By Alessia Rossi

Organised crime is one of the most important threats to the functioning of the rule of law and democracy. This research will analyse why the ‘ndrangheta, with its structure, ranks among the most powerful mafias. Specifically, consideration will be paid to cocaine trafficking, which is their most profitable supply channel. One of their main strengths is having ‘ndrine located all over the world, especially in Latin America. There, brokers manage to contract with key organisations, such as the Urabeños. Moreover, to carry out operations mainly via containers, they have trusted corrupt accomplices in the ports. In the latter, the ‘ndrangheta may not only have influence but even be embedded, as in the case of the port of Gioia Tauro. Finally, it will be examined not only the transnational approach but also the need for a national response of increasing port security in limiting the infiltration of the Calabrian mafia.  

Fiesole FI, Italy:  Transnational Governance of the European University Institute, 2023. 43p.

By Robby Roks & Lieselot Bisschop & Richard Staring

As an important gateway to Europe, the Port of Rotterdam is known for its high-quality facilities and efficiency, but also attracts organised crime groups who use the transatlantic legal trade flows to traffic cocaine. Based on a qualitative study, consisting of 73 interviews with public and private actors, an analysis of 10 criminal investigations and field visits to public and private organisations in the port, this article examines how organised crime groups involved in cocaine trafficking take advantage of or adapt to the socio-spatial relations in the Port of Rotterdam. First, we pay attention to which physical spaces in the port of Rotterdam provide opportunities for cocaine trafficking. Second, we examine how the occupational and legal environment in which people, private companies and law enforcement agencies in the port work and interact provide opportunities for cocaine trafficking. Our findings demonstrate that increased security measures by both public and private actors directed at physical spaces result in a displacement to new spaces in and around the port of Rotterdam. Furthermore, the current socio-spatial relations in the port of Rotterdam also make the role of people on the inside – referring to a whole range of public and private employees – increasingly indispensable. 

Trends in Organized Crime (2021) 24:171–188 

By: Bryan Avelar, Juan José Martínez

Moskitia is dying. And it is organized crime that is killing it.

First came the drugs, as traffickers turned the region’s coasts and forests into a cocaine corridor. Then came the traffickers themselves, financing invaders that are clear-cutting thousands of hectares of forest and fencing off vast tracts of land with barbed wire and armed guards.

The region’s Indigenous Miskito people have been left trapped in desperate poverty, and are caught between the traffickers and an indifferent state. But some are now preparing to fight back.

Washington, DC, Columbia: InSight Crime, 2023. 64p..

By David Restrepo

On August 25th, 2020, a group of Colombian legislators challenged one of the last drug policy taboos left standing since the start of the current prohibition era: they proposed the legal regulation of both coca and cocaine.

The bill, Proyecto de Ley No. 236, unexpectedly passed the first round of committee-level congressional debate in 2021, but was archived by Colombia’s conservative-dominated legislature. Its opponents claimed that legalisation would unleash drug use and a crime wave, kicking the country back to its Pablo Escobarera international pariah status (Colombian Congress, 2021).

Despite its shelving, the bill’s relative success in Congress reflects a growing understanding that, no matter what governments do, drugs are here to stay. If a drug-free world is not an option, societies are better served by making peace with drugs via regulations that help us contain their harms and maximise their benefits.

Sensible drug policy today means leaving behind disproven measures like eradication, crop substitution, drug seizures and incarceration, which do little to prevent “drug addictions”, henceforth referred to as substance use disorders or SUDs. Like child abuse, punitive drug policy achieves the opposite of education. It unleashes highly profitable, powerful underground markets where drug use is promoted and glamourised, and violence and corruption become the business model (Durán-Martínez, 2018). Punitive drug policy channels public and private resources towards attacking rather than helping marginalised populations whose livelihoods depend on the least lucrative and most unsafe rungs of the illicit drug supply chain.

In Colombia, the Amazon basin, and South East Asia, conflicts and economies made possible by cocaine or opioid prohibition do not just victimise people: they are also speeding the demise of mega-biodiverse ecosystems, tugging the world towards the cliff of runaway climate change (McSweeney, 2015). In Mexico and Central America, homicidal drug wars are destabilising democracies and sending out waves of refugees, vulnerable to exploitation and xenophobia even as they attempt to rebuild their lives (Junger & Quested, 2020; Agren, 2020). In Central Asia, illicit opium helped fund the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan, after trillions of dollars spent on the US war on terror (Felbab-Brown, 2021). In the Global North, punitive drug laws reinforce ethnic and racial profiling, turn low-income neighbourhoods into ganglands, and promote the mass incarceration of people of colour (Davis, 2003).

