The new Narcos: this is how drug dealing has changed after Covid

The latest shipment was discovered on the beach near Sydney on March 31st. Five duct-taped packages had washed ashore at Freshwater and Curl Curl. They opened them: they were bricks of cocaine. Three days before last Christmas another 250 had been found. They looked like Tom Thumb’s breadcrumbs: dozens more one-kilo packages, some weighing 39, lay on the shoreline for 500 kilometres.

It is yet another sign of a trend that has appeared clear since the beginning of 2024. There is a watershed that marks the new business of a market that is still illegal but compared, in terms of extension and volume of business, to that of oil. It coincides with the two-year period 2019-2021, when the world found itself faced with a new and mysterious virus called Covid-19 for the first time. The world economy suffered the first serious setback of the new century. The crisis affected all sectors. Including the narcotics sector which reorganized itself: he decided that the time had come to diversify investments and change the entire map of drug trafficking.

Today the price of coca is collapsing. Leaf growers prefer to focus on cocoa. The increase in the cost of fuel and the difficulty in finding the solvents necessary for the conversion have rewarded the grain of the plants which reached the maximum on Wall Street. But it is only a temporary choice linked to fluctuations in prices. The narcos are a holding company and think like all multinationals. You have to go back 54 years to understand what they have become.

It was June 17, 1970 when then President Richard Nixon summoned the press to the White House and announced: “The number one enemy of the United States of America is drug abuse.” Nothing was like before. The “war on drugs”, the longest fought by the USA, rather than curbing consumption, created the basis of clandestine trafficking, upset the economies of producing countries, eliminated jobs and money for tens of thousands of farmers, locked dozens of countries into a spiral of violence that continues now.

In 1970, overdose deaths were one per 100,000 inhabitants. At the end of the 20th century the number had multiplied by six and in 2019 the victims exceeded 20 per 100 thousand. Since then, fentanyl has entered the market, a concentrate 50 times stronger than heroin that gets you high and immediately kills even the most stubborn addicts. But it is easier to carry, takes up less space, and is much more popular. A trap built in a laboratory and placed on the US and Canadian markets by the ‘Ndrangheta, the most powerful criminal organization in the world. It is the only one to have a transport and dealing network even in distant Australia. Independent sources agree on one fact: the impact with fentanyl comes after the United States has spent between 340 million and one trillion dollars fighting drugs worldwide for half a century.

With disappointing results. The narcotics sector has an impressive volume of earnings. In 2009, according to data from the main anti-narcotics agencies, it was 84 billion. A figure very close to Bill Gates’ turnover. Today other reliable sources estimate a revenue of almost 350 billion dollars. Yet, it is known that 70 percent goes to traffickers and only 1.2 to the farmers who grow the plants. The IMF estimates that almost $30 billion in drugs entered the US in 2022. If they had been the result of legal transactions they would have represented 1.3 percent of all imports. It is the same sum that the Italian government invested to deal with the first wave of Covid.

The business continues and expands. This is demonstrated by the data collected in a dossier by InSight Crime, one of the most informed investigation sites on drug trafficking and transnational crime. The dossier starts from a premise: cocaine production has started to grow again to satisfy the incessant demand. This, together with the blockade of land transport due to Covid, has forced the drug cartels to redesign routes and conquer new territories.

Tired of dealing with producers and paying transit taxes, the Mexican narcos have decided to go south along the Latin American continent and take over the entire business chain: from cultivation, to production, to transport, up to drug dealing. . It wasn’t a painless operation. It was a conquest, weapons in hand. “There are two countries that explain the change in this strategy better than others: Ecuador and Costa Rica,” we read in the dossier. For the first, it is enough to remember the sensational assassination in broad daylight, in front of everyone, of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio on August 9, 2023 during a rally in Quito. His murder marked a turning point.

The wave of violence was caused by the Mexican Cartels. They want to conquer the Pacific coast which from Chile to Guatemala (with the epicenter in Chiapas, southern Mexico) has become the corridor along which the river of coca, heroin and fentanyl destined for the North American markets flows. To do so they formed alliances with some local groups to the detriment of others. The operation broke the balance that had lasted for years and triggered a series of changes involving massacres, retaliations and revenge. The Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan cartel, which aims to dominate traffic, immediately entered this conflict.

