LA PAZ (AFP) – Bolivia has mobilised more than 2,250 security agents in a massive operation closing in on an alleged cocaine trafficker who has ricocheted around the world to elude capture, a senior official said on Sunday.
The target of the hunt is Sebastian Enrique Marset Cabrera, wanted on drugs charges in his native Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and the United States.
“A series of raids have been carried out in the department of Santa Cruz (for) a drug trafficker of high value for our region and the whole world,” Bolivian Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo said.
“We have mobilised more than 2,250 police officers, more than 144 motorised vehicles, we have carried out more than 23 operations, six raids and the arrest of 12 people,” Del Castillo said.
Marset Cabrera, 32, is believed to be in Santa Cruz, a sprawling energy-producing region of southeastern Bolivia abutting Brazil and Paraguay.
Del Castillo said Marset Cabrera is accompanied by his Peruvian wife and three children.
“In the coming hours, we will achieve the detention of Sebastian Enrique Marset Cabrera,” Del Castillo avowed.
Heavily armed police raided a luxury home in Santa Cruz, a city of 1.9 million inhabitants that is capital of the department of the same name, and entered other properties, an AFP journalist witnessed.
Del Castillo said raids during the day netted 17 long guns, a pistol, nearly 2,000 rounds of ammunition, bullet-proof vests and 31 vehicles.
Authorities said they believed Marset Cabrera entered Bolivia last September, and maintained a relatively high profile, including acquiring a professional football club in the nation’s Second Division.
As recently as two years ago, Marset Cabrera was in jail in the United Arab Emirates on charges of using a forged Paraguayan passport, but managed to obtain his freedom using Uruguayan documents.
Authorities accuse him of being one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the Southern Cone region, transporting multi-tonne shipments through Uruguay. He has been linked to former Paraguayan president Horacio Cartes’s uncle, who was convicted of marijuana trafficking.
