New Zealand Police
More than 77 pounds of cocaine were found hidden in a statue of a horse's head.
On Friday morning, police in New Zealand seized a horse's head statue covered with diamantes (like sequins) and stuffed with 77 pounds of cocaine worth more than $10 million, in what may be the latest sign of Mexican cartels' expansion around the world.
The cocaine, crammed inside the statute, arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, in May, flown in from Mexico.
Police surveilled the shipment for weeks before moving in to seize the drugs and arrest two men, a 44-year-old Mexican and a 56-year-old American who were traveling to Hawaii, according to The New Zealand Herald.
Shortly after the bust was announced, a 29-year-old Mexican was arrested in Christchurch and will face the same charges.
The horse-head statue, over 3 feet tall and more than 800 pounds, was shipped to an address in Auckland, but its ultimate destination remains unknown.
"There is a market for cocaine in this country and generally, the market is high society people or socialites," Detective Superintendent Virginia Le Bas said, according to The New Zealand Herald.
New Zealand Police/The New Zealand Herald
Authorities unload a horse's head statue seized with drugs inside.
However, there is also the possibility that the drugs were meant to travel on to Australia's east coast, according to Chris Wilkins, chief drug researcher at New Zealand's Massey University, though Wilkins admitted that cocaine use was rising among New Zealanders.
The shipment of cocaine found in the statue was itself far more than has typically been seized in New Zealand. "Prior to this, the average amount of cocaine seized by police each year was around 250 grams," or about a half-pound, said Detective Senior Sergeant Colin Parmenter, who runs the country's organized-crime unit.
Friday's seizure was the largest cocaine bust in New Zealand's history, and comes just a few weeks after the country's largest drug bust ever: $494 million worth of methamphetamine found on an abandoned boat.
New Zealand Police
Cocaine bricks seized from a horse's head statue by police in New Zealand.
At present, it's not clear who is behind the shipment or what its final destination was. But the involvement of Mexican nationals suggests that the Sinaloa cartel of jailed kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán may have been involved.
The Sinaloa cartel reportedly controls more than one-third of the cocaine made in Colombia, the world's top producer of the drug, and the organization is believed to have operations in up to 50 countries, ranging from Argentina up to the US, across Europe and Africa, and throughout Asia and Oceania.