The port of Belgium confirmed its place as a first drug trafficking platform, in front of the Dutch Rival of Rotterdam.
MO12345LEMONDE With AFP
This is the first time that more than 100 tonnes have been recovered in a year. Belgian authorities announced Tuesday that cocaine seizures in the Flemish port broke a new record: nearly 110 tonnes of cocaine were seized in 2022 in the port of Antwerp. More than ever targeted by drug traffickers, the port city is the first gateway to Europe for this drug shipped from Latin America, often hidden in fruit cargoes.
Last year, the seizures amounted to 89.5 tonnes. In Rotterdam (Netherlands), the interceptions for this same drug fell to 52.5 tonnes against around 70 in 2021, it was specified during a press conference associating, for the first time, customs Belgian and Dutch, with the ministers of the two countries with authorities on these administrations.
caches in ship hulls
“The two customs services seized together 160 tonnes of cocaine” last year, were delighted together the members of the two governments, the Belgian Minister of Finance Van Peteghem and the Dutch Secretary of State Aukje de Vries . Both insisted on their “intensive cooperation” in the fight against this international traffic. Dutch divers teams intervene, for example, in the port of Antwerp, to inspect any caches in the ship’s hull, under the flotation line.
On the Belgian side, the government will recruit a hundred customs officers and buy new scanning equipment to strengthen controls in Antwerp. An investment in equipment of 70 million euros has been announced. “For the Netherlands, investments for the coming years will focus in particular on artificial intelligence, chemical detection, tracing containers,” he was underlined in a press release common to both countries.
“White Christmas”, a peak in cocaine consumption 2>
For the past ten years, the seizures have been stealing from record to record in Antwerp, the second merchant port in Europe. In 2021, the volume had even led 36 % thanks to the amount of information collected from traffickers with the infiltration of the Sky ECC encrypted phones. And while the first semester 2022 let it consider a slowdown, the curve then soar.
The seizures “accelerated in the fall,” said a Belgian customs spokesperson, attached by the France-Presse agency. She recalls that the end of year celebrations generally mark a peak in the consumption of cocaine. And several weeks upstream, the cartels increase white powder deliveries to prepare this “White Christmas”, an imaginary expression that Kristian Vanderwaeren, General Director of Customs.
In mid-October, customs had recorded one of the largest seizures of the past few years in Antwerp: more than 6 tonnes in a single catch in two “Tenches” delivered from the Suriname, a small country on the coast northeast of South America. “A tsunami” for the country, a large port “flooded” by drugs: the Belgian authorities do not skimp on the superlatives to describe this scourge which they struggle to fight.
According to the European Drug Observatory and Drug Addiction, 213 tonnes of cocaine were seized in 2020 in the EU and three of the twenty-seven member countries-Belgium (70 tonnes), Netherlands (49), Spain (37) – alone represented “almost 75 %” of the total volume.