Retired Bolivian general who headed anti-drug agency convicted in Miami
A retired Bolivian general who once headed his country’s anti-narcotics agency will be spending 14 years in a U.S. prison on a drug-trafficking conviction in Miami, a federal judge ruled last week.
Rene Sanabria-Oropeza, who had pleaded guilty to conspiring to smuggle cocaine, used his official position to protect a load sent from Bolivia to South Florida, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami.
Sanabria-Oropeza was sentenced along with a Bolivian trafficker, Marcelo Foronda-Azero, who received nine years in prison from U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro.
Both defendants were the targets of a Drug Enforcement Administration undercover operation assisted by authorities in Chile and Panama.
In the summer of 2010, Foronda-Azero and another Bolivian trafficker met with an undercover DEA agent and confidential source posing as representatives of a Colombian drug syndicate. According to recorded conversations, the Bolivians discussed selling multi-kilo loads of cocaine for export via Chile to the United States.
Later that summer,
Sanabria-Oropeza, then chief of the Bolivian National Intelligence Agency, and another anti-narcotics official, promised to provide protection for the cocaine in a recorded meeting with the DEA agent and confidential source.
Sanabria-Oropeza’s take: $2,500 per kilo sent to the U.S., according tother DEA. At the end of the August meeting, the intelligence chief and the other official received $50,000 as a down payment.
The following month, Foronda-Azero sent a 144-kilo shipment of cocaine to the Port of Miami, hiding it in a cargo container filled with zinc rocks.
After the shipment and payments, Foronda-Azero and Sanabria-Oropeza agreed to travel to the Dominican Republic to meet with the DEA undercover agent and confidential source to discuss a future drug deal.
In February of this year, while both were awaiting a connecting flight in Panana City, authorities arrested Foronda-Azero and Sanabria-Oropeza and transferred them to the U.S. for prosecution in Miami.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/09/25/2 ... z1Z5gBMzqI