Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe

Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe
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In this file photo taken on January 7, 2022, Belgian customs officers search for drugs in a container at the port in Antwerp. (Photo by François Walschaerts / AFP)
Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe
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A Belgian officer checks a box of bananas during a customs control for drugs in the hangar of a fruit company at the port in Antwerp. (Valeria Mongelli / AFP)
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Updated 16 January 2023
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Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe

Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe

PARIS: “Seventy euros for one, 120 for two,” said the cocaine dealer as the young woman opened her door on Paris’ chic Left Bank.
“I’m like all the delivery riders speeding around Paris dropping off sushi and groceries,” he smiled. “I get orders and I deliver them.”
Getting cocaine in many of Europe’s big cities is now as easy as ordering a pizza.
Twenty or so minutes after you place your order by WhatsApp or Signal, a dealer can be at your door.
“Consumers prefer to go on a platform and have their drugs delivered by a guy who looks like a Deliveroo rider,” said police commissioner Virginie Lahaye, the head of the Paris drugs squad. “It is much easier than having to go to some grim place in the suburbs.”
Some 3.5 million Europeans took cocaine in 2021, according to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) — four times more than 20 years ago.
The continent has been hit by a “tsunami” of cocaine, said the head of the Belgian federal police, Eric Snoeck, with 240 tons seized in 2021, according to Europol, nearly five times more than a decade ago.

Lucrative market
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.
“Kidnappings, torture and hits: there is so much money at stake that the criminal organizations have brought the cartels’ methods to our shores,” said Stephanie Cherbonnier of the French anti-drug office.
Northern Europe’s big ports like Antwerp and Rotterdam have been so riven by drug violence that democracy itself has been threatened, with gangs even daring to plot to kidnap Belgium’s justice minister.
With gunbattles in the streets of Antwerp, the country could soon “be regarded as a narco state” warned Brussels’ chief prosecutor Johan Delmulle.
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.
In Catatumbo in northeast Colombia, Jose del Carmen Abril relies on coca to feed his eight children.
“Coca... has replaced the government which was never very present here,” said the 53-year-old. “It has helped us build schools, health centers, roads and houses.”

In a country where many earn no more than $7 (6.5 euros) a day, a coca grower can earn five times that.
But Del Carmen Abril chafes at being called a “narco,” saying farmers like him “don’t even make the minimum wage.”
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 percent in 2021 to an all-time high of 1,400 tons, according to the United Nations.
“Chemists” mix the chopped leaves with petrol, lime, cement and ammonium sulphate to make a white paste that is then turned into powder in the drug laboratories.
In Catatumbo the paste sells for $370 a kilo. Once mixed with a cocktail of acids and solvents it becomes “coke,” worth more than $1,000 a kilo.

Mexican cartels
Colombia supplies two-thirds of the world’s cocaine. But the fall of the Cali and Medellin cartels in the 1990s, and the peace deal signed in 2016 with the Marxist FARC guerrillas, turned the trade upside down.
Once mere middlemen, the Mexican cartels have since taken almost total control of the market, from financing production to supervising cocaine smuggling.
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.
Europol estimates that Europe’s cocaine market is now worth between 7.6 and 10.5 billion euros at street level.
“The US market is saturated and coke sells in Europe at prices 50 to 100 percent higher,” said the head of French customs’ intelligence unit, Florian Colas. “Another advantage for the traffickers is the less dissuasive prison sentences and the multiple logistic options.”

Most of the cocaine that crosses the Atlantic is carried in containers, hidden in perfectly legal shipments of bananas, sugar or tinned food.
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.
But the arrest of several major smugglers and above all the explosion in maritime traffic, persuaded them to redirect smuggling through northern Europe’s giant container ports like Antwerp, Hamburg, Le Havre and Rotterdam.
“Some cargos go through Caribbean ports” on their way from South America, while others “pass via the Balkans or West Africa before entering Europe,” said Corinne Cleostrate, deputy head of French customs.

