Drug routes | “For narcos, the key is to penetrate the ports”

Gangs, hostage taking, assassinated politicians and prosecutors, crisis, curfew. The outbreak of violence currently shaking Ecuador is not the result of chance, explains Bertrand Monnet, professor of economic crime at the School of Advanced Commercial Studies (EDHEC) and author of the series Narco Business for the newspaper The world. This is the result of its strategic geographical position. Interview.

The Ecuadorian army and criminal groups have been at open war since the beginning of January in Ecuador. Violence is increasing, particularly in the port city of Guayaquil. How did we get here ?

To understand what is happening in Ecuador, you have to understand what is happening in Colombia. Colombia produces almost 60% of the cocaine that is exported around the world. However, this production has exploded since 2016, and has accelerated since 2022, as a result of negotiations between the Colombian government and various guerrillas such as the FARC [Forces armées révolutionnaires de Colombie] and the ELN [l’Armée de libération nationale] or ex-paramilitary militias, including the Clan del Golfo. Many of these guerrillas were already financing themselves through cocaine trafficking. But now that the armed struggle against these organizations has slowed, cocaine trafficking has become an economic objective in itself for them. The result is that Colombia produced 1,700 tonnes of cocaine in 2022, 20% more than the previous year. In short, there is an explosion in production and we have to export this cocaine…

So we export it from Ecuador?

Narcos export cocaine via several routes. From Colombia to the United States, from Colombia to Europe, via Panama and Mexico, via the French and British West Indies, some shipments even go through Africa before going back to Europe . A few years ago, they said to themselves: we are going to use Ecuador because it is a border country and there is a very important port. This is how the port of Guayaquil became a logistical hub for Colombian and Mexican narcos who ship drugs to the United States and Europe. Under the leadership of these two huge exporters of Colombian cocaine, traffic at the port of Guayaquil inevitably exploded. It is now estimated that 40% of the cocaine seized in Europe’s main port of entry, the port of Antwerp [en Belgique], comes from the port of Guayaquil. It has become a huge hub.

Who says hub says violence?

For narcos, the key is to penetrate the ports. To do this, we must corrupt the customs officers, corrupt the dock workers, corrupt the entire logistics chain that takes care of the port. However, only locally established organizations can provide this service. The small Ecuadorian gangs therefore found themselves in contact with narcos, who paid them a lot of money to put the cocaine in containers at the port of Guayaquil. This means that there is a flow of criminal money that flowed into the pockets of these Ecuadorian criminals, with which they enriched themselves, bought weapons and corrupted all the people who could pose a problem to them in the The state apparatus, in the penitentiary system, in the police… But the trigger for the violence is the reaction of the current government, which has decided to put an end to it. It’s courageous. But if he had not decided to fight against the criminal penetration of the Ecuadorian state apparatus, there would not have been war and fighting like what we saw in January.

Are there other hubs?

Another port widely used by narcos is Santos, Brazil, where they collaborate with a criminal organization, the PCC. [Primeiro Comando da Capital], which holds this port completely. There is another country that is going to move towards this, it is Paraguay. Paraguay has no seafront, but it has created a port for container ships on a very important river [le fleuve Paraguay] which leads to the sea through Argentina. This route is used by Colombian and Mexican narcos to sell part of both Colombian and Bolivian cocaine. In May 2022, an anti-drug prosecutor from Paraguay was even assassinated in Colombia, during his honeymoon…

Why this need to have several routes?

To minimize risks and costs. Narcos must continually diversify supply chains to minimize the risk of loss through seizures. By putting several routes in competition, they can also minimize costs. It is the same as the logistics of legal businesses. According to the narcos I know, it costs around 18,000 euros per kilo to transport cocaine.

There are ports that export and those that import. Where is this drug going?

In the United States, cartels smuggle a lot of drugs by land. Crossing the border in trucks, buses, cars, trains. They are lucky to have the largest border with Canada and the United States. It also passes through ports. Los Angeles, Vancouver, the ports of the East Coast… For Europe, it first goes by sea. But be careful, it varies all the time. There is Antwerp, but also the port of Rotterdam, Le Havre, Montoir in Brittany, wherever you can bring in containers!

What place do synthetic drugs occupy in this large drug market? We are talking more and more about fentanyl or M30, particularly in Canada, where the devastation is enormous.

It is not at all a drug that is sold in the same quantities as cocaine. Nor even cannabis. Because it’s a limited market. But it makes a lot of money for the Mexican narcos, essentially, because they have a production line and they sell across the border. The profitability for them is 2400% between the moment they produce fentanyl in the laboratory and the moment they sell it to the American wholesaler. Narcos make fentanyl because it’s 30 times stronger than heroin and costs three times less.

This drug is also very dangerous. We are talking about 100,000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2022 alone. In your series of reports Narco Businesspublished by The worldYou will meet [au Mexique] the Sinaloa cartel narcos who manufacture the M30. What interest do they have in producing a drug that kills?

This is also what one of the major fentanyl distributors in New York told me: that this market is going to stop because it kills too many people. But that’s logical reasoning. Mexican traffickers are not like that. They are economic extremists. What they want is maximum profit, as quickly as possible. They don’t care at all about killing thousands of people. It’s not the awareness that they are killing their market that will stop them.