Colombia’s bill does not endorse cocaine use. Neither does it overlook the risk of turning coca and cocaine into for-profit industries like alcohol and tobacco. It is unwise to hand private corporations unchecked control of the plants and molecules that can inebriate and damage our mental health, but also, in the right circumstances, connect us with others, spark our creativity, and even allow us to experience altered states of mind that facilitate personal and community growth (Griffiths et al., 2019). Rather, managing the power, risk and benefits of psychoactive substances demands careful regulatory design that harnesses democratic accountability and knowhow from as diverse an array of human experience as possible.

Colombia’s bill captures the evidence-based perspective that regulations can help contain the self-serving excesses of legal markets. They can delay the age of drug initiation, promote moderation and encourage pro-social norms. They do this whilst enabling the emergence of legal industries that pay taxes, provide legal employment and generate medical and social benefits. If done via controls that prevent publicity and reduce profit motives, regulation can minimise drug-related harms even if drug use were to rise, which is not a foregone conclusion. Overall, welldesigned regulatory regimes for psychoactive substances offer the possibility of a better cost-benefit balance for society than prohibition appears to do.

Colombia’s proposal laid the groundwork for a regulatory architecture that has social justice at its core. It recognised the authority of Indigenous and local government institutions to shape the low-potency, whole coca leaf market, thereby providing an alternative to corporate takeover. This would honour the collective property rights to coca that generations of Indigenous people have fought for, whilst benefitting small coca farmers and integrating beneficial coca leaf uses into society.

Following these equity and inclusion principles could transform coca and cocaine markets from a source of devastation to a potential driver of regenerative, intercultural development, not to mention a form of long-overdue reparations for ethnic and small farmer communities.

The proponents of Colombia’s coca and cocaine regulation bill knew it would likely fail on its first try, but challenging this longstanding taboo could nudge people to conceive another world (Marulanda, 2020). By unlocking the imagination, new strategies might emerge, and this might ultimately change the political balance of power that blocks legal regulation.

This essay seeks to build on that approach. It comments on the bill’s comprehensive proposals: the result of a group of legislators, NGOs, and local communities coming together to condense decades of lessons from Colombia’s drug war trenches. It also imagines what the legal regime would look like from farming to consumption, assessing the outcomes in terms of the potential benefits and costs. The essay closes by exploring insights for overcoming the forces that doomed the bill: a stagnant political economy that sustains the war on coca and cocaine as one of the deadliest and most environmentally destructive of all the drug wars.

London: International Drug Policy Consortium, 2022. 34p.

By Gabriel Feltran, Isabela Vianna Pinho and Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo

Cocaine trafficking through West Africa, following the well-established route from Latin America to the European consumer market, appears to be in a phase of sharp growth. Since 2016, the majority of consignments transiting West Africa begin their journey in Brazil. The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) – the largest criminal organization in Brazil – is pivotal to understanding Brazil’s newfound importance for cocaine in West Africa.

Cocaine trafficking between Brazil and West Africa stretches back at least to the 1980s, but as cultivation in Latin America continues to increase and consumption in Europe has grown, more and more cocaine is being moved along this path. In 2018, only one West African country – Senegal – was in the top 10 destinations for cocaine seized in Brazilian ports; by 2019, after a bumper year of seizures in Brazil, Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone had also pushed their way onto the list. Cultivation in Latin America reached record levels in 2021, and in the following year an unprece-dented 24 tonnes were seized across West Africa.

In this report, we focus on the flow of cocaine between Brazil and West Africa, which largely supplies the lucrative European consumer market, and in particular on the role of the PCC, which straddles various illicit supply chains.

The research for this report has drawn on various data collection techniques but rests primarily on field observations of the retail trade and transit of illegal goods in South America, West Africa and Europe between 2015 and 2022. These observations, described in detail in the authors’ field notebooks, were supplemented by formal and informal interviews with those involved in the cocaine trade, from the South American borders to the retail trade spaces of Europe, allowing us to trace the journey of cocaine through the different nodes of the value chain.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2023 28p.

By Venezuela Investigative Unit

In 2013, Nicolás Maduro became president of Venezuela following the death of his charismatic predecessor Hugo Chávez. Since then, the country’s cocaine trade has undergone revolutionary changes. Today, Venezuela is at risk of becoming the world’s fourth cocaine-producing country. And the Maduro regime has positioned itself as the gatekeeper to the country’s drug trade, controlling access to cocaine’s riches not only for drug traffickers but also for corrupt politicians and the military-embedded trafficking network known as the “Cartel of the Suns.” The product of more than three years of investigations, hundreds of interviews and field work in all of Venezuela’s key drug trafficking territories, this InSight Crime investigation looks at one of the world’s most important cocaine trafficking hubs – and the authoritarian regime that keeps the drugs flowing.