The second country that marks the turning point is Costa Rica. Considered a true oasis, without an army as established by the Constitution, this small Central American state has seen its homicide rate increase by 41 percent in one year. The furious struggle between the small local clans and the large criminal organizations aimed to conquer slices of territory in this case too and in particular the ports which remain the entry point of the chemical precursors, essential for producing synthetic drugs, arriving from China and exit hub for consignments to be sent to the USA and Canada. Fentanyl has created a diplomatic crisis between China, Mexico and the US like few others. In the last meeting a few days ago between Biden and Xi Jinping they mainly talked about this, rather than Ukraine and Taiwan.

Land routes have become too risky. The large criminal groups favor maritime ones. They resorted to homemade submarines to get the cargoes to Europe. Port control, at that point, became vital in the drug business. Thus, in the space of 12 months, two routes have opened up that run from South to North along the Atlantic and the Pacific. In the Atlantic, the main hub remains the port of Santos, on the coast of Sao Paulo. Thanks to the rivers that connect Bolivia to Paraguay and continue towards Argentina and Uruguay, coca crosses the southern part of South America and lands in Brazil. From here, it branches off towards Africa and Europe or goes up the Atlantic, passes through Venezuela and concentrates in the Caribbean which have proven to be excellent transit and storage points. Jamaica has put itself forward as the main landing place but the series of atolls dotting that stretch of sea offer decent alternatives along the way.

On the opposite side, in the Pacific, Mexican Cartels have conquered the city of Durán, Ecuador, transforming it into one of the main loading points for cocaine. It is located a few kilometers from Guayaquil and is defended with weapons. It records the highest number of murders: from 6 per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2016 it rose to 44.5 in 2023. The country is strategic: it borders Peru and Colombia which remain the largest producers of white powder. Last year 200 tons were seized here alone. The route follows the coast to Mexico where the drugs are transferred onto trucks headed for the US border. The very high murder rate (105 per 100 thousand inhabitants) confirms the strategic importance of the North American country in controlling drug trafficking. The two hegemonic cartels (Jalisco Nueva Generación and Sinaloa) are competing for the slice of territory that connects with the US border. Chapo has always suffered from not having had an entrance to the main world market: he was forced to pay a tax to the Tijuana Cartel which blocked the way to every load. Only by defeating his opponents and inventing underground tunnels did he manage to dominate the market and become the world king of cocaine.

Europe remains the second destination for traffic. The demand for synthetic drugs (especially ketamine) has increased to the detriment of cocaine which, with the accumulation of production during Covid, had suffered a drop in price and the narcos were struggling to dispose of it. The traditional entry points remain Holland, Belgium and Spain. But Norway, Russia and even Sweden are catching on. They are passage points for distribution in the Old Continent. The drugs also arrive from Africa, with the islets in front of Guinea Conakry acting as a storage center for the goods coming from Brazil. The two emerging mafias also operate here on an international level: the Nigerian and the Albanian. The latter, above all, has reached as far as South America. Thanks to the family ties of the clans which guarantee absolute silence, he presents himself as a competitor to the ‘Ndrangheta. It has the same organizational structure and the same determination. She lacks experience and a very close network of contacts. Most of the coca destined for Europe passes through the port of Gioia Tauro: 80.35 percent of global seizures took place here in 2023. Even if in reality it happens ten times more.

According to the latest Drug Report 2023, published by the UN Office and Crime, 296 million people habitually consume drugs in the world. They represent 5.8 of the planet’s population. In ten years they have increased by 23 percent. Cannabis prevails with its 219 million consumers; followed by 36 million who take amphetamines, 22 who snort coke and 20 million who like to get high on ecstasy, methamphetamine and ketamine. It is a reality that must be reckoned with.

Today all states are wondering about the effects of a war on drugs considered lost from the start. After Uruguay, Colombia and even Mexico are aiming for the liberalization of marijuana as the USA and Canada did and, first in Europe, Germany at the end of March. But prohibition resists. Not so much for a moral problem but an economic and social one. Legalizing means taking the market away from crime, causing prices to collapse and making a commodity safer which turns into poison and rubbish through illegality. But it also means putting millions of people on the streets who make a living in the sector without being consumers. The consequences would be public order. As in all production fields, market laws rule. Money drives governments’ choices. Those used to fight drug trafficking and those collected from drug trafficking. A billion-dollar treasure that no one wants to give up.