The Hague-Sana
A report by the European Police Agency Europol revealed today that Belgium and the Netherlands have become the main hubs for smuggling cocaine into Europe, bypassing Spain as the main route for the entry of this dangerous substance into European countries.
"Criminal organizations are taking advantage of the increased supply of cocaine, especially from Colombia, to use the ports of Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Antwerp in Belgium to bring drugs," the agency was quoted by AFP as saying in a report prepared in cooperation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The report of the Hague-based agency added that "the center of the cocaine market in Europe has moved to the north," noting that the increasing use of cargo transport in containers, relying on the large capacities of the German ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, has strengthened the role of the Netherlands as a transit area.
The report stressed that the coasts of the North Sea “overwhelmed the Iberian Peninsula as the main entry point for cocaine arriving in Europe,” noting that the total quantities of cocaine seized in Antwerp amounted to 65.6 tons in 2020.
According to the report, the increase in supplies has stimulated the European cocaine market, especially since the peace agreement concluded in 2016 between the FARC and the Colombian government, which led to the emergence of different groups competing for control of cocaine production, while European criminal organizations changed their strategy and formed unmediated alliances with these groups with Buy cocaine directly from the source.
The report concluded that cocaine is the second most used drug after cannabis in Western and Central Europe, where the latest estimates indicate that the number of users in 2020 reached 4.4 million people.
It is noteworthy that last March, the Belgian police launched a massive campaign against organized crime and carried out hundreds of raids and searches on an unprecedented scale in the country, as with the arrival of thousands of container ships daily to Antwerp, the city has become one of the main European ports through which cocaine passes to Europe. An increase in violence and human trafficking.