Guatemalan police have recovered more than 1.5 tons of cocaine worth an estimated $20 million from a crashed plane near the Mexican border, the attorney general’s office said Thursday.
The partially burned-out plane was located Wednesday in the Laguna del Tigre forest reserve, the Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
No victims were located, or arrests made.
The area is part of the Peten jungle, a known drug trafficking route on the border with Mexico and Belize, about 370 miles (600 kilometers) north of Guatemala City.
According to Guatemala’s Office for Drug Crimes, “the approximate value of the shipment is more than $20 million,” the public prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
In September, a plane carrying drugs from Venezuela crashed near an indigenous community at Chisec, around 70 miles north of the capital.
Four people were killed, including Jeankarlo Meneses, a drug trafficker who had escaped from a Guatemalan prison in 2019.
Since the beginning of the year police have located around 30 planes used for transporting drugs, most of them in remote areas in the north and south of the country.
US officials believe 90 percent of the cocaine reaching the country comes through Central America and Mexico via small planes, boats and even so-called narco submarines.