MIAMI: Federal investigators have discovered Venezuelan connections in the shipment of cocaine and Ecstasy to Miami.
Investigators learned of the link to a cocaine pipeline during monitored telephone calls between a confidential source in Miami and a man in Venezuela described as the drug supplier.
The Ecstasy connection was discovered when immigration officers arrested a traveler who had just arrived from Venezuela carrying a packet filled with the drug concealed in his groin.
It is not the first time a Venezuelan cocaine link has been found in South Florida.
In 2012, several Venezuelans were implicated in a cocaine trafficking ring that brought loads of the drug from Velencia, an industrial city west of Caracas, to Fort Lauderdale.
In 2013, federal prosecutors filed papers in Miami federal court outlining the activities of a drug-trafficking gang that smuggled cocaine from Apure state in Venezuela to Central America and the Caribbean.
The latest Venezuela cocaine case was detailed in a criminal complaint filed in Miami federal court by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent.
It was on Dec. 13 that federal agents heard a call an ICE confidential source received from a suspect named Merlín Manzo García, 39, who said he was calling from Orlando on behalf of someone he only identified as Andrés.
Manzo asked the ICE confidential source if they could meet. Five days later, Manzo drove from Orlando to an Office Depot parking lot near Miami International Airport.
