Surinamese Police Identify Heroin Smuggling Networks via Wood Exports

Major trafficking routes through Suriname to U.S. and Netherlands revealed a year before military coup.

Date: November 23, 1978

The chief of the Suriname National Police (KPS) Narcotics Brigade, Major Abdoelhafizkhan, provided the U.S. Embassy with detailed intelligence on specific schemes to smuggle heroin from Suriname to the United States and the Netherlands, revealing the country's emerging role as a narcotics transit point.

Details:

  • Surinamese police identified Iwan Lieuw A Joen, a well-known Surinamese-Chinese businessman with U.S. residency and business interests in Miami, as a key figure involved in smuggling heroin to the United States.
  • The method allegedly involved concealing heroin inside heavy, tropical wood items like mahogany clocks and large paintings of Chinese scenes, which were then exported from Suriname.
  • The KPS also had "very reliable" information that another individual, Larry Liu, had been attempting to establish a narcotics connection on the U.S. West Coast.
  • A separate, established trafficking route was moving sizeable quantities of heroin (up to 10 kilos per shipment) by boat into Suriname and then via air couriers to the Netherlands. The KPS suspected one or two high-level Surinamese customs officials might be involved in this route.
  • In response to these developments, the Surinamese Narcotics Brigade Chief expressed a strong interest in a visit from U.S. DEA agents based in Caracas, a request the U.S. Embassy strongly endorsed.

Significance: This intelligence report is highly significant because it establishes that Suriname was already being used as a transit country for international heroin trafficking more than a year before the 1980 military coup and the subsequent rise of large-scale cocaine trafficking under the Bouterse regime. It shows that Surinamese law enforcement was actively investigating these networks and attempting to cooperate with U.S. authorities. The alleged involvement of prominent businessmen and potentially corrupt customs officials foreshadowed the deeper connections between criminal enterprises and state entities that would come to define the subsequent era.

Source:

U.S. Embassy Paramaribo Cable 1978PARAMA01567d, "SURINAM DRUG TRAFFICKING PATTERNS," November 24, 1978.

Link:

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1978PARAMA01567_d.html

Internal Link:

Date:
November 23, 1978
Categories:
Child Abuse Networks, Desi Bouterse, Log, Matthew Smith, Military & Intel
Tags:
Cable, Dea, Drug Trafficking, Heroin, Law Enforcement Cooperation
Boxes:
MW Zotero
Years:
1978
Persons:
Nancy Ostrander
META DATA
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