The drugs were stored for several days at the Simon Bolivar International Airport outside Caracas, then placed in 31 suitcases with false name-tags and put on an Air France flight to Paris on Sept. 10, 2013. Ten days later, French police announced the biggest cocaine haul in their history - the shipment was worth about $270 million - after a meticulous operation involving French, British, Spanish and Dutch authorities. The foreign agents kept Venezuelan authorities in the dark. "They're not stupid," Mildred Camero, who led Venezuela's anti-drug agency under former socialist leader Hugo Chavez, said recently of the decision to exclude Venezuela from the sting. "Why would they tell them about the operation knowing that Venezuela's military was involved?" Camero told Reuters.
Venezuelan soldiers watch from the door of a helicopter as they patrol during a military operation to destroy clandestine drug laboratories, near the border with Colombia, in the state of Zulia
Dubbed the "narco-maletas" or "drug-suitcases" scandal, it is the most high-profile in a series of cases that illustrate Venezuela's growing role in the global drug trade. U.S. and other Western officials, plus domestic political opponents, accuse Venezuela's military of colluding with traffickers and allege that President Nicolas Maduro's socialist government is, at the very least, turning a blind eye. Maduro, who won election last year after Chavez died of cancer, denies that, depicting the claims as a U.S.-led campaign to besmirch Venezuela and pave the way for foreign intervention. Authorities point to arrests and drugs seizures as evidence they are battling traffickers like never before. In the last five years, at least 100 military and police officials - albeit mainly low-ranking ones - have been convicted or are in jail awaiting charges of drug-trafficking.
Venezuela's Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino (front L) speaks during a military operation to destroy a clandestine drug laboratory, near of the border with Colombia, in the state of Zulia
Among 27 people eventually arrested over the Air France case, eight were low-ranking military officers. The rest were airline and airport employees. Their trial is yet to start. Venezuela's anti-drugs agency says 107 drug bosses, mainly Colombian, have been captured in the last eight years. During a raid this month on a clandestine cocaine lab in jungle near the Colombian border, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino said accusations of widespread corruption were nonsense though he acknowledged there were some rogue officials. "They are rotten apples, individual actions," Padrino said after landing with soldiers in a helicopter on a 20-hectare strip of coca and marijuana plantations. The traffickers had already fled by boat to the Colombian side of the inhospitable border. Anti-narcotics operations this year have brought in 46 tons of illegal drugs.
'Corrupt Environment'
