Mexican soldiers have seized five-and-a-half tons of cocaine worth more than €82 million from a commercial plane arriving from Venezuela.
The army was waiting for the plane on Monday at the airport of Cuidad de Carmen, 550 miles east of Mexico City, after receiving information from Venezuelan and US authorities, said General Carlos Gaytan.
The cocaine was stacked in 128 black suitcases marked private.
Soldiers arrested the plane's co-pilot, but the pilot escaped, Gaytan said. There were no passengers. The soldiers also arrested two Mexicans who were waiting at the airport with another plane.
Gen Gaytan said airport officials initially stopped soldiers from approaching the plane, claiming there was an oil leak and that it might explode.
US and Mexican officials say that cocaine and heroin was increasingly passing from Colombia through Venezuela to Mexico where it is smuggled into the United States. While drug traffickers used planes to smuggle large quantities of drugs in the 1990s, most Mexican traffickers now use land and sea routes.
A US State Department report released in March said that Venezuela has become a key transit point for drugs because of "rampant corruption at the highest levels of law enforcement and a weak judicial system".
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez suspended cooperation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration in August, accusing its agents of spying.