Enormous profits
The traffickers follow a well-trodden “business plan,” with Mexican cartels selling to European multinational crime syndicates, sometimes via fixers who divide up the cargos to spread the costs and risks.
Some of the “crime groups (who are part of these deals) can be competitors,” said Cherbonnier.
“But they also create alliances to pool their strengths and their know-hows to get the drugs in.”
The Moroccan “Mocro maffia” in Belgium and the Netherlands, Albanian, Serb or Kosovan mafia and the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta divide up the market according to their territories and specialities.
But they pilot drugs through the ports using local criminals, with a strict division of roles.
A kilo of cocaine bought for $1,000 in South America can be sold for 35,000 euros ($37,600) in Europe. Once out of the port and cut with other substances, it will then be sold on to customers for 70 euros a gram, its value having gone up close to 100-fold by the time it hits the street.
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.
Several French dockers have been jailed for working with drug gangs in Le Havre, with police saying some have been forced into helping the traffickers.
One described to his lawyer how he was sucked in. “Before I used to make 200 or 300 euros a month from selling (stolen) perfume or cartons of cigarettes. One day some guys asked me to take some bags out (of the port) for 1,000 euros a bag,” he said.
The gangs are willing to pay up to 100,000 euros to get a container out of Le Havre, where “we are only able to check one percent of the containers because we haven’t the resources to do any more,” a customs officer admitted.
Some dock workers are paid to authorize 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 Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest port, police and customers officers surprised a group of the traffickers’ local foot soldiers holed up in a “container hotel” with food and bedding waiting for the arrival of a shipment of cocaine.




In this file photograph taken on November 7, 2022, a French customs officer tests a package suspected to be cocaine at Orly Airport, south of Paris. (AFP)

Royals targeted
As well as buying complicity and silence, the huge sums to be made have fueled extreme violence in northern Europe’s port cities.
Antwerp — the main gateway of illegal drugs into Europe — has recorded more than 200 drug-linked violent incidents in the last five years, with an 11-year-old girl killed last week after bullets were fired into a house in the Merksem residential district.
In May the home of a family known to be involved in drugs in nearby Deurne was bombed while their neighbors were celebrating a marriage in their garden.
In the Netherlands, the gangs have gone even further.
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.
A crime specialist, one of his sources was the main witness against drug baron Ridouan Taghi, the suspected head of the “Mocro maffia” arrested in Dubai in 2019.
“We have gone to another level of violence entirely,” said Belgian police chief Snoeck. “They have no qualms about torturing someone for information or simply executing someone who has not kept to a contract... it sends shivers down your spine.”
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.
The cocaine mafia will do anything to protect their business. And no one is safe. Belgian police uncovered a plot to kidnap the country’s justice minister in September, and in the Netherlands Crown Princess Amalia and Prime Minister Mark Rutte were said to have been targeted late last year.

Only a tenth seized

But the authorities have been hitting back hard with better port security, intelligence cooperation and “targeting” of the top dogs that have led to record seizures, with 109.9 tons of cocaine intercepted in Antwerp last year.
“It shows our methods are now more efficient but also that the flow of drugs is increasing,” admitted French customs chief Cleostrate.
As a rule of thumb, experts suspect only a tenth of the cocaine shipped to Europe is ever seized.
But Ger Scheringa, who heads Dutch customs investigations in Rotterdam, said more and more “automization of cargo terminals is making it difficult” for traffickers.
They are already switching shipments to smaller, less guarded ports like Montoir-de-Bretagne in northwestern France, however, where more than 600 kilos of “coke” was seized in 2022.
Europe police forces have also had major successes, claiming to have decapitated the “super cartel” responsible for smuggling a third of the continent’s cocaine, with 49 suspects held in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and most of all, Dubai, one of the drug lords’ favored haunts.
But on the front line in the Caribbean, French customs officers in Martinque monitoring vessels heading north from South America are far from complacent.
“The traffickers know our methods... we do our best but you have recognize that we cannot get them all,” admitted the island’s customs chief Jean-Charles Metivier. “We are often one step behind.”
Meanwhile in Paris, business and competition are brisk. “Flash sale!” declares a message sent out by a dealer on WhatsApp. “Fifty euros a gram.”


