The Belgian port of Antwerp is consolidating itself as Europe’s major gateway for Latin American cocaine

Decades of trial and error allowed Spanish authorities to stop the entry of Latin American cocaine for its ports. A military system for detecting and attacking ships in the Atlantic and means of aerial surveillance were added to coastal surveillance. Spain has managed, little by little, to fill the gap through which Latin American mafias have flooded Europe with drugs.

That era is coming to an end, which had its peak in the 80s of the last century, when that drug, abundant and cheap, wiped out sectors of Spanish youth, Gradually, the drug traffickers found other routes until they found a black hole: the port of Antwerp.the second Belgian city.

Antwerp It is one of the largest European ports and it is the natural gateway for the import of agri-food products from Latin America for the markets of the north of the continent.

Thousand of Every year containers full of Ecuadorian bananas arrive and with them drugs enter (also from other Latin American ports), which makes Antwerp the main failure of the European anti-drug system. The trend found in the latest reports from the European Medicines Agency was confirmed again this year.

Record amounts in 2023

The Belgian authorities already confirm that they seized 116 tonnes of cocaine in 2023, a figure never seen in any other European port.

Experts always warn that seizures are a tiny fraction of what arrives, that they are made practically by luck because scanning every container (only a few containers per ship are scanned) would create such a delay in unloading the ship that it would block the port.

The authorities “sell” this massive drug seizure as a success, but they don’t hide it he only manages to prevent the entry of a fraction. Most of the coca goes to other European markets, but Belgium retains some of it, which has driven drug prices down.

Crime sink

Antwerp, together with its sister port of Rotterdam, a few kilometers away but already in the Netherlands, is becoming a hotspot for crime. So much so that everyone, from Princess Amalia of the Netherlands to the Belgian Minister of Justice, has had to experience periods of loneliness in the past.

In addition to the port of Guayaquil, cocaine shipments also arrive in Antwerp, especially from Panama and Colombia, although in recent years Ecuadorian drug traffickers have gained the upper hand. This contributes to the destabilization of security in the Andean country.

Antwerp has been in the news for a few years as European destination of Latin American coca. On March 10, 2021, the deepest Belgian police operation in peacetime was launched and the largest drug seizure in European history was made: 17 tons of cocaine in a single day.

More than 1,500 officers participated in the operation, carrying out more than 200 raids on homes and businesses, arresting 48 people and seizing 1.2 million euros in cash. Plus jewelry, luxury cars, police uniforms and dozens of weapons.

The operation was possible because the agents penetrated the communications encryption software, “Sky Ecc”, through which they had access to over 1 billion messages.

This huge amount of information, which included conversations between drug traffickers, provided agents with tons of information about criminal drug organisations, particularly those located in the Belgian provinces of Antwerp and Limburg. For Justice it was the “largest police operation in the history of Belgium”. The Prosecutor’s Office had already stated at the time that the operation showed how “criminals abuse the port of Antwerp” and that “the legal economy is being seized”.

“Sky ECC,” a company operating from Canada and the United States, had until the day before the raid said it would reward $5 million to anyone who managed to hack its network. He has never rewarded a Belgian cyber espionage agent.