Paris: “Seventy euros for one, 120 for two,” said the cocaine dealer as the young woman opened his door on Paris’s chic Left Bank.
“I’m like all the delivery riders out there dropping off sushi and groceries fast around Paris,” he smiled. “I receive orders and I deliver them.”
In many of Europe’s largest cities, obtaining cocaine is now as easy as ordering a pizza.
Twenty minutes after placing your order by WhatsApp or Signal, a dealer can be at your doorstep.
“Consumers prefer to go to a forum and have their drugs delivered by a person who looks like a Deliveroo rider,” said Police Commissioner Virginie Lahaye, head of the Paris drugs squad. “It’s a lot easier than moving to some serious place in the suburbs.”
According to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), some 3.5 million Europeans will take cocaine in 2021 – four times more than 20 years ago.
Eric Snoeck, chief of Belgium’s federal police, said the continent is being hit by a “tsunami” of cocaine, with 240 tonnes seized in 2021, almost five times more than a decade ago, according to Europol.
profitable market
Europe has become one of the most lucrative markets for the big drug cartels, who have not hesitated to use the corruption and extreme violence that have served them so well in South America.
“Kidnapping, torture and beatings: so much money is at stake that criminal organizations have brought cartel methods to our shores,” said Stéphanie Cherbonnier of the French Anti-Drug Office.
Northern Europe’s major ports such as Antwerp and Rotterdam have been so affected by drug violence that democracy itself has been threatened, with gangs even daring to plot to kidnap the Belgian justice minister .
Brussels’ chief prosecutor Johan Delmulle warned that with gunmen on the streets of Antwerp, the country could soon “be regarded as a narco state”.
The flood of cocaine begins its journey to Europe in the high mountain plateaus of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, where coca leaves are grown from which the drug is extracted.
In Catatumbo, northeastern Colombia, José del Carmen Abril relies on coca to feed his eight children.
The 53-year-old said, “Coca … has replaced a government that was never here.” “It has helped us build schools, health centres, roads and houses.”
In a country where many people make no more than $7 (6.5 euros) a day, a coca grower can earn five times that much.
But Del Carmen Abril herself chafes at being called a “narco,” saying farmers like her “don’t even make minimum wage.”
Despite the billions spent by Washington and Bogota over decades in their “war on drugs”, farmers have continued to grow more and more coca, with a 14 percent harvest in 2021 to an all-time high of 1,400 tons, according to the United Nations. has reached. ,
“Chemists” mix the chopped leaves with petrol, lime, cement and ammonium sulphate to form a white paste, which is then ground into powder in pharmaceutical laboratories.
In Catatumbo the paste sells for $370 per kilo. Once mixed with a cocktail of acids and solvents, it becomes “coke,” which costs more than $1,000 a kilo.
mexican cartel
Colombia supplies two-thirds of the world’s cocaine. But the collapse of the Cali and Medellin cartels in the 1990s and a peace deal with Marxist FARC guerrillas in 2016 turned the trade upside down.
Once only middlemen, Mexican cartels have taken almost complete control of the market, from financing production to monitoring cocaine trafficking.
The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels focused on their “natural” market, the United States, where cocaine consumption has exploded, before turning their attention to Europe.
Europol estimates that Europe’s cocaine market is now worth between 7.6 and 10.5 billion euros at street level.
“The US market is saturated and Coke sells for prices 50 to 100 percent higher than those in Europe,” said Florian Collas, the head of the French customs intelligence unit. “Another advantage for smugglers is the less discouraging prison sentence and the many logistical options.”
Most cocaine crossing the Atlantic is carried in containers, concealed in perfectly legal shipments of bananas, sugar or canned food.
The rest is carried by air in suitcases or hidden in the stomachs of drug “mules”. Some remote-controlled submersibles also come by sea, such as those seized by Spanish police in July.
The Mexican cartel established its European bridgehead in the early 2000s on Spain’s Costa del Sol, which was already the main hub for the transport of Moroccan cannabis.
But the arrests of several prominent smugglers and, above all, an explosion in maritime traffic prompted them to redirect smuggling through giant container ports in northern Europe such as Antwerp, Hamburg, Le Havre and Rotterdam.
“Some cargoes pass through Caribbean ports on their way from South America”, while others “pass through the Balkans or West Africa before entering Europe”, said Corinne Cliostret, deputy head of French customs.
big profits
The smugglers follow a well-crafted “business plan”, with Mexican cartels selling to European multinational crime syndicates, sometimes through fixers who split cargoes to spread the costs and risks.
