The government has announced that military personnel would soon join police in addressing the country’s drug crisis.
Piveni Piukala, the Minister for Police, said the move was part of the Ministry’s new efforts to combat drug trafficking and transnational crime.
He said that the army will assist the police solely in a patrol capacity.
Mr Piukala said he received photographs of vessels lowering their cranes into deep waters in the Vava‘u islands.
The Minister did not provide any details of those photographs, but he was implying that this may be one of the means utilized for smuggling illicit drugs into the country.
Meanwhile, Neiafu, Vava’u town officer Vava Lapota, shared photos purported to show a ship with what appeared to be its crane being lowered into the sea. Kaniva News was unable to verify the authenticity of the image.
The revelation follows cocaine packages that washed up on beaches on Vava’u in 2021.
In 2012, Tongan authorities seized more than 200kg of cocaine destined for Australia from a yacht stranded on an uninhabited atoll with a badly decomposed body on board.
Mr Piukala said the government has reactivated the Illicit Drugs Response Team, which was established to address drug-related issues. The team last convened in January 2024.
Installation of CCTV cameras at borders, airports, and wharfs was underway, he said.
Tonga’s efforts at sea borders come after New Zealand authorities discovered a strange pink-and-black pontoon bobbing back and forth in international waters near the Cook Islands in February 2023. It was found that the jetsam was 81 bales of cocaine, held together with fishing nets and floating on a bed of yellow buoys, New Lines Magazine reported.
According to the New Zealand Police, at the time, the 3.5-ton cache was worth $290 million.
They believed if the haul remained undiscovered it would have been picked up by a second vessel to be smuggled onward.
The report by the New Lines Magazine said Mexico’s two biggest organized criminal groups, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, are also alleged to have conscripted local political leaders into a trade worth tens of billions of dollars.
