The Security Minister stated that, “The majority of the routes leave from zones in Venezuela, with airplanes displaying that country’s flag. It’s a situation that we haven’t seen for many years, but in the last two years these types of flights have increased.”

The Honduran official said that Honduras is a logistical stopover for drug traffickers, and that trafficking to Honduras has increased in part because of the infrastructure development on the Atlantic coast.

Minister Alvarez met earlier with the Colombian Defense Minister, Gabriel Silva, and they further discussed the agreement they signed to share intelligence on drug trafficking, kidnapping and organized crime.

The officials talked about how to properly oversee intelligence efficiently so that they can uncover the drug trafficking networks. Air traffic controllers, they recently discovered, are operating in collusion with these criminals, a tip they learned of from the recent international anti-narcotics operation, “Frontiers.”

The Frontiers operation uncovered proof that Honduras has become a stop-over point for those drug traffickers moving Colombian cocaine to Mexico. Operation Frontiers was responsible for the arrest of twenty-one traffickers who were also wanted for extradition to the United States. This was the largest U.S. – Colombia anti-drug operation since Operation “Milienio” in 1999.