Getting cocaine in many of Europe’s big cities is now as easy as ordering a pizza. Read more at straitstimes.com.
PARIS - “Seventy euros for one, 120 for two,” said the cocaine dealer as the young woman opened her door on Paris’ chic Left Bank.
The continent has been hit by a “tsunami” of cocaine, said the head of the Belgian federal police, Mr Eric Snoeck, with 240 tonnes seized in 2021, according to Europol, nearly five times more than a decade ago.Europe has become one of the most lucrative markets for the big drug cartels, who have not hesitated about using the corruption and extreme violence that has served them so well in South America.
The cocaine flooding Europe begins its journey in the high mountain plateaus of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, where the coca leaves from which the drug is extracted are grown. Despite the billions spent over the decades by Washington and Bogota in their “war on drugs”, peasants continue to grow more and more coca, with harvests up 14 per cent in 2021 to an all-time high of 1,400 tonnes, according to the United Nations.
The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels at first concentrated on their “natural” market, the United States, before switching their focus to Europe, where cocaine consumption has exploded. The rest comes in by air hidden in suitcases or in the stomachs of drug “mules”. Some even comes by sea in remote-controlled submersibles, like the ones seized by Spanish police in July.The Mexican cartels established their European bridgehead on Spain’s Costa del Sol in the early 2000s, which was already the main hub for the transport of Moroccan cannabis.
Such enormous profits allow a huge war chest to buy off dockers, cargo agents, truckers, and sometimes customs and police officers, to get cocaine out of the ports. Some dock workers are paid to authorise the exit of containers or move ones full of drugs out of range of security cameras. Others loan their security badges to the gangs.
In May the home of a family known to be involved in drugs in nearby Deurne was bombed while their neighbours were celebrating a marriage in their garden.On July 6, 2021, the celebrated investigative journalist Peter R de Vries was shot several times in an underground car park moments after appearing on a television talk show. He died nine days later.
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 a further insight into their ruthlessness, with people put through meat grinders or executed live on video.
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