The season before Valentine's Day is the busiest time of the year for Colombia's growers, when the 130,000 people employed at hundreds of flower farms work nonstop to ship some 500 million stems, mostly to the United States but other parts of the world as well. It is now is the world's second-largest cut flower exporter, after the Netherlands, and the top supplier to the U.S.
is a sign of just how much the industry has blossomed. That Colombia's criminals now train their eyes on flower shipments as a way to smuggle drugs into the U.S. Congress passed a law eliminating tariffs on goods from Andean drug-producing nations in a bid to encourage legal exports. Julio Triana said as he and his drug-sniffing Labrador retriever walked through the refrigerated warehouse where flowers are kept before being loaded onto cargo planes.Ĭolombia's flower industry took off in the early 1990s when the U.S. "We have to guarantee that our flower exports aren't contaminated by criminal gangs," Col. Last year, police said they found almost 200 pounds (90 kilograms) of cocaine hidden in flower boxes. Once the flowers are inside the airport, 100 police offices equipped with 15 drug-sniffing dogs and electronic scanners inspect each shipment. Security protocols that the flower industry developed with police begin the moment that refrigerated trucks carrying rose buds depart dozens of flower farms dotting the waterlogged savannah surrounding Colombia's capital. "Without a doubt we're a target," said Augusto Solano, president of the Colombian flower exporters' association. But every year, police and growers in Colombia must work around the clock to make sure that the romance of Valentine's Day isn't spoiled by the drug, the nation's other major export along with flowers.Īs much as 330,000 pounds (150 metric ton)s of flowers leave Colombia on 30-plus jumbo cargo planes daily starting in late January, presenting an opportunity for the country's ingenious drug cartels to penetrate the frenzied, overworked chain of suppliers and stash drugs amid the roses.
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