Putin won’t make peace in Ukraine before 2024 US election -US official

Putin won’t make peace in Ukraine before 2024 US election -US official
Updated 13 sec ago
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Putin won’t make peace in Ukraine before 2024 US election -US official

Putin won’t make peace in Ukraine before 2024 US election -US official
BRUSSELS: Russian President Vladimir Putin will not make peace in Ukraine before he knows the results of the November 2024 US election, a senior US State Department official said on Tuesday, amid concerns that a potential victory for former President Donald Trump could upend Western support for Kyiv.
Trump, who is seeking reelection in 2024 and is the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been sharply critical of US support for Kyiv.
A senior official briefing reporters after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels said the alliance reiterated its support for Ukraine knowing that a peace agreement in the next year is unlikely.
“My expectation is that Putin won’t make a peace or a meaningful peace before he sees the result of our election,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the outcomes of the meeting.
Asked whether they were expressing a personal opinion or the view of the US government, the official said it was a “widely shared premise.”
“That was the context in which the allies all expressed strong support for Ukraine” in the NATO meeting on Tuesday, the official added, without mentioning Trump by name or explicitly saying how the election result would affect support for Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has given massive military aid and other support to Kyiv since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion, but additional funding for Ukraine is being held up by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this month invited Trump, who has said he could end the war in 24 hours if reelected, to Ukraine to see the scale of the conflict for himself.

Hundreds remember Tanzanian student killed in Israel-Hamas conflict

Hundreds remember Tanzanian student killed in Israel-Hamas conflict
Updated 28 November 2023
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Hundreds remember Tanzanian student killed in Israel-Hamas conflict

Hundreds remember Tanzanian student killed in Israel-Hamas conflict
  • Clemence Felix Mtenga, 22, was reported missing after Hamas gunmen stormed across the border from Gaza into Israel on October 7
  • Family members — wearing black shirts bearing Mtenga’s picture — broke down as they filed past the closed coffin

DAR ES SALAAM: Hundreds of Tanzanians bid a tearful farewell on Tuesday to a young agriculture student who was killed in the Hamas-Israel conflict several thousand kilometers away.
Clemence Felix Mtenga, 22, was reported missing after Hamas gunmen stormed across the border from Gaza into Israel on October 7, killing a reported 1,200 people and taking scores more hostage, according to Israeli officials.
Family members — wearing black shirts bearing Mtenga’s picture — broke down as they filed past the closed coffin at a ceremony in his home village of Kirwa in the Mount Kilimanjaro region.
Mtenga and another Tanzanian student, Joshua Mollel, 21, went to Israel in September for an agricultural internship program but both went missing after the October 7 attack.
Tanzania’s foreign ministry confirmed his death in a statement last week, without elaborating on how he was killed, and said Mollel was still missing.
Friends who studied with Mtenga before he moved to Israel described him as being “lovely and friendly.”
“It was sad and difficult to accept news of his death because we used to communicate with him almost every evening,” said Anthony Kanyanza.
“He was a leader of one of the class groups and we all enjoyed his company.”
A member of the local choir, Mtenga had been due to graduate from his university in Tanzania last week.
“Clemence died innocent. Let’s keep Israel and Palestine in our prayers every day to end this kind of innocent deaths,” said priest Alfred Minja who led the burial service attended by government officials.
The head of Israel’s international development agency Eynat Shlein had said on X, formerly Twitter, that Mtenga “was murdered by Hamas terrorists on Oct 7.”
The two students were among about 260 Tanzanian youths who went to Israel for an internship in modern farming under a partnership program between the two countries.
Many of the places worst affected by the Hamas attacks were Israeli agricultural communes lining the region bordering the Gaza Strip.
Mtenga’s sister Christina Mtenga told AFP by phone that they had paid their “final respects.”


