and other sifting waste; harvesters, threshers (US$ 202,297.80); sawn or roughed curupay wood. The firm started importing in 2020 and has continued until now. In these three years, it made imports worth US$ 1.7 million. The first operations of the firm are from November 2020 and the last of this month, when it imported US$ 520,107.98. The busiest month was March 2023.
The drug seized by the Drug Brigade had the inscription “king of the south”
85% of imports came from Paraguay, 12% from Argentina (but from the United States) and 4% from China. Merchandise from Paraguay and Argentina was moved by truck (by land) and 4% from China by sea.
