Government pilots linked to drug seizure
Two pilots detained as they awaited a shipment of cocaine from Venezuela are employees of Mexico’s federal water commission, local media quoted officials as saying today.
The two men were detained on Monday at the airport of Ciudad de Carmen, 550 miles east of Mexico City, after they flew there in a small plane.
Officials said they were waiting for a larger, DC-9 jet carrying five and a half tonnes of cocaine.
Local media quoted Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the country’s top organised crime prosecutor, as saying that detainees Fernando Poot Perez and Marco Perez de Gracia were listed as working for The National Water Commission.
The water commission oversees dams, reservoirs and watersheds, and has several aeroplanes.
However, the 10-seat Falcon executive jet which the two men were using does not appear to have been a government plane.
Because of a national holiday, no spokesmen for either the Attorney General’s Office nor the National Water Commission were available to confirm the report.
However, in a press statement, prosecutors said they had also detained a third man who was apparently aboard the smaller jet at the time of the incident.
The DC-9, registered in the United States, was seized at the airport by Mexican army soldiers, as was the smaller plane.
Soldiers found the drugs packed into 128 suitcases. There were no passengers. They arrested the Colombian co-pilot of the DC-9, but the pilot escaped.
The two arrested pilots landed earlier in the smaller plane, then filled out forms and paid fees to enable the landing of the larger craft at the airport.
US and Mexican officials say that cocaine and heroin is increasingly passing from Colombia through Venezuela to Mexico where it is smuggled into the United States.
While drug traffickers used planes to smuggle large quantities of drugs in the 1990s, most Mexican traffickers now use land and sea routes.
