The New York Times has reported previously that drug traffickers can “make an airstrip on the flat prairie in a few hours by dragging a log behind a pick-up truck to smooth the ground”. Insight Crime described the shared border as “a hub of criminal activity” for drugs, human trafficking and money laundering. “Its long Caribbean coastline, sparsely populated jungles and plains and proximity to other Caribbean drug transit points like Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Honduras and the Dominican Republic have also contributed to Venezuela becoming a major narcotics smuggling route,” Insight Crime reported.Ī relative cries outside prison in Barquisimeto, Venezuela where inmates die of drug overdoses in the crowded jail.
In 2015, the two nephews of Venezuelas’s President Nicolas Maduro’s wife were arrested in Haiti in a sting by the US Drug Enforcement Agency.