Drug cartels find new routes and customers in eastern Europe, Asia and Africa as geography of demand changes
An Air France flight arrived from Caracas carrying 31 suitcases packed with the precious powder. Fingers were pointed at Venezuela, but in fact the goods came from Colombia. "The narco-traffickers will stop at nothing," says Bogotá's police commissioner. "Organised crime, and its corrupting influence, is at work in every single country in Latin America."
Just look at the news. In the autumn, police in Ecuador seized three tonnes of cocaine, ready to cross the Pacific. Soon after, half a tonne was intercepted in a tanker truck on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. On the heels of that discovery, 1.5 tonnes was intercepted in the port of Piura, Peru. More than 90% of cocaine seizures worldwide occur on the American continent.
Peru is now the top source of coca leaves and cocaine hydrochloride, according to UN figures. Colombia, no longer the market leader, has dropped back to third place, behind Bolivia.
According to the same figures, the latter now supplies half the cocaine consumed in Brazil. With an estimated 900,000 users (out of a total population of nearly 200 million), Latin America's largest country has become the second-largest consumer worldwide, behind the United States.
The geopolitics of cocaine is in constant flux.
Not so long ago the "African route" was thought to be booming, with drugs from the Andes transiting via west Africa. But customs seizures there are no longer rising, the conflict in Mali having forced traffickers to find new routes. At the end of 2012 police in Antwerp found eight tonnes of cocaine in a container on a freighter arriving from Guayaquil, in Ecuador.
Consumption is steady in western Europe and declining in the US. In contrast the markets in Latin America, eastern Europe, Asia and Africa are expanding fast.
"For the past 25 years the geopolitics of cocaine has tended to oppose producing countries in the south and consumer countries in the north. But in the near future the problem may become a south-south issue," says Ricardo Soberon, former counter-narcotics chief in Peru and now head of the Drugs and Human Rights Research Centre in Lima.
How much is a cocaine catch worth? A kilo of extremely pure powder is worth between $800 and $2,000 at the laboratory gate in the Andes, $6,000 on reaching its point of embarkation, $10,000 in Central America, $30,000 on the streets of New York and twice as much in Paris, by which time it has been cut with all sorts of other substances and is not pure at all.
The drug's production processes, distribution circuits and markets are changing all the time. The only objective evidence the police have in their battle to identify networks and routes is seized drugs and arrests. Neither tells the full story.
Politics muddies the water even further. "The US, which pumped $7bn in military aid into Colombia as part of the war on drugs, would have us believe its eradication policy was a success," Soberon says.
Pleading the cause of national sovereignty, Venezuela and Bolivia sent the Drug Enforcement Administration packing, so now Washington has blacklisted them. "Yet their strategy for combating drugs, based on repression, hasn't changed and their results are quite comparable to neighbouring countries," he adds.
Venezuela is quick to point out that it does not grow coca but is merely a point of transit. But the opposition are not the only ones to express concern about the narco-traffickers' alleged connections in the army and national guard. "It looks like the mafia has taken control of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," an exasperated blogger wrote. The expression "cartel de los soles"– an allusion to the sun-like insignia on officers' dress uniform – was hatched in 1993, so this not a new development.
It is certainly no worse than elsewhere, according to Marcos Alvar, who heads a major project to promote co-operation between police in the European Union and Ameripol, a body set up in 2007 which aims to become the regional equivalent of Europol. "We have established absolutely remarkable co-operation with the Venezuelan authorities," he says. "In August it enabled us to break up a large network of transporters and to catch Brian Colin Charrington [from the UK], who is one of the most wanted narco-traffickers in Europe." Charrington used to brag about his criminal exploits on the net.
The Colombian police are equally happy about their co-operation with Venezuela. In July Caracas handed over Diego Perez, alias Diego Rastrojo, following his arrest on 3 June in Barinas province. As the leader of the Rastrojo gang he was one of the most wanted drug-runners. "When it comes to corruption Colombia is hardly in a position to give other people lessons," says a senior official at the country's anti-drug agency. General Mauricio Santoyo, the head of security under President Alvaro Uribe, was extradited to the US and is now serving a 13-year sentence for conspiring to support a narco-terrorist group.
According to the most recent figures published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, at the end of 2012 there were 48,000 hectares under coca cultivation, 25% less than the previous year. "It's a spectacular reduction," says Bo Mathiasen UNODC representative in Colombia. "But the result is fragile." He points out that 130,000 hectares of coca were destroyed in 2012: 100,000 hectares by aerial herbicide spraying (Colombia is the only country to authorise this technique and the use of glyphosate) and 30,000 by manually uprooting the plants.