Authorities face calls to declare a hate crime in Vermont shooting of 3 men of Palestinian descent

Authorities face calls to declare a hate crime in Vermont shooting of 3 men of Palestinian descent
Updated 28 November 2023
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Authorities face calls to declare a hate crime in Vermont shooting of 3 men of Palestinian descent

Authorities face calls to declare a hate crime in Vermont shooting of 3 men of Palestinian descent
  • Jason J. Eaton, 48, was arrested and held without bail on three counts of attempted murder
  • The US Department of Justice, along with Vermont authorities, are still investigating whether Saturday’s gunfire on a Burlington street was a hate crime

BURLINGTON, USA: Vigils for three college students of Palestinian descent who were shot in Vermont over the weekend prompted calls for authorities to recognize the violence as a hate crime, and for unity among the Jewish and Arab communities.
Jason J. Eaton, 48, was arrested and held without bail on three counts of attempted murder. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf on Monday.
The US Department of Justice, along with Vermont authorities, are still investigating whether Saturday’s gunfire on a Burlington street was a hate crime amid an increase in threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities across the US since the Israel-Hamas war began, Attorney General Merrick Garland said. “There is understandable fear in communities across the country,” he said.
One vigil was held Monday night at Brown University in Rhode Island, where one of the victims, Hisham Awartani, is a student. Participants shouted at school president Christina Paxson as she addressed the crowd, demanding that Brown divest from investments that support Israel, according to media reports.
Robert Leikend, New England regional director for the American Jewish Committee, called for unity and finding common ground between the Jewish and Arab communities, saying in a statement Monday night that “hate should not beget more hate.”
He said a vigil after Eaton’s arrest “featured anti-Israel and antisemitic statements from some participants.” He didn’t name the location.
“The anger is understandable. The finger-pointing is not,” he said.
The vigil at Brown was closed to media. NBC News reported that Awartani said in a statement read by a professor that as much as he appreciates the love and support of the community, “I am but one casualty in a much wider conflict.”
The statement read, “Had I been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services which saved my life here would have likely been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who would have shot me would go home and never be convicted.”
Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, all age 20, were spending their Thanksgiving break in Burlington, and were out for a walk while visiting one of the victims’ relatives when they were confronted by a white man with a handgun, police said. The victims were speaking in a mix of English and Arabic and two of them were also wearing the black-and-white Palestinian keffiyeh scarves when they were shot, Police Chief Jon Murad said.
Abdalhamid told police he ran away, jumped a fence, and hid behind a house. He eventually knocked on another door, begging the woman who answered to call 911. At that point, he sat down, felt pain, and saw blood, according to an affidavit.
Two of the students were struck in their torsos, while one was hit in the lower body, Murad said. All three were being treated at the University of Vermont Medical Center, and one faces a long recovery because of a spinal injury, a family member said.
One of the students has been released from the hospital, according to media reports.
“I’ve been with them almost constantly since Saturday evening. I’ve been listening to them talk to one another and try to process the events, and I’m blown away by their resilience, by their good humor in the face of these difficult times,” said Rich Price, Awartani’s uncle.
The three have been friends since first grade at Ramallah Friends School, a private school in the West Bank, and all are “remarkable, distinguished students,” said Rania Ma’ayeh, head of the school.
Awartani is studying mathematics and archaeology at Brown; Abdalhamid is a pre-med student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania; and Ali Ahmad is studying mathematics and IT at Trinity College in Connecticut, Ma’ayeh said. Awartani and Abdalhamid are US citizens while Ali Ahmad is studying on a student visa, Ma’ayeh said.
Abdalhamid’s uncle Radi Tamimi, said at a news conference Monday his nephew grew up in the West Bank and “we always thought that that could be more of a risk in terms of his safety and sending him here would be a right decision.
“We feel somehow betrayed in that decision here and we’re just trying to come to terms with everything,” he said.
Eaton moved to Burlington over the summer from Syracuse, New York, and legally purchased the gun used in the shooting, Murad told reporters. According to a police affidavit, federal agents found the gun in Eaton’s apartment on Sunday. Eaton came to the door holding his hands, palms up, and told the officers he’d been waiting for them.
Eaton’s mother, Mary Reed, told the Daily Beast that Eaton, who had held various jobs as a farmer, ski instructor and researcher, had struggled with mental health issues, including depression. But she said he was in “such a good mood” when she saw him on Thanksgiving.
Syracuse police said Eaton’s name appeared in 37 police reports from 2007 until 2021, but never as a suspect. The cases ranged from domestic violence to larceny, and Eaton was listed as either a complainant or victim in 21 reports, according to Lt. Matthew Malinowski, the department’s public information officer.
Sarah George, state’s attorney, said that law enforcement officials do not yet have evidence to support a hate crime charge, which under Vermont law must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. But, she said, “I do want to be clear that there is no question that this was a hateful act.”
Demonstrations have been widespread and tensions in the US have escalated as the death toll rises in the Israel-Hamas war. A fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was set to continue for two more days past Monday as 11 more hostages were handed over to the Red Cross in Gaza under what was originally a four-day truce deal.


