How Cocaine Is Flooding Into Europe

0:00Before we get to today's episode, a quick reminder, the journal is coming to Dallas on Monday, November 9th. I'll be on stage for a live show. We'll dig into a big story, bring in a special guest, and I promise it's going to be the journal like you've never experienced it before. There's a link to where you can buy tickets in our show notes. I'd love to see you there. Alright, here we go. The world is being flooded with cocaine right now. More land is being cultivated for coca in South America. Gangs have taken control of ports in Ecuador and Brazil. And a well-oiled global supply chain has allowed for the illicit drug to travel around the world. Cocaine production has increased so much that cartels are looking for new markets. That's our colleague, Sooner Rasmussen. He says that a lot of that cocaine is headed to Europe. The cocaine market in Europe has exploded.

1:01Cocaine here is now cheaper, better, and there's more of it than ever before. Europe is now the second largest market for cocaine in the world after North America. Europe is being hit by a wave of cocaine according to Europe. The law enforcement agency admits the problem is worse than it first realized with organized crime networks better connected and increasingly violent. A lot of cocaine enters Europe through the southern coast of Spain, including the beautiful coast of Del Sol, home to white sand beaches and Mediterranean cities like Malaga. In 2023, Spain seized around 117 tons of cocaine, double from the previous year. So to better understand how the drug traffickers are able to get so much in, Sooner went there. He patrolled with the local authorities and a nighttime boop patrol.

2:02He spoke to prosecutors and drug traffickers, and he met with the families of victims of drug violence. And what he learned was that the local authorities are outmatched, out-resourced, and out-gunned. I think ultimately this story, you know, for all of the sort of violence and crime involved, this is a business story. And the people involved just happen to trade and illicit goods. Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Conneuxen. It's Friday, October 2nd. Coming up on the show, how cocaine is pouring into Europe and why authorities are struggling to stop it. This episode is presented by Accenture.

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4:04Visalertic reactions increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trampaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit trimphiradio.com On his reporting trip to southern Spain, Suna met with a person very familiar with how cocaine gets into Europe. I met with a drug trafficker at a hotel in my Bay on the southern coast of Spain. This guy has been nearly 15 years since he was a teenager, basically, been part of a gang trafficking drugs into Spain. What do you want to know? What do you want to know more or less? How do you know? Soon as reporting shows that the trafficker is pretty senior in his gang, his job is to

5:07handle the logistics of moving cocaine from South America into Spain. And this means that he ensures that the people sending the drugs can be trusted and then he also receives messages along the way to ensure that the cargo, the cocaine, is safe until it arrives in Spain. And we chatted for, yeah, close to two hours and he kind of laid out the inner workings of the international drug market and drug trafficking industry. For a long time, the tried and true method for getting cocaine into Europe was to hide shipments in large shipping containers and sneak them through major seaports. And this is still a common method, but traditionally, cocktails when they exported cocaine into Europe, I put them on containers. So hidden them in containers on ships where the crew often don't know that the cocaine

6:08is present. And then once it arrives, for example, in a port in the Netherlands or Belgium, then gangs on the other end know where the cocaine is and then they extract it. But these days, the ports are crawling with security, partly due to the increased cocaine traffic. So increasingly, traffickers are avoiding ports altogether, by relying on a network of small but powerful boats to avoid detection. They're using these super fast, powerful speed boats that they call narco lanches. Narco launches, aka Narco boats. They're super fast, powerful, brute force, but they are equipped with radars and cameras. So the people who manned the boats can detect law enforcement and evade detection and arrest. So they come with some sophisticated equipment, but the boats themselves are pretty simple.

7:10As you mentioned, these boats are illegal in Spain, so they're typically built in workshops in Portugal and then they're smuggled into Spain either via river or via truck. Typically one of these boats will come with four engines in the back, each of 400 horsepower, so that's a hugely powerful boat. Yeah, you got 1600 horses right there. Yeah, exactly. The boats can go hundreds of miles out to sea where traffickers wait for cocaine shipments from South America to be dropped off in the water. They can wait for weeks at a time, sheltering under umbrellas and eating the fish they catch in the ocean. And unlike the bustling ports, these smaller boats can duck into the quieter coastlines along southern Spain. A lot of this coastline, some of it is developed, but a lot of it is not. You got long stretches of sandy beaches, which is ideal territory for traffickers to drop a couple of tons of cocaine because it's super difficult to detect. So they just drive these narco boats like right up under the sand.

8:10And sometimes they do it in broad daylight on a beach where there are families swimming. Wow. According to students reporting, transporting cocaine this way is cheaper than sneaking it in through ports on containers. The ports cost the drugs mugglers about 21% of the shipments value. They often have to pay off port workers, police officers, and ship captains. But the narco boats only charge a 12% fee. The fee is lower because for one thing, it takes just a few people to operate an narco boat. So usually it takes four people to man one of these boats. You'll have a pilot, you'll have one person that man's the radar, and then you have two people that take care of the cargo. And they get paid very well for it. A pilot of one of these boats get paid up to 300,000 euros. So that's $350,000, more or less. So that's a very good salary for it. For one job. For one job. The fee also goes towards other costs. The boat itself costs around 500,000 euros. Then you have to pay for fuel.

9:11He's had fuel costs are up because of the war in Iran. Of course. Straight up for moose. It also affects inflation hits everybody. It hits the drug dealers as well, you know? But a single boat can carry as much as four metric tons of cocaine, which is worth roughly 250 million euros. And that's per boat. That is an insane profit. What does this mean for the for the gangs and the cartels? It means that Europe has opened up, like the fact that Europe has opened up as such a hungry market to put it bluntly in satiable market, it seems. Means that cartels in South America and cartels operating in Central America and the U.S. have found a they found a way to strengthen the revenue independent of the U.S. So while authorities in the U.S. are trying to squeeze the amount of cocaine going in there and trying to squeeze the cartels, they found a market that's not going to be that seems insatiable where they can continue to earn probably greater profits than ever before.

