Police Dogs Sniff Out 6 Tons of Cocaine in a Single Banana Shipment

Ecuadorian prosecutors have pressed charges against five individuals over six tons of cocaine found in a banana shipment destined for Europe .

Knewz.com has learned that the discovery was made with the help of sniffer dogs during a routine inspection at the country’s Deep Water Sea Port of Posorja.

The haul comprised 5,630 brick-shaped packages worth $224 million, which were adorned with various labels including the 911 logo.

The seizure led to the arrests of five individuals including a representative of the export company assigned to moving the contraband.

Said individual then gave up four other names including those of administrators at a banana plantation and a driver who moved the load to the port.

Ecuador is believed to be a major international cocaine transfer point. According to a report by a nonprofit think tank, Insight Crime (focused on crime in North and Latin America ), the country moved a third of Colombia’s cocaine – which amounts to 467 tons – through its border in 2022.

As a testimony to this figure, a seizure dubbed the country’s largest cocaine bust took place in January 2024.

A local report indicated that during a raid on a pig farm, authorities, with the help of 150 soldiers, uncovered 22 tons of the drug .

In one stash the authorities found nearly ten tons buried four meters below the ground. Extricating the entire haul is said to have taken hours.

The rest of the cocaine was found when the armed forces found a sewer pipe leading to an underground maze.

When they had unearthed the loot, it was noticed that the packages were meticulously labeled according to their destinations and the airlines they would be smuggled on.

Despite the magnitude of the find, the local authorities made no arrests and did not know who the loot (estimated at a value of $1 billion) belonged to.

Local sources said that the bust was the result of a six-month investigation by military intelligence and noted that another method for getting the drug out of the country was by using smaller boats to ferry it out to cargo ships, which would then move them to a prearranged destination.

Aside from the 12 tons of cocaine found there, there were 12 rifles and 5,000 rounds of ammunition.

As a nod to the violence these weapons might incur, a previous report by Knewz.com noted that Ecuador's murder rates for 2022 and 2023 were 4,800 and 8,012 respectively.

Of these deaths, 92% were male and 87% were inflicted by firearms .

The country’s capital, Guayaquil, bore the brunt of the high death rate when two of the three refrigerated shipping containers used to store the central morgue’s overflow broke down.

The latter led to the facility’s employees stuffing bodies into the remaining container which then struggled to keep the corpses cold.

As a result, the unmistakable smell of decay emanated from the complex bathing the surroundings in a miasma.