The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) assured on Friday that a pioneering method proposed by Ecuador to eliminate cocaine by casting it with cement and encapsulating it in underground cells is fast, efficient and respectful of the environment.
In dialogue with The Associated Press, Luisa Fernández – coordinator of the UNODC Regional Safe Management and Elimination of Seized Drugs and Chemical Precursors Program – pointed out that this regional office has received many requests to learn about this new practice.
He stressed that a meeting is scheduled for March 17 in Quito with authorities from Guatemala, Honduras and Peru. “It does not mean that they are going to use it due to internal regulations, but they want to know about it,” he said.
Fernández clarified that this method, which has been applied in Ecuador since April of the year to eliminate the growing amount of seized cocaine, cannot be applied to other drugs such as marijuana.
The Ecuadorian authorities have recognized that the country has become in a drug transit and storage areaespecially cocaine, and the main dispatch point to the United States and Europe, among other destinations.
This put the country before many challenges, among them the storage, security and destruction of drug seizures which went from an average of 60 tons per year to more than triple in 2022.
“The State did not have the capacity or the infrastructure to destroy that amount of drugs,” said Fernández. With incineration, five tons a month could be burned in a single furnace located in Quito, but with encapsulation, eight tons can be eliminated in four hours, Fernández explained.
The international official highlighted that the situation changed last year when the government proposed encapsulating cocaine mixed with cement, melting it down and burying it in underground cells, which guarantees better security conditions and environmental management.
The Ecuadorian and UNODC chemical engineer, William Ibáñez, explained that encapsulation “is not a process of destruction, but of immobilization” in which cocaine is trapped by different physical and chemical forces that make it practically impossible to free it from the underground cells.
Fernández pointed out that the latest UNODC report also revealed that Ecuadorian ports, especially Guayaquil, play a very important role in the export of drugs since 90% of illegal substances leave the country by sea.
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