Some “crime groups (that are part of these deals) may be competitors,” Cherbonnier said.
“But they also form alliances to learn about their strengths and how to get the drugs.”
The Moroccan “Mokro Mafia”, the Albanian, Serb or Kosovan Mafia and the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta in Belgium and the Netherlands divide the market according to their regions and specialties.
But they operate drugs through ports using local criminals, with a strict division of roles.
A kilo of cocaine bought for $1,000 in South America can sell for 35,000 euros ($37,600) in Europe. Once out of port and cut up with other substances, it will be sold to customers for 70 euros per gram, a value that has risen close to 100 times by the time it hits the street.
Such huge profits allowed a huge war chest to buy off dockers, cargo agents, truck drivers, and sometimes customs and police officers, to move cocaine out of ports.
Several French doctors have been jailed for working with drug gangs in Le Havre, with police saying some have been forced to help traffickers.
One told his lawyer how he had been duped. One day some people asked me to take some bags out (from the port) for 1,000 Euros per bag.
A customs official admitted that gangs are willing to pay up to 100,000 euros to get a container out of Le Havre, where “we are only able to check one percent of containers because we don’t have the resources to do more”. are not.”
Some dock workers are paid to bail out containers or move containers loaded with drugs out of range of security cameras. Lend your security badges to other gangs.
In Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, police and customer officials surprised a group of local foot soldiers of smugglers hiding in a “container hotel” with food and bedding awaiting the arrival of a shipment of cocaine.
In this file photo taken on November 7, 2022, a French customs officer tests a package suspected of being cocaine at Orly airport, south of Paris. (AFP)
targeted the royals
The large sums of money involved in complicity and the buying of silence have fueled extreme violence in the port cities of northern Europe.
Antwerp – Europe’s main gateway for illegal drugs – has recorded more than 200 drug-related violent incidents over the past five years, including the death of an 11-year-old girl after being gunned down last week at a home in the Merksem residential district. had died. ,
In May, the home of a family involved in drugs in nearby Derne was bombed while their neighbors were celebrating a wedding in their garden.
In the Netherlands, gangs have gone even further.
On July 6, 2021, renowned investigative journalist Peter R. De Vries was shot multiple times in an underground car park after appearing on a television talk show. He died nine days later.
A crime expert, one of his sources was the key witness against drug baron Ridoun Taghi, the suspected head of the “Mokro Mafia”, arrested in Dubai in 2019.
“We have gone to a whole other level of violence,” said Belgian police chief Snoeck. “They have no qualms about torturing someone for information or executing someone who hasn’t kept a contract … It sends shivers down your spine.”
In 2020, Dutch police discovered containers converted into a cell and torture chamber, and last year the cracking of the encrypted Sky ECC secure messaging app used by the gangs gave further insight into their brutality, which saw people being sent to meat grinders. Placed through or killed live. video.
Cocaine mafia will do anything to save their business. And nobody is safe. Belgian police uncovered a plot to kidnap the country’s justice minister in September, and in the Netherlands Crown Princess Amalia and Prime Minister Mark Rutte were targeted late last year.
seized only one tenth
But authorities are fighting hard with improved port security, intelligence cooperation and “targeting” of top dogs, which led to 109.9 tonnes of cocaine being seized in Antwerp last year.
“It shows that our methods are now more efficient but also that the flow of drugs is increasing,” acknowledged French customs chief Cleostret.
As a rule, experts suspect that only one-tenth of the cocaine shipped to Europe is ever seized.
But Ger Scheringa, head of Dutch customs investigations in Rotterdam, said greater “automation of cargo terminals is making it difficult” for smugglers.
They are already switching shipments to smaller, less protected ports such as Montoire-de-Bretagne in northwestern France, however, where more than 600 kilos of “coke” were seized in 2022.
Europe police forces have also had major successes, claiming to have decapitated a “super cartel” responsible for a third of the continent’s cocaine trafficking, with 49 suspects in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain and, above all, Dubai Caught in. Favorite hangout of drug lords.
But on the front line in the Caribbean, French customs officials in Martinique monitoring ships headed north from South America are smug.
The island’s customs chief Jean-Charles Metivier acknowledged, “Smugglers know our methods… We do our best but you know we can’t get them all.” “We are often one step behind.”
Meanwhile business and competition in Paris is brisk. “Faster Sales!” Announces a message sent by a dealer on WhatsApp. “Fifty Euros a gram.”