On Monday, officials with the French navy seized 2.4 tons of cocaine from a Venezuelan fishing boat that was located in the Atlantic Ocean, authorities shared.
France’s Caribbean Armed Services department shared that it was acting on a tip from the customs department when it used a helicopter to land on the boat located near the Caribbean island of Martinique.
On the boat, the French navy found the narcotics and crew members who appeared to be in the midst of trafficking the narcotics.
The cocaine, boat, and crew were handed over to the Venezuelan authorities after the officials secured the situation, a Facebook post from the department shared.
This isn’t the first major encounter French officials have had with drug smugglers in recent months. On May 2 and 9, authorities shared that another 2,466 kilograms of cocaine were seized off the coast of the Antilles.
So far this year, the military department says it has seized more than 12 tons of narcotics as the Caribbean continues to play a major role in the smuggling of cocaine from South America to Europe and North America.
In 2022, 22.7 tons of cocaine was intercepted in the region, a figure that has quintupled in the last decade.