The area under cultivation has been halved in 10 years. But at the same time glyphosate has contaminated other crops covering 1.3m hectares. Good reason for concern among environmental campaigners. Even the overall effectiveness of such policy is open to question, particularly as output has increased in both Peru and Bolivia. The specialists call this a "balloon effect". If the pressure increases on one side, the balloon swells up on the other. "It means that the big success of the Colombian scheme has been to push coca cultivation across to Peru and Bolivia," says Soberon.
"The number of hectares under cultivation is no longer an adequate indication of cocaine hydrochloride production, just as the number of hectares eradicated doesn't accurately reflect the effectiveness of anti-drug measures," Soberon adds. Yields have increased and in some areas coca growers obtain up to six crops a year. Productivity has improved too, with refining processes extracting more cocaine from each coca leaf. But the farmers themselves are still just as poor. "Without a real rural development policy and a reduction in demand, the goal of switching to alternative crops is hard to achieve," Mathiasen says.
The narco-gangs are very inventive. In August Colombian police seized a tonne of cocaine, packed into 11,500 limes, which had been carefully emptied and reconstituted. Two weeks later a young pregnant woman from Canada was stopped at El Dorado airport in Bogotá. Police discovered two kilos of cocaine in her latex belly. Last December their colleagues in Barcelona found the drug hidden in a woman's breast implants. In all 238 mules have been arrested in Colombia since the beginning of 2013, including 98 foreigners.
But the mules are just small change in this massive business. The biggest challenge these days is the shipping containers in which narco-traffickers can send drugs worldwide, quickly and with less risk, according to an Ameripol report. The global market plays into the hands of all sorts of trafficking and makes life even more difficult for the police.
All the more so since the disappearance of the big Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia, eliminated in the 1990s, with increasing fragmentation of the trade. Organised crime has segmented its activities. "It is much more difficult to infiltrate," says Ameripol head Marco Alvar. Mexican groups now control much of the traffic between producers in the Andes and the US market, but there is much stiffer competition in Europe. The big international networks are still dominated by Colombians.
"Drug trafficking obeys a law of physics which dictates that nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed," Alvar adds.
The Ameripol report calls for closer co-operation between countries: a global response to a global problem. It urges a goal endorsed by all the police forces. Political leaders are beginning to admit that the war on drugs, in its present form, is a failure. But neither police nor policymakers have so far come up with an alternative.
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
An Air France flight arrived from Caracas carrying 31 suitcases packed with the precious powder. Fingers were pointed at Venezuela, but in fact the goods came from Colombia. "The narco-traffickers will stop at nothing," says Bogotá's police commissioner. "Organised crime, and its corrupting influence, is at work in every single country in Latin America."
Just look at the news. In the autumn, police in Ecuador seized three tonnes of cocaine, ready to cross the Pacific. Soon after, half a tonne was intercepted in a tanker truck on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. On the heels of that discovery, 1.5 tonnes was intercepted in the port of Piura, Peru. More than 90% of cocaine seizures worldwide occur on the American continent.
Peru is now the top source of coca leaves and cocaine hydrochloride, according to UN figures. Colombia, no longer the market leader, has dropped back to third place, behind Bolivia.
According to the same figures, the latter now supplies half the cocaine consumed in Brazil. With an estimated 900,000 users (out of a total population of nearly 200 million), Latin America's largest country has become the second-largest consumer worldwide, behind the United States.
The geopolitics of cocaine is in constant flux.
Not so long ago the "African route" was thought to be booming, with drugs from the Andes transiting via west Africa. But customs seizures there are no longer rising, the conflict in Mali having forced traffickers to find new routes. At the end of 2012 police in Antwerp found eight tonnes of cocaine in a container on a freighter arriving from Guayaquil, in Ecuador.
Consumption is steady in western Europe and declining in the US. In contrast the markets in Latin America, eastern Europe, Asia and Africa are expanding fast.
"For the past 25 years the geopolitics of cocaine has tended to oppose producing countries in the south and consumer countries in the north. But in the near future the problem may become a south-south issue," says Ricardo Soberon, former counter-narcotics chief in Peru and now head of the Drugs and Human Rights Research Centre in Lima.
How much is a cocaine catch worth? A kilo of extremely pure powder is worth between $800 and $2,000 at the laboratory gate in the Andes, $6,000 on reaching its point of embarkation, $10,000 in Central America, $30,000 on the streets of New York and twice as much in Paris, by which time it has been cut with all sorts of other substances and is not pure at all.
The drug's production processes, distribution circuits and markets are changing all the time. The only objective evidence the police have in their battle to identify networks and routes is seized drugs and arrests. Neither tells the full story.
