Honduras discovers first Mexican-made cocaine lab

TEGUCIGALPA, (Reuters) – Honduran police discovered  a Mexican-run cocaine lab yesterday, the first ever found in  the Central American country, in a sign Colombian-dominated  production of the drug is moving north.

Police found the lab — a crude shack with a metal roof —  in a mountainous area around 100 miles (175 km) north of the  capital Tegucigalpa. An electricity generator, barrels of  chemicals, filters, scales, and tools to process cocaine were  all found at the site but no one was arrested.

“The townspeople in the region say a helicopter would land here operated by guys with Mexican accents. This is not a  Colombian lab, it has to be a Mexican lab,” Security Minister  Oscar Alvarez told Reuters.

Colombia has long been the world’s top producer of cocaine,  but powerful Mexican cartels now largely control the  trafficking of the drug north to the United States.

Central America is a strategic smuggling corridor and is  increasingly a staging ground for Mexican drug gangs.

But the lab would be one of the first signs Mexicans are  manufacturing cocaine themselves.
“What we have here is a top notch, Colombia-style,  laboratory which is very worrying because it’s the first time  we have found cocaine processing in Honduras,” Alvarez said.

Coca leaves, often grown in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia are  first made into a paste and then turned into a powdered drug.  Alvarez said Honduras is probably not growing coca plants but  processing the paste smuggled from South America.

The growing presence of Mexican drug gangs in Central  America is increasing violence in an already dangerous region  overrun by youth street gangs and recovering from decades of  civil war in the 1980s.