The cocaine trade is booming – and with it violence, trafficking and smuggling

Good morning.

The devastating human and environmental cost of cocaine production is well known and well documented. For decades, the industry has been run by gangs that wreak havoc and violence on local communities in cocaine producing countries and anywhere it is dealt. The problem is only getting worse, as demand for the drug in Europe has exploded in recent years, making international drug trafficking more efficient than ever – gangs are smuggling in cocaine in submarines, luxury yachts and private jets.

And this surge has come with a rise in violence. In Antwerp, there were 81 drug-related shootings and explosions in 2022 alone. Reports of gun battles, car bombings, torture chambers, kidnappings and child soldiers have become increasingly common in some of Europe’s port cities and towns as the trade has become more prominent.

In South and Central America the story is even more brutal: Ecuador, a country that was once considered a “island of peace” in an otherwise volatile region, is in the midst of astonishing brutality having become a “cocaine superhighway” to Europe.

It’s a ruthlessly lucrative business. The total street-level value of the cocaine market in Europe is estimated at between €7.6bn and €10.5bn (£6.4bn-£8.9bn), according to Europol – and cartels are seeking to expand that.

To get a better understanding of this booming market, I spoke to Annie Kelly, the editor of the Guardian’s Rights and Freedom series, who commissioned a series of stories called Bloodlines to investigate the human rights abuses throughout the cocaine supply chain. That’s right after the headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: ‘Everyone thinks it’s a bit of a laugh – but it’s a drug dripping in human misery’

The amount of cocaine seized by authorities has been steadily rising for six years. In 2021, 303 tonnes of cocaine were seized by EU member states. In 2022 that number rose to 323 tonnes. Spain reported its largest single seizure of cocaine last year, 9.5 tonnes worth of the drug concealed in a banana shipment. Nearly 14 times as much cocaine was confiscated in 2022 as it was in 2014 in Belgium, whose authorities described cocaine trafficking to the Guardian’s Jon Henley as a “tsunami” that “just keeps coming.” Most of the cocaine entering Europe comes from Colombia, Bolivia or Peru, with traffickers taking a number of routes, through ports in Ecuador or through Venezuela, where it then moves through the Caribbean or west Africa into Europe.

A decade of change

The transformation of the trade can be traced back to the demobilisation in 2016 of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). Farc once controlled vast swaths of the country in which it monopolised the drug market, but since the peace deal, that power vacuum has been filled by smaller groups.

“The Farc signing the peace deal has fundamentally shaken up and fragmented the narco trafficking industry in South America and presented a really big opportunity for smaller cocaine traffickers to be able to exploit easy routes to Europe through countries like Ecuador,” Annie says.

Unlike the United States, where there was a well-resourced “war on drugs”, Europe has comparatively “porous” borders, Annie adds. “It’s relatively low risk because Europe hasn’t really got its head around what’s happening and how to respond.” There is also a chicken and egg situation going on: it is unclear whether the surge in cocaine production since 2016 was in response to an existing rise in demand, which then encouraged international drug cartels to look for new routes, or whether a surplus of the crop meant larger volumes of cocaine getting into Europe, increasing availability, pushing down price and creating more demand.

Violence in the supply chain

Almost every facet of the cocaine supply chain is soaked in brutality. In Bolivia, there have been more reports of kidnappings and extortion, especially on its borders. In Peru, where cocaine production has steadily increased in recent years, coca farmers are encroaching on Indigenous territory. Indigenous communities have reportedly been threatened and harassed by drug trafficking gangs who want to expand coca farms – more than a dozen Indigenous people and Amazon activists were killed between 2020 and 2022 by drug cartels.

In Argentina, children are now being targeted by gangs both as victims of violent crimes and as recruits. Last year, police in Ecuador recorded 8,000 violent deaths – that is eight times higher than the murder rate just five years earlier, making it the most violent country in central and South America. Tom Phillips reports here on how Ecuador became a war zone, with gangs from other countries fighting proxy wars through Ecuadorian gangs and creating even more chaos. The violence became global news when a major TV station was taken over by masked gunmen during a live broadcast as part of a seemingly coordinated series of attacks that were taking place. One mayor has been moving between living in safe houses for a year after an assassination attempt.

Migrant children

A lot of people are needed to move this much cocaine, and it is often the most vulnerable people who get caught up with cartels. Mark Townsend’s investigation found that hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children have been lured and then forced to work as soldiers for drug cartels, with authorities warning of “industrial-scale exploitation” of African children by cocaine networks operating in western Europe.

The investigation lays bare the scale of Europe’s unaccompanied child migrant issue. “These children, in many ways, are a sign of Europe’s abject failure to protect the most vulnerable victims of the global migration crisis. Nobody is looking out for these kids who are pushed over the border to escape desperate situations,” Annie says. The drug cartels identified an endless supply of easily recruitable, controllable and vulnerable people that can staff their rapidly expanding and lucrative business. These children then face tremendous abuse and brutalisation and “it doesn’t seem like any of the authorities have even the loosest grip on the situation,” Annie adds.

