Seized timber is more likely to have brushed against cocaine than be used to smuggle it, with dense tropical hardwoods such as ipe and cumaru “very complex to impregnate”. That is according to an expert in South American timber trading, who wrote to Wood Central after its extensive report on how police on three continents found drug networks moving cocaine inside timber planks and plywood.
“The wood came into contact with cocaine but does not actually contain any,” the expert said of the cases. He called it “much more logical” because dense wood is harder to impregnate, and cited the Bolivian timber Brazil’s customs service held in June as confirmation.
Firms that modify timber, for example, would find the impregnation method “of great interest”, the expert said, since it can protect species lacking natural durability. He said extracting the drug mattered too, given millions of cubic metres of treated softwood could later be cleaned until it posed no environmental risk.
Brazil’s customs service, the Receita Federal, had stopped 260 tonnes of Bolivian hardwood at the frontier towns of Corumbá and Cáceres under Operation Timber Shield. The agency estimated the loads could hide 20 to 50 tonnes of liquid cocaine, in what it called the same scheme Chile uncovered earlier that month.
Chilean prosecutors say traffickers behind that seizure dried Bolivian timber in extreme heat, then forced drugs into its fibres under vacuum and pressure. The wood was tajibo and almendrillo, the Bolivian names for ipe and cumaru.
“All the tests and instrumental examinations described were negative for the presence of cocaine impregnated in the wood samples sent for forensic examination,” states the Brazilian Federal Police report released in July. The force’s experts said aroeira, a fencing hardwood that barely rots in damp ground, resists moisture so well it is poorly suited to soaking up the drug.
Nearly two months after the seizure, the timber was handed back to its owners, once a second police laboratory in Brasília had confirmed the finding. Federal Police investigators have since opened an inquiry into who supplied the information that led to the seizure and why, including whether a crime was falsely reported.
