EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Authorities in Chihuahua, Mexico, said they have seized more than 1.5 tons of marijuana in a place they describe as a camp used by members of an organized criminal group.
Most of the drug was already packed in 117 sacks ready for transport and in three large containers waiting to be sorted for packing. Another large portion of the drug, apparently harvested recently, lay on a black tarp next to trees, the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office said.
Chihuahua state police officers found the drug on Tuesday near the farming community of El Willy, which lies southwest of Nuevo Casas Grandes, Mexico, and has been in the news for the past two months due to a large number of clandestine graves found there.
The remains of 87 people reported as missing in the past few years were recovered at El Willy and three other communities in northwest Chihuahua several miles south of the U.S. border.
Chihuahua Attorney General Cesar Jauregui has linked the mass graves to La Linea, a transnational criminal organization run by former members of the Juarez cartel.
A federal judge in North Dakota in 2022 issued a $4.6 billion judgement against La Linea in connection with the Nov. 4, 2019, murder of nine Americans riding in vehicles that members of the criminal group allegedly mistook as being occupied by associates of the rival Sinaloa cartel.
The Attorney General’s Office said the cartel camp found on Tuesday is one of 46 such hidden outposts located just in the past 14 months in mountains, forests, farming communities and the desert in a state that borders Texas and New Mexico and is only 30 miles from Arizona.
No arrests were reported at the camp.
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