The Triple Frontier: Triads, Hezbollah and Narco Heavies

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When Paraguay extradited French-Corsican heroin kingpin Auguste Ricord to the US in 1972, some thought Paraguay’s narco trafficking days might be numbered. If anything they were just beginning. Within years the tiny nation had welcomed Hong Kong Triads and Lebanese militants — who, combined with considerable homegrown narco and cigarette trafficking, made Paraguay one of the world’s most lawless places, a hive of narco-contraband-terror madness. This nexus was focused not on the country’s sleepy capital city Asunción, but the so-called “Triple Frontier”, where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil met. And thanks to a 2018 conspiracy involving a local trafficker, a money mule and an up-and-coming senator, we know it’s very much alive and kicking today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:04.3	August 28, 2018, around 2 p.m.
1:10.0	Sudha deleste, the second largest city in the Latin American nation of Paraguay.
1:14.9	Home to half a million people, the city is perched on the bend of the Palinar River that marks the border between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.
1:19.7	The so-called triple frontier, best known for its spectacular Iguasu Falls,
1:24.4	a tourist hotspot, welcoming over a million people each year.
1:28.3	The falls though, they're split between Argentina and Brazil.
1:32.3	Almost no tourists comes to Ciudad de Leste and it shows.
1:36.3	The city is an awkward tangle of glass-fronted high-rise, half-finished homes and shopping malls,
1:42.3	over a dozen shopping malls, many of them brand spanking
1:45.7	new and stuffed full of electronics and luxury goods you'd never find in Asuncione, Paraguay's
1:51.2	sleepy capital.
	...

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