10:13As soon as there's those profits flown to the local economy in southern Spain, especially the coastal city of Marbella. Marbella is not only a tourist hotspot, but is also a place that for decades has attracted a lot of flashy consumption, a lot of dirty money to be frank. And that means if you're a drug dealer that makes a lot of money and you need to loan your money or spend your cash, you can do that relatively undetected. You can do that in a way that doesn't draw too much attention to yourself in Marbella. As the gangs and traffickers prosper, Spanish authorities have struggled to fight back. That's next. People disagree about a lot in this country. Taxes, health care, education, but wherever you land politically, I think most of us agree on this. Better information leads to better decisions. That's the mission of USAFax to make government data clear and accessible because public data

11:18should be easy to access, trust and understand so we can use it to make informed decisions. Read and sign our open letter to support public data at USAFax.org. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. The right hire can make or break your company, especially if you're a small business. And relying on luck to find that person isn't really the best strategy. But you know what is, using Indeed sponsor jobs. You can use it to boost your job post to make sure it reaches more people with the right talents, certification, location and more. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your offices, less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsor jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indie.com slash podcast. Disco to Indie.com slash podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about

12:20Indeed here. Indie.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply. Hirey now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored jobs. The agency responsible for patrolling Spain's coastline is the Gourady a Seville or civil guard. Two years ago, the civil guard had a violent and deadly interaction with the drug boats. And it was caught on video and shared on social media. This is one winter evening a couple years ago where this small inflatable police boat was doing a patrol of a port in southern Spain in a place called Barbatte. And this area is a place that's known as Gangland. In the video, numerous drug boats are speeding around the port. They're imposing 60 feet long and powered by four engines and a small police boat approaches.

13:27But instead of fleeing this largest people then started circling around the smaller police boat and onlookers on shore began chanting. They chanted Ole, Ole as if cheering for a bullfighter almost. And there's a matalo, matalo basically killed him. The drug smugglers toyed with the police boat, approaching its speed and narrowly missing them several times. And then the drug boat smashed into the police boat and crushed the officers on board. In the end, two officers were killed. While he was in Spain, Suna met with the mother of one of the officers who died.

14:28Miguel on Hellgonsolos. This was Francisco María Gomez Pantoja. And she, of course, blames the cartels, but she also blames Spanish authorities. She says that the Spanish government has under-invested in the armed forces, police, the Navy, Guardia Civil. And so they're now too ill equipped to really take up the fight and make them vulnerable to attacks. And even though the people who are involved in her son's death were arrested, she feels like justice wasn't done because all her son's colleagues are still out there fighting this fight and risking their life for it.

15:33What is that story? The illustrate. They can tell us something about how violent the drug trade in southern Europe has become and the level of impunity that some of these drug traffickers operate with. And also the lengths they're willing to go to to protect their trade. And they clearly feel like they can attack law enforcement with impunity. Suna looked into how authorities are handling the influx of cocaine. And what he found was that Spanish authorities are severely outnumbered. According to the Spanish government, there are hundreds of drug boats operating around the street of Gibraltar alone. Fewer than 10 of the civil guards' boats are fast enough to catch them. Spanish authorities operate a little bit with their hands tied behind their backs. I mean, they are doing what they can, but they have limited resources to go back to the napkin drug map we did before. One drug boat can carry $250 million worth of cocaine in street value.

16:34Over the past decade, that's more or less what the Spanish government has allocated to fight drug trafficking in the southern part of Spain. Wow. One boat is... One decades worth of funding. The entire defense budget. Yeah. The Spanish authorities acknowledge they're under-equipped to intercept the Narco Boats, but they say they're making progress in fighting cocaine smugglers. In May, the civil guard confiscated more than 30 tons of cocaine off the Canary Islands. The largest seizure ever made anywhere in the world. I think Spanish authorities feel confident that they're catching more of these boats now than they used to. They've gotten better at detecting them and monitoring them and following them to shore and finding them on wherever beach they end up. That just doesn't change the fact that there are maybe 10, 15 times as many drug boats as there are police boats. The cartels are basically flooding the zone in the Strait of Gibraltar. And then, of course, you can pick off some of them.

17:35But as long as it's still so profitable for drug traffickers to keep doing this, they'll keep coming. As soon as it says the global cocaine trade, now equipped with drones, radar, thermal imaging and powerful boats, we'll find a way to get the money back. A way to get drugs into the hands of customers, no matter what. In the industry, drug experts and law enforcement officials, they use this term called the Water Bed Effect, which is basically what it's what it sounds like. If you try to suppress the drug supply in one area, then it just bulges up in another. I think if we look at the international drug trade as just any other global trade, then we start to understand why the cartels act the way they do. And it all comes down to profit, it all comes down to cost benefit analysis of whether these methods work on it, and as long as it's profitable for them to do it this way, they'll continue to do it, right?

18:35That's all for today, Friday, October 2. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Katherine Burr, Evelyn Fahardo Alvarez, Pia Gettcari, Max Green, Sophie Coddner, Matt Quang, Colin McKulty, Jessica Mendoza, Amani Moise, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez-De LaRosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Hesponosa, Heather Rogers, Katie Shepherd, Tiersinghi, Jiva Gavirma, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zameez and me, Ryan Knudsen. Also, this is Katherine Whalens last week with us. Katherine, we will miss you so much. Good luck on your next adventure. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singerpock and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singerpock,

19:40Griffin Tanner and Buddha Sessions. Fact checking this week by Nicole Pasolka. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on Sunday for another episode of My Monday Morning.