South American drug cartels have capitalised on the retreat of the Covid-19 pandemic to produce and smuggle record amounts of cocaine around the world.
Production of coca, the drug’s base ingredient, spiked 35% in 2020-21, surpassing pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The increase in coca production is the highest since 2016 and has been accompanied by the continued trend of South American cartels improving the efficiency of their jungle labs where they can extract more of the illicit white powder from the green coca leaves.
“The pandemic was a bit of a blip for the expansion of cocaine production, but now it has rebounded and is even higher than what it was before,” said Antoine Vella, a UNODC researcher working on the report.
Cartels were forced to stockpile mass quantities of cocaine early in the pandemic when flights were suddenly grounded and road traffic heavily policed, but they quickly devised new ways of operating.
Major drug busts revealed cocaine to be cleverly concealed inside avocados, face masks and even crates full of squid on cargo ships.
In the most sophisticated of cases the drug was chemically broken down, mixed into liquids, waxes and fabrics so it could not be seen, and then extracted and transformed back into a powder at its destination.
Despite record cocaine seizures of nearly 2,000 tons in 2021, anti-narcotics efforts have only slowed down the growth of cocaine smuggling as it continues to meet the rapacious global demand for the drug.
“There’s no question that there is no limit to the ingenuity of traffickers,” Vella said.
Cartels are also devising new routes to avoid the watchful eye of anti-narcotics agents and are looking to expand into nascent but rapidly growing markets such as Asia and Africa, the report says.
The amount of cocaine flowing through North Sea ports such as Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg now eclipses those in Spain and Portugal, historically the drug’s gateway into western Europe.
Ports in west and central Africa are also increasingly favoured hubs to ferry cocaine to Europe while more cocaine is passing through South Africa on its way to riskier, more remote destinations, such as Australia.
Demand for cocaine is currently concentrated in the Americas and Western and Central Europe. The regions are home to one-fifth of the world’s population and three-quarters of its cocaine consumers.
Countries such as Brazil – South America’s largest cocaine consumer – are seeing a spike in overdoses, however, suggesting they are seeing rapidly growing supply and consumption.
“I think we need to shift away from thinking of cocaine as being a European/North American problem because it’s also very much a South American problem,” Vella says.
The growing global demand for production has been met by a surge in coca cultivation in Bolivia, Peru and, particularly, Colombia.
The amount of land used for Colombian coca cultivation increased by more than 40% in 2021, reaching 204,000 hectares.
Cartels have also become more efficient at extracting cocaine from the little green shrubs.
The demobilisation of Colombia’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), has been followed by the emergence of new criminal groups who operate in a more competitive and efficient cocaine market, the UNODC says.
Farc once controlled vast swaths of the country in which it monopolised the drug market but most of the group’s guerrillas laid down their weapons in 2016 as part of a landmark peace deal.
Crop substitution efforts have failed and the Farc’s power vacuum was quickly filled by myriad smaller groups – including a growing number working with Mexican cartels.
They operate in a freer market where better prices can be offered than the ones during the Farc monopoly, Vella says.
The Farc demobilisation has also made it safer for other crime factions and rebel groups to focus on their business matters, said Jorge Restrepo, director of the Bogotá-based Resource Center for Conflict Analysis (Cerac).
“The group with the largest capacity to exert violence suddenly disappeared – and that in itself is an incentive for the production of coca and cocaine,” Restrepo says.
