WASHINGTON — Mexico City police made one of the biggest drug busts in recent memory in the capital, stopping two freight trucks carrying about 1.6 tons of cocaine, officials said Tuesday.
City police chief Omar Garcia Harfuch said the cocaine was worth about $20 million on the street in Mexico. But he said only part of the shipment had been destined for the capital, with the rest heading north to Los Angeles.
The cocaine apparently was sent to Mexico from Colombia and landed at a port on the Pacific coast of the southern state of Oaxaca, the chief said.
He said a third vehicle was escorting the two trucks, and four Colombians were arrested.
Mexico City officials have long acknowledged that drug cartels use the capital as a shipping point, but they claim the gangs do not operate in the city as brazenly as they do in other parts of Mexico.
Earlier this month, Mexico’s army and National Guard announced what they called a “historic” seizure of over a half-ton of fentanyl at a warehouse in the northern city of Culiacan.
“This is the largest seizure in history of this lethal drug,” said Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo Mejia, estimating the fentanyl had an illicit value of around $230 million.
The nearly 1,200 pounds found at the warehouse could have produced millions of the counterfeit pills in which fentanyl is usually offered. Fentanyl is so deadly because it is pressed into pills made to look like Xanax, Adderall or Oxycodone, or mixed into other drugs.
