Three procedures by the Rivera police and customs staff, two at the Curticeiras border post with Brazil, led to the seizure of 138 kilograms of marijuana.[1] At the Curticeiras post, customs officers stopped a taxi and found 32 bricks of pressed marijuana weighing 19.982 kilograms in the boot, arresting the driver and the passenger.[1] Following those interviews, Brazilian civil police and military brigade officers searched a house in Santana do Livramento and found another 62 bricks of marijuana weighing 52 kilograms, detaining four more people.[1]

The taxi driver, 31 and with no criminal record, was sentenced to 24 months of supervised release for assisting the criminal activity.[1] The passenger, 25, was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for possessing, transporting and importing banned narcotics.[1] In the second procedure, customs officers at Curticeiras found six bricks weighing 4.5 kilograms of marijuana in a passenger’s backpack on an interdepartmental bus bound from Rivera for Montevideo.[1] A search of the home of a prisoner linked to the bus passenger yielded 11 bricks weighing 7.714 kilograms of marijuana, a notebook with sales records and a mobile phone, and the owner of the house, a 23-year-old woman, was detained.[1] The bus passenger, 31, was sentenced to two years in prison for possessing and transporting banned narcotics, and the woman was ordered held under house arrest for 120 days on an aggravated distribution charge.[1]

In the third procedure, part of Operation Ryguasu, anti-drug officers followed a pickup truck into a house in the Sacrificio de Sonia neighbourhood and intercepted it in Rivera Chico, finding 66 bricks weighing 51.94 kilograms of marijuana hidden in its bodywork.[1] The driver, 42 and with ten criminal records, was sentenced to three years in prison for transporting banned narcotics.[1] Six people were detained across the three procedures, including the imprisoned man, who was held in his cell and was due to face a court.[2]