Guns and grenades betray Antwerp’s struggles with rising cocaine trade
“Authorities believe the two men from Antwerp have been hiding out in Dubai, from where they allegedly continue to run their narcotics operations. The US government in July placed the siblings on a sanctions list for drugs smuggling, limiting their ability to open bank accounts abroad.
“If you see the bombs and grenades on the streets of Antwerp, most of them are organised by people hiding in Dubai,” said Belgian justice minister Vincent Van Quickenborne, who is under police protection after criminal gangs last year attempted to kidnap him and his family.
Belgium signed an extradition agreement with the UAE in 2021, but it has failed to deliver key suspects such as the El Ballouti brothers. The minister said diplomatic efforts to facilitate extraditions from those “safe havens” are ongoing.
According to the US authorities, the El Ballouti network extends from suppliers in Latin America to businesses in China. A lawyer representing Younes El Ballouti declined to comment for this story. A lawyer representing his brother could not be reached for comment.
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As cocaine shipments to Europe via Antwerp have gone up in recent years, so have the violent incidents: gangs have thrown grenades and Molotov cocktails at rivals’ houses and set cars on fire — often in relation to stolen drug shipments. Last year, Antwerp’s prosecutor’s office registered 81 such incidents, twice as many as in 2021.
Belgian police have seized record amounts of cocaine from Latin America in recent years, hidden in everything from banana crates to the lining of containers. In 2022, the total amount confiscated reached nearly 110 tonnes of the illegal drug and more than 43 tonnes have been seized in the first half of this year.
Law enforcement is no match for the highly sophisticated international drug trafficking networks using the sprawling Antwerp port to cater for a growing European customer base.
The port is the second-largest in Europe after Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and extends over both banks of the river Scheldt for more than 11,000 hectares — larger than the metropolitan area of Paris. About 240mn tonnes of freight volume pass through its quays every year.
Antwerp has been a trading hub for centuries. At city hall, spokesperson Johan Vermant gestured to a mural depicting early traders at the dockside. “The town grew rich with salt from the 13th century and sugar in the 16th. Now, we’re dealing with another white powder.”
But in recent years, Antwerp has become “the first port of call for goods that are interesting to use for drug trafficking, like exotic fruits” from Latin America, which must pass customs quickly, Vermant said.
The rise in shipments to Europe follows an increase in Colombian production, driven by innovations in coca processing and a 2016 peace deal between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) rebel group, according to authorities and researchers.
Only about 2 per cent of the goods coming through Antwerp are scanned, with containers selected on the basis of intelligence or risk-analysis.
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All containers coming from Latin America and deemed a high risk will be scanned by 2028 thanks to new equipment, he said. Currently, just about 5 per cent of those are controlled.
The measures are part of a new government plan announced in February, which also includes appointing a drugs commissioner, additional staff for police and customs and background checks on 16,000 port employees.
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Law enforcement has gained a better understanding of how criminal groups operate by decrypting their communications. A big breakthrough came in 2021, when they cracked Sky ECC, a Canadian-made messaging service considered infallible by criminal groups who used it. Once they identified leading smugglers, including from the El Ballouti network, “all the puzzle pieces came together”, said Europol spokesperson Jan Op Gen Oorth.
But the thousands of cases opened after Sky ECC was decrypted have hardly had an impact on cocaine smuggling. “I thought . . . now we’ve killed the beast,” said Vanderwaeren. “[But] we were not capable of breaking down the organisation.”
Capturing the kingpins would not necessarily disrupt drug trade in Antwerp, said Op Gen Oorth. “If you take number one out, there’s always number two waiting.”
In Europe, the retail price of cocaine has remained stable at about €50 per gramme for several years, while its purity has increased, according to the EU’s drugs monitoring agency (EMCDDA). Consumption has risen, with wastewater analysis showing cities in Belgium and the Netherlands among those with the highest concentrations.
Van Quickenborne, who has called for a greater European response to capture smugglers, warned it would be difficult to stamp out the drug trade. “We think that in the end we will not win the war on drugs, because it’s not winnable. But we’ll contain it.””
Booming cocaine production suggests the war on drugs has failed
There is no shortage of people willing to plant and harvest coca; and there is no shortage of cocaine. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (unodc), global production hit a record 1,982 tonnes in 2020. That number is up by 11% on the year before, and nearly double the amount produced in 2014 (see chart 1). When Richard Nixon, then America’s president, launched his “war on drugs” in 1971, the flow of cocaine into America was a trickle. Despite billions of dollars spent every year on arrests, asset seizures and destroying coca bushes, it has become a flood. About 2% of North Americans—roughly 6m people—are thought to use the stuff. New shipping routes are bringing the drug to consumers in Africa, Asia and Europe (see map).