Ukraine says wife of spymaster Budanov was poisoned

Ukraine says wife of spymaster Budanov was poisoned
Updated 28 November 2023
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Ukraine says wife of spymaster Budanov was poisoned

Ukraine says wife of spymaster Budanov was poisoned
  • “Yes, I can confirm the information, unfortunately, it is true,” GUR spokesperson Andriy Yusov told Reuters
  • The 37-year-old has himself been the target of several attempts on his life, including a botched car bombing

KYIV: The wife of Ukraine’s military spy chief has been poisoned with heavy metals and is undergoing treatment in a hospital, a spokesperson for the agency said on Tuesday.
Marianna Budanova is the wife of Kyrylo Budanov, who heads Ukrainian military intelligence agency GUR, which has been prominently involved in clandestine operations against Russian forces since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“Yes, I can confirm the information, unfortunately, it is true,” GUR spokesperson Andriy Yusov told Reuters, without clarifying when the poisoning took place.
The BBC’s Ukrainian service cited Yusov as saying that several GUR officials had also experienced milder symptoms of poisoning.
Budanov’s public profile has risen in Ukraine and the West, where he is portrayed as a behind-the-scenes mastermind of operations to strike back at Russia. In Russian media he is a hate figure.
The 37-year-old has himself been the target of several attempts on his life, including a botched car bombing.
If confirmed as deliberate, the purported poisoning of his wife would represent the most serious targeting of a high-profile Ukrainian leadership figure’s family member during the 21-month-long war.
The poisoning was first reported by Ukrainian media outlets.
One publication, Babel, cited an unidentified source who said Budanova had been in hospital, and was finishing a course of treatment for the effects of the poisoning.
Another outlet, Ukrainska Pravda, cited an unidentified source who said the poison was likely administered through food.
Moscow has previously blamed Ukrainian secret services for the murders of a pro-war Russian blogger and a pro-war journalist on Russian soil. Ukraine denies involvement in those deaths.
Separately, Russian media has reported that a court in Moscow had arrested Budanov in absentia in April on terrorism charges.


Ukraine says Russian shells hit private homes, four killed

Ukraine says Russian shells hit private homes, four killed
Updated 28 November 2023
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Ukraine says Russian shells hit private homes, four killed

Ukraine says Russian shells hit private homes, four killed
  • “A 63-year-old man was killed. Two women, aged 65 and 63, were injured,” Dnipropetrovsk region governor Serhiy Lysak said

KYIV: Russian shells struck a residential building and private houses on Tuesday, killing four and injuring at least five people, local Ukrainian officials said.
A five-story building was hit in the morning in the southern town of Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk region governor Serhiy Lysak said.
“A 63-year-old man was killed. Two women, aged 65 and 63, were injured. There may be people under the rubble,” he said on Telegram messenger.
In a separate attack in the afternoon, Russian shelling destroyed at least five private houses in a northern settlement just on the border with Russia, Sumy regional prosecutors reported.
Two bodies have been recovered from the rubble, and a 7-year-old girl died in hospital after a car she was in came under fire, the prosecutors said on Telegram. Three people have been injured.
Russia has denied deliberately targeting civilians although many have been killed in its frequent air strikes.