Washington, DC: Insight Crime, 2022. 53p.

By Carolina Sampó · Valeska Troncoso

  This article presents the results of an exploratory study aimed to analyze the contexts in which the use of Non-Traditional ports of cocaine departure and counterintuitive routes is prioritized, based on the experience of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Moreover, we show that criminal organizations prioritize the Ports of Buenos Aires, San Antonio and Montevideo, and the counter-intuitive routes that lead to them, because they are spaces that generate incentives linked to the porosity of borders, the lack of control at the ports, and the possibility of exploiting the country’s lack of reputation for drug exportation to re-export cocaine undetected. This study constitutes a precedent for future research on the role of South American Southern Cone ports in cocaine trafficking. We can identify at least four emerging lines of research: 1. Cocaine trafficking from landlocked countries; 2. The role of the waterway Paraná-Paraguay; 3. The link between Non-Traditional ports of cocaine departure and new markets; and 4. Other Non-Traditional Ports of cocaine departure, which are not containerized.

Trends in Organized Crime, 2022. 

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

This report examines the emergence of new hubs for cocaine trafficking, noting that countries in Southeastern Europe and Africa – particularly those in West and Central Africa – are increasingly being used as key transit zones for the drug. Ports on the North Sea like Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, meanwhile, have eclipsed traditional entry points in Spain and Portugal for cocaine arriving in Western Europe. Traffickers are also diversifying their routes in Central America by sending more and more cocaine to Europe, in addition to North America.

The modalities of cocaine traffickers are also examined in this report, with findings showing that the criminal landscape is fragmenting into a myriad of trafficking networks. The demobilization of fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) - who had previously controlled many of Colombia’s coca-growing regions – created an opening for others to step in, such as new, local actors; ex-FARC guerillas; or even foreign groups from Mexico and Europe. Additionally, the report reveals that so-called “service providers”, i.e., specialized groups that lend their services at all stages of the supply chain for a fee, have proliferated.

Vienna: UNODC, 2023. 184p.

By Mark Shaw

Drug seizures are widely referred to in the media and academic reporting on drug trafficking and organised crime. Everyone knows their limitations. But what if seizures represent the exact opposite of what we generally think them to be? That is, not a reflection of state efficiency, but rather cracks in systems of political protection. If that is the case, they may appear more regularly at some times rather than others. A detailed study of West African cocaine seizures in the context of periods of political instability over a twenty-year period suggest this association is worth exploring.

ENACT (Africa), 2021. 23p.

By UNODC and EUROPOL

The cocaine market presents a clear threat at global level. Well-defined locations of production in South America and large consumer markets in the Americas and Europe lead to trafficking routes from a circumscribed origin to specific, even if far-flung, destinations. While some parts of the world play a crucial role as transit regions, the routes, modalities and networks employed by criminal actors continue to evolve, diversify and become more efficient. The increasingly globalized, interconnected, digitalized and technologically sophisticated nature of society, as well as a growing affluent demographic in some regions where cocaine use has traditionally been low, can potentially catalyse and accelerate the dynamism and expansion of the market. 

Vienna: UNODC and EUROPOL, 2021. 28p.

By Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde

While corruption and organized crime are thriving amid Venezuela’s political and economic crisis, previously unpublished U.S. government drug trade monitoring data suggests that Venezuela is not a primary transit country for U.S.-bound cocaine. In “Beyond the Narcostate Narrative,” the authors assess the implications of official U.S. drug control data for prospects at advancing a peaceful, negotiated return to democracy in Venezuela.  When U.S. policymakers talk about Venezuela’s crisis, the flow of cocaine through the country is a frequent talking point. And there is no question that organized crime and corruption have flourished in the midst of Venezuela’s crisis. Yet the true extent of drug trafficking is often magnified by actors who suggest that a negotiated, democratic solution in Venezuela is impossible. The authors have heard some version of “you can’t negotiate with a narcostate” countless times in recent years.

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  This paper uses the U.S. government’s own best estimates of transnational illegal cocaine shipments to gauge the scale and relative importance of Venezuela’s role as a transit country. In particular, we draw on recent data from the U.S. interagency Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB), a multi-source collection of global illegal drug trafficking events that is gathered from intelligence data such as detection and surveillance, as well as interdiction and law enforcement data. According to the Department of Defense, “The CCDB event-based estimates are the best available authoritative source for estimating known illicit drug flow through the Transit Zone. All the event data contained in the CCDB is deemed to be high confidence (accurate, complete and unbiased in presentation and substance as possible).” We have supplemented CCDB estimates with public statements and presentations made by officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Defense, and Department of State regarding drug trafficking trends in the Americas. 

Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, 2020. 20p.