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Mr Petro and Mr Soberón are right to say that the war on cocaine has failed. The main reason is the vast profits to be made from the drug, which is cheap to produce but expensive to buy. According to Jeremy McDermott of InSight Crime, a website that analyses organised crime, Mexican gangs can buy a kilo of cocaine for $3,000 in Colombia. He estimates that a kilo is worth between $8,000 and $12,000 in Central America, $20,000 in the United States, $35,000 in Europe, $50,000 in China and $100,000 in Australia. Gangs can boost profits even more by cutting coke with cheaper drugs. These days much of the cocaine that is shipped north to the United States comes mixed with fentanyl, a powerful and addictive opioid painkiller. The UNODC reckons that toxic combination is the main reason why cocaine-related deaths in America have risen fivefold since 2010 (see chart 2).
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The UNODC reckons that the amount of land dedicated to coca cultivation fell by 9% in Colombia in 2020 compared with the year before. But estimated production of cocaine rose by 8% to 1,228 tonnes, thanks to higher-yielding plants and more efficient processes in the labs that turn leaves into coca paste and then cocaine powder. Indeed, the gangs have achieved efficiency gains that would make a management consultant envious. The unodc calculates that the amount of cocaine obtained from one hectare of coca-bush cultivation rose by a whopping 18% in a single year, from 6.7kg in 2019 to 7.9kg in 2020.
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Gangs fight viciously to control the cocaine trade. That helps make Latin America one of the most violent regions on Earth. With less than a tenth of the world’s population, Latin America is the scene of roughly a third of murders.
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As cocaine spreads around the world (see chart 3), that criminal infrastructure travels with it. Guinea-Bissau has become an important route for South American cocaine bound for Europe. An attempted coup earlier this year, in which gunmen attacked the presidential palace, was blamed on drug gangs. Much European cocaine is imported through Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Dutch journalists and lawyers investigating the cocaine trade have been murdered. Earlier this year police discovered a sound-proofed torture chamber built into a shipping crate. The head of a Dutch police union has warned, hyperbolically, that the country is at risk of becoming a “narco-state”.
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Peru has therefore long permitted the growing of 22,000 hectares of coca by around 34,000 farmers who are registered with the government. They sell their crop to the only authorised buyer, Enaco, a state-owned firm. It is a similar story in Bolivia. In 2012 the country’s government, then headed by Evo Morales, withdrew from the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, a treaty from 1961 which aims to harmonise its signatories’ drug policies. Bolivia rejoined a year later with a carve-out allowing the decriminalisation of coca-leaf chewing. The idea was to give legal protection to a small domestic market supplying coca-related products, such as drinks and toothpaste.
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Bolivia’s trade unions are in charge of how much coca is grown. Encouragingly, violence in Bolivia is low, and seems to have fallen further since this model of “community control” came into force. According to Joaquin Chacin, a Bolivian coca researcher at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba, between 2004 and 2021 there were 15 deaths from coca-related conflicts. Between 1982 and 2003 there were 120.
But creating a legal coca-leaf market is not without its problems. For a start, having legal coca growers does not seem to put off the illegal ones. After a change of government in Bolivia in 2019, the area under coca cultivation rose by 15% in 2020, to just under 30,000 hectares, of which only 22,000 were legal.
It is a similar tale in Peru, where the area under cultivation rose by 30% in 2021 to just under 81,000 hectares. Once again, that is far in excess of the government-mandated limit. And the state-sponsored system is leaky. The official registry of farms has not been significantly updated since it was first created in 1979, making it hard to keep track of what is being grown where. Enaco also tends to offer low prices. The amount of coca leaf it has managed to buy has halved in the past 20 years. At least some of the missing coca is diverted into the illegal cocaine trade, where the prices offered are much higher. Mr Soberón, for his part, wants to abolish Enaco’s monopoly, and allow other buyers that might offer something closer to the market rate.
Iván Marulanda, a liberal Colombian senator, has floated a more radical idea. In 2020 he introduced a bill to the Senate that proposes that Colombia buy up all the coca produced in the country at market prices. Mr Marulanda reckons that would cost around 2.6trn pesos ($560m), less than the 4trn pesos spent on eradication each year. More controversially, the bill—which passed its first reading before being shelved in the run-up to the presidential election this year—would also legalise cocaine for domestic use. Few Colombians indulge, at least at the moment. Mr Marulanda estimates that around 260,000 use the drug. Under his proposal, it would become available for over-18s who pass a medical exam. Steve Rolles, of Transform, a British drug advocacy group, thinks that even such a small-scale experiment could “open up the debate.”
However, there is not much about tackling illegal groups in the bill, admits Lorenzo Uribe, a researcher who helped draft it. And legalisation would probably come with serious drawbacks. In a paper in 2016 Dr Caulkins, the Carnegie Mellon professor, examined what might happen were cocaine to be legalised in Latin America. He concluded that, although it might generate a legal cocaine market worth “somewhere between hundreds of millions and low single-digit billions per year,” the price would be that the country in question would become an “international pariah”. Dr Caulkins reckons America and others would impose sanctions in retaliation.
