Americas

Booming cocaine trade spreads across Latin America

Drug violence and associated crime extends beyond Mexico and Colombia

A police officer transports bags of seized cocaine before its incineration at a police base in Lima in April. All but three of Latin America’s 21 mainland nations are now “main countries of source or transit” for cocaine, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/Getty Images

Michael Stott
Thu Aug 25 2022 - 11:52

An explosion that blew the front off two modest houses, killing at least five people. Two bodies left hanging from a bridge over a busy road. At least 187 inmates murdered, some decapitated, in two prison massacres.

This trail of blood would not be unusual in Mexico or Colombia, scarred by drug violence for decades. Yet it was unleashed over the past year in Guayaquil, the biggest city of once-tranquil Ecuador. In Uruguay, often described as the “Switzerland of Latin America”, 14 bodies appeared over a 10-day period this year. Three had been burned and one dismembered.

The Caribbean honeymoon of Paraguay’s chief anti-drug prosecutor ended in May with two bullets as a gunman executed him on the beach in front of his pregnant wife.

Behind this alarming spread of violent crime into Latin America’s smaller and formerly more peaceful countries lies the booming cocaine trade. Ever hungry to expand, cartel bosses are devising new routes to reach new markets. “What we’re seeing now is the culmination of the globalisation of the drugs trade,” said Jimena Blanco, head of Americas political research at Verisk Maplecroft. “This is a trend which began five to 10 years ago but has been accelerating in the past couple of years”.

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Antwerp seized more cocaine than any other European port last year, almost 90 tonnes. Belgian customs said the three main source countries were Ecuador, Paraguay and Panama — none major producers of the drug. Most Europe-bound cocaine is smuggled in shipping containers, and “when the seizure rates hit 20 to 25 per cent, the drug traffickers tend to switch routes”, said Jeremy McDermott, executive director of InSight Crime.

Along with the Brazilian port of Santos and Costa Rica’s Limón facility, Guayaquil is one of what McDermott terms a “second wave of ports” used for cocaine shipment in recent years. Paraguay, Uruguay and Chile are newer additions. Things are so bad that all but three of Latin America’s 21 mainland nations are now “main countries of source or transit” for cocaine, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. (The exceptions are the tiny nations of Guyana, Belize and El Salvador.)

The drug cartels have not just expanded their routes. They have also grown the total size of the cocaine business and diversified into adjacent criminal enterprises. After five decades of the US-led war on drugs and billions of dollars spent on interdiction and the pursuit of cartel bosses, the trade has never been larger. Total cocaine production hit a new record of 1,982 tonnes in 2020, according to the UNODC, more than twice as much as in 2014. Cocaine in Europe has never been more plentiful or cheaper in real terms, and the traffickers are growing lucrative markets in Russia, China and parts of Asia where the drug fetches two or three times more. As McDermott put it, “cocaine’s popping up everywhere”.

Major cartels have moved well beyond trafficking drugs. They now smuggle refugees, extort from businesses, kidnap the wealthy, and trade illegal Amazon timber or gold. Chilean organised crime has dipped into illicit fishing, while the latest business for Mexican gangs, according to Verisk’s Blanco, is smuggling abortion pills over the border to the US. The litany of depressing statistics from the failed drug war and its ghastly human toll have prompted an increasing number of politicians in Latin America to call for the legalisation of cocaine.

Yet, as Shannon O’Neil, vice-president at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, points out: “These are no longer really drug cartels. They are organised crime groups. Even if you get rid of the drugs, you still have extortion, robberies, human trafficking, gold smuggling.

“The focus should be: How do you instil the rule of law?”

In a region notorious for corruption, weak enforcement and high murder rates, that is a tall order — but a vital one. - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2022