Caracas Chronicles

The French Interior Minister announced today that 1,300 kilos of high purity cocaine were discovered in Paris on an  Air France flight from Caracas on September 11th. The telling detail? The drugs were discovered in bags that were not assigned to any passenger registered on that flight. The drugs were stashed into 30 suitcases, at a back-straining 43 kg. of high grade coke per bag. Altogether, they were worth a staggering 200 million euros. It was the biggest drug bust in the history of La Ville Lumière.

Now, anyone who has witnessed the elaborate controls the National Guard keeps over every aspect of passenger and bag movements in Maiquetía  – where woe be onto you if you try to leave the country with two packs of coffee in your bag as souvenirs – knows perfectly well you can’t get 65 ghost bags onto a plane without them knowing about it. Which makes this pretty much proof positive that the Guardia runs drugs out of Maiquetía.

Sure, we always “knew that”…but now we can drop the scare quotes.

Correction: In fact, the drugs were packed into 30 bags, not 65 as I mistakenly wrote earlier.