Nor would it stop international crime. Legalising cocaine in places where consumption is low would do little to dent the profits over which the gangs fight, which mostly come from countries where consumption is high. And weak law enforcement could allow gangs to dominate newly legal markets just as they have dominated illegal ones. Several American states have legalised cannabis in the past few years. But Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, points out that Mexican gangs have started to move into those legalised markets too.
And legalisation in a Latin American country could even, perversely, end up increasing violence in the region. Another paper, also published in 2016, this time by Daniel Mejia, an economist at the University of the Andes, and his colleagues found a link between coca eradication policies in Colombia and increased violence in parts of Mexico where several drug gangs compete against one another. If cocaine were to become harder for Mexican gangs to get their hands on—because the government was buying up all of the crops, as in Senator Marulanda’s bill—the extra competition could lead to even more bloodshed.
A problem of demand
“The problem is in consumption, not production,” says Mr Petro. His view is that “the competitive society…the ideology of the last few decades…is the one that generates addiction. And it is what generates widespread drug use.” Mr Petro’s explanation is dubious. But his diagnosis is surely correct. So long as cocaine remains illegal in the rich countries that consume it, then legalising it in the poorer places that produce it will have only a small effect.
Full-on decriminalisation, let alone legalisation, is not about to happen in the West. But attitudes have shifted notably in the past few years. In 2020 the state of Oregon decriminalised the possession of all drugs, cocaine included. Portugal has had a similar policy since 2001. On October 7th Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s mayor, told a meeting of European justice ministers that she thought that the war on drugs had failed, and that cocaine should be decriminalised. If decriminalisation happens in Latin America, it could put more momentum behind such ideas.
And even America’s government is not as hostile as it once was. At a meeting with Mr Petro on October 3rd Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, said diplomatically that President Joe Biden’s administration supported the Colombian president’s more “holistic approach” to tackling drugs. Coming from the country that began the drug war five decades ago, that feels like a significant concession.”
It is time to legalise cocaine
“Since Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs” half a century ago, the flow of cocaine into the United States has surged. Global production hit a record of 1,982 tonnes in 2020, according to the latest data, though that is likely to be an underestimate. That record high is despite decades of strenuous and costly efforts to cut off the supply. Between 2000 and 2020 the United States ploughed $10bn into Colombia to suppress production, paying the local armed forces to spray coca plantations with herbicide from the air or to yank up bushes by hand. To no avail: when coca is eradicated on one hillside, it shifts to another.
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Half-measures, such as not prosecuting cocaine users, are not enough. If producing the stuff is still illegal, it will be criminals who produce it, and decriminalisation of consumption will probably increase demand and boost their profits. The real answer is full legalisation, allowing non-criminals to supply a strictly regulated, highly taxed product, just as whisky- and cigarette-makers do. (Advertising it should be banned.)
Legal cocaine would be less dangerous, since legitimate producers would not adulterate it with other white powders and dosage would be clearly labelled, as it is on whisky bottles. Cocaine-related deaths have risen fivefold in America since 2010, mostly because gangs are cutting it with fentanyl, a cheaper and more lethal drug.
Legalisation would defang the gangs. Obviously, some would find other revenues but the loss of cocaine profits would help curb their power to recruit, buy top-end weapons and corrupt officials. This would reduce drug-related violence everywhere, but most of all in the worst-affected region, Latin America.
If cocaine were legal, more people would take it. For some, this will be a choice: snorting a substance they know is unhealthy because it gives them pleasure. But cocaine is addictive. A paucity of research makes it hard to know how it compares with alcohol or tobacco on this score. More study is needed, as are greater efforts to treat addiction. This could be funded (and then some) by the money saved if the “war” were wound down.
In private, many officials understand that prohibition is not working any better than it did in Al Capone’s day. Just now full legalisation seems politically impossible: few politicians want to be called “soft on drugs”. But proponents must keep pressing their case. The benefits—safer cocaine, safer streets and greater political stability in the Americas—far outweigh the costs.”
Colombia’s president: Legalize cocaine, it’s no worse than whiskey
“Colombia, the world's largest producer and exporter of cocaine, has spent decades fighting drug trafficking, but the country's left-wing president claimed the drug was being scapegoated by American politicians, who have waged the war on drugs for decades.
“Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whiskey,” Petro said during a six-hour-long government meeting.
“Scientists have analyzed this: cocaine is not worse than whiskey,” he added, suggesting that the global cocaine industry could be “easily dismantled” if the drug was legalized worldwide.
“If somebody wants peace, the business [of drug trafficking] has to be dismantled,” Petro said. “It could be easily dismantled if they legalized cocaine in the world. It would be sold like wine.”
By contrast, Petro pointed out that fentanyl, a contributor to the opioid crisis in the United States, “is killing Americans, but it's not made in Colombia.”
“Fentanyl was created as a pharmacy drug by North American multinationals" and those who used it “became addicted,” he added.
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Cocaine production in Colombia reached a record high in 2023, jumping by 53 percent to more than 2,600 tons, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.”