Politics muddies the water even further. "The US, which pumped $7bn in military aid into Colombia as part of the war on drugs, would have us believe its eradication policy was a success," Soberon says.
Pleading the cause of national sovereignty, Venezuela and Bolivia sent the Drug Enforcement Administration packing, so now Washington has blacklisted them. "Yet their strategy for combating drugs, based on repression, hasn't changed and their results are quite comparable to neighbouring countries," he adds.
Venezuela is quick to point out that it does not grow coca but is merely a point of transit. But the opposition are not the only ones to express concern about the narco-traffickers' alleged connections in the army and national guard. "It looks like the mafia has taken control of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," an exasperated blogger wrote. The expression "cartel de los soles"– an allusion to the sun-like insignia on officers' dress uniform – was hatched in 1993, so this not a new development.
It is certainly no worse than elsewhere, according to Marcos Alvar, who heads a major project to promote co-operation between police in the European Union and Ameripol, a body set up in 2007 which aims to become the regional equivalent of Europol. "We have established absolutely remarkable co-operation with the Venezuelan authorities," he says. "In August it enabled us to break up a large network of transporters and to catch Brian Colin Charrington [from the UK], who is one of the most wanted narco-traffickers in Europe." Charrington used to brag about his criminal exploits on the net.
The Colombian police are equally happy about their co-operation with Venezuela. In July Caracas handed over Diego Perez, alias Diego Rastrojo, following his arrest on 3 June in Barinas province. As the leader of the Rastrojo gang he was one of the most wanted drug-runners. "When it comes to corruption Colombia is hardly in a position to give other people lessons," says a senior official at the country's anti-drug agency. General Mauricio Santoyo, the head of security under President Alvaro Uribe, was extradited to the US and is now serving a 13-year sentence for conspiring to support a narco-terrorist group.
According to the most recent figures published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, at the end of 2012 there were 48,000 hectares under coca cultivation, 25% less than the previous year. "It's a spectacular reduction," says Bo Mathiasen UNODC representative in Colombia. "But the result is fragile." He points out that 130,000 hectares of coca were destroyed in 2012: 100,000 hectares by aerial herbicide spraying (Colombia is the only country to authorise this technique and the use of glyphosate) and 30,000 by manually uprooting the plants.
The area under cultivation has been halved in 10 years. But at the same time glyphosate has contaminated other crops covering 1.3m hectares. Good reason for concern among environmental campaigners. Even the overall effectiveness of such policy is open to question, particularly as output has increased in both Peru and Bolivia. The specialists call this a "balloon effect". If the pressure increases on one side, the balloon swells up on the other. "It means that the big success of the Colombian scheme has been to push coca cultivation across to Peru and Bolivia," says Soberon.
"The number of hectares under cultivation is no longer an adequate indication of cocaine hydrochloride production, just as the number of hectares eradicated doesn't accurately reflect the effectiveness of anti-drug measures," Soberon adds. Yields have increased and in some areas coca growers obtain up to six crops a year. Productivity has improved too, with refining processes extracting more cocaine from each coca leaf. But the farmers themselves are still just as poor. "Without a real rural development policy and a reduction in demand, the goal of switching to alternative crops is hard to achieve," Mathiasen says.
The narco-gangs are very inventive. In August Colombian police seized a tonne of cocaine, packed into 11,500 limes, which had been carefully emptied and reconstituted. Two weeks later a young pregnant woman from Canada was stopped at El Dorado airport in Bogotá. Police discovered two kilos of cocaine in her latex belly. Last December their colleagues in Barcelona found the drug hidden in a woman's breast implants. In all 238 mules have been arrested in Colombia since the beginning of 2013, including 98 foreigners.
But the mules are just small change in this massive business. The biggest challenge these days is the shipping containers in which narco-traffickers can send drugs worldwide, quickly and with less risk, according to an Ameripol report. The global market plays into the hands of all sorts of trafficking and makes life even more difficult for the police.
All the more so since the disappearance of the big Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia, eliminated in the 1990s, with increasing fragmentation of the trade. Organised crime has segmented its activities. "It is much more difficult to infiltrate," says Ameripol head Marco Alvar. Mexican groups now control much of the traffic between producers in the Andes and the US market, but there is much stiffer competition in Europe. The big international networks are still dominated by Colombians.
"Drug trafficking obeys a law of physics which dictates that nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed," Alvar adds.
The Ameripol report calls for closer co-operation between countries: a global response to a global problem. It urges a goal endorsed by all the police forces. Political leaders are beginning to admit that the war on drugs, in its present form, is a failure. But neither police nor policymakers have so far come up with an alternative.
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.