Is there any hope for change?

Despite the bloody journey that cocaine takes, it has maintained an image as a relatively harmless, party drug. “Everyone just thinks it’s a bit of a laugh. And actually it’s a drug that is dripping in human misery, exploitation, pain,” Annie says.

One person told Annie that cocaine is a “drug that leaps over socioeconomic barriers like no other drug I’ve encountered” –in Ireland, where cocaine use has skyrocketed, multiple generations of the same families are all reportedly doing the drug. One mum whose son became heavily addicted, told Annie that her “own family are doing cocaine all the time, at family birthday parties, at christenings, they have no idea the damage and pain that it can cause. Nobody is listening. It feels completely out of control.”

But this fun image is sharply contrasted by what the reporting in Bloodlines found, where “cocaine is turning once peaceful or prosperous cities into places that are in the grip of terrible gang violence, with local communities inevitably becoming collateral damage,” Annie says. As the purity of the drug increases and price drops, addiction to cocaine has also been on an upward trajectory.

Authorities across Europe have been putting more resources into trying to tackle the amount that’s coming in, to make it economically nonviable for gangs to smuggle so much. But it is unlikely that these measures will go far enough, particularly as long as cartels continue to take vulnerable children and transform them into the next generation of drug traffickers. In order to address this, European governments have to “understand Europe’s part in creating the problem that drove these children into the hands of the cartels in the first place and prioritise giving them the protection and support that they need,” Annie says.

What else we’ve been reading

• Emine Saner continues her series of interviews with outstanding athletes with a raw and honest profile of Ukrainian-born US Paralympian Oksana Masters. Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters

• It is no secret that Britain’s criminal justice system is on its knees but the scale of the crisis often goes unseen. Lizzie Dearden’s report delves into the crown court, where inside grand Victorian buildings people wait two years to be tried, defendants go missing and the buildings themselves crumble due to ill-maintenance. Nimo

• In case you missed it: the Guardian TV team have totted up this year’s best podcasts so far, from the latest series of Serial to the Guardian’s AI-themed pod Black Box and the return of the Green Wing cast. Hannah

• Nyima Jobe has written a brilliant piece on the many iterations of the Wag and how she has changed over time. Nimo

• For his latest Fit for ever column, Phil Daoust looks at how to tackle loneliness, which can hamper our quality of life – and shave years off it, too. Hannah

Sport

Football | It has been a happy feature of the Gareth Southgate years that his team always win their opening game at tournaments, but it was a nervy second half, a stark contrast to the enjoyment of the first, which had been epitomised by Jude Bellingham, whose early bullet header would prove decisive in the 1-0 win against Serbia.

Cricket | England are through to the Super Eights of the men’s T20 World Cup after a 41-run win against Namibia.

Tennis | Andy Murray faces an uncertain wait to see if he will make the cut for the Olympic doubles draw alongside Dan Evans as he deliberates over attending his fifth and final Olympic Games in Paris. Emma Raducanu, meanwhile, has opted out of competing at the Olympics despite also being offered one of the Olympic quota places. Katie Boulter will be the sole women’s singles selection.

The front pages

While Jude Bellingham’s winning goal appears across almost all the front pages, the headlines continue to be dominated by general election campaigning. The Guardian leads with “New calls on Starmer to discard Tories’ two-child benefits limit”. The Mirror looks at a Labour promise for 650,000 new roles for skilled workers with “Just the job”. The FT says “Reeves pledges to tear down EU trade barriers in reset for relations”.

The i says “Labour accused of watering down housing reform pledges”, while the Telegraph leads with a warning from a Conservative minister under the headline “Labour net zero plan’s £4.5bn tax black hole”. The Mail says “Has Labour left the cat out of the bag on tax?” and the Times reports that the prime minister is being urged to launch personal attack on Keir Starmer, under the headline “Go for the jugular, Sunak urged”.

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The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

It’s easier than ever before to just replace things when they break but the environmental cost of such wastefulness has become impossible to ignore. The answer to this problem is blindingly obvious to many people: we need to repair our broken goods. There is a flourishing nationwide revival to fix and upcycle old products – a volunteer-run repair cafe that operates from a community centre in Bethnal Green is one of 580 other locations in the UK that form the backbone of a flourishing nationwide repair subculture. Locals come with their toasters, TVs, old radios, coffee machines and battery-operated kids’ toys balanced on their laps.

If the 13m items that are now thrown away each year were reused, we could save 930 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to waste management company Suez. But as the number of cobblers, tailors and electrical repair shops have dwindled on our high streets since the 1990s, there is a significant skills shortage, which the repair sector is trying to address with workshops and social enterprises. “There’s a real camaraderie that comes from fixing things together and feeling useful,” fixer and former electronics engineer “Spanner” Spencer says of his repair cafe in Huddersfield. “We often go to the pub afterwards as our repair gang, too, though we have to hold back from fixing anything that’s broken when we get there!”

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