June 11, 2024 • 32 mins
As cocaine is smuggled out of South America it multiplies in value, driving people to extremes.
Stephen Drill follows the trail to Mexico and uncovers how the numbers used by law enforcement do not add up.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
In my opinion, it's stupid to look at cocaine trade
on a national level because this is an international trade.
It's just a commodity that has to go from A
to B.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Actually it works like regular trade, but it has a
dark side to it as well.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Just a recommendation, the you know, the labels with the information.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
It's nothing because that's judicial evidence. See.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
Cartagena is a city on the north coast of Columbia.
It's picturesque, full of cobbled streets and brightly colored colonial
buildings that look out over the Caribbean Sea. Centuries ago,
wooden ships would arrive here to be loaded with gold
bound for Europe. Today, Stephen Drill is at the city's port,
(01:01):
where hundreds of container ships still arrive every year, but
to be filled with another kind of precious cargo.
Speaker 5 (01:09):
That's with better security than this week.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Right now, Stephen's been shown into a locked room which
is mostly empty except for a huge pile of bags
stuff full of cocaine, containing the small mountain of drugs
that has been seized by customs in the past month.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
Eight hundred kilo ceiling of two containers.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Think about that for a moment. Eight hundred kilograms of
cocaine seized in a single day, and no one seems
to think that's unusual. One of the customs officials goes
over and picks out a black duffel bag drags it
back across the floor.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
This doesn't paches.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
The book is usually fifty sixty.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
The customs official opens the bagger, you can see the
dur and starts pulling out blocks the size of bricks,
which are shrink wrapped in black plastic labeled with the
name Juvonci. Inside is a solid block of white powder,
(02:27):
which has nothing to do with the luxury fashion house,
so white as brick after brick of cocaine is unloaded
on the tile floor, Stephen is told the street value
of this eight hundred kilo hall would be about six
(02:49):
hundred million US dollars. That's the total amount people will
pay for it in countries like the UK and Australia.
Six hundred million US is on most half a billion
pounds or nearly a billion Aussie dollars. It's pretty hard
to get your head around those numbers. But what really
makes my head spin is this. If you're the drug
(03:12):
gang hoping to sell this cocaine, then actually while it's
still here in Cartagena. It isn't worth very much at all.
In fact, if you were running an international drug smuggling operation,
it's the kind of loss you wouldn't even notice. I'm
(03:36):
Fiona Hamilton and from The Times, the Sunday Times and
News Corp Australia. This is Cocaine Inc. Episode three, the
sixty four million percent markup. I'll leave it to Stephen,
(03:57):
who's looking at this drug hall, to explain it.
Speaker 7 (04:03):
Okay, think about it this way. In the Colombian jungles,
the raw coca leaves that are used to make cocaine
are worth about point zero zero zero six two US
dollars per gram. That's according to figures from the United Nations.
Now that's not much here in Cartagena. The price of
(04:24):
process cocaine it's much higher. It's about one point two
dollars per gram. And once it's shipped from here to
the US, where these blocks of coke were likely headed,
the price goes up again to thirty US dollars. And
that's the wholesale price, meaning the price paid by the
drug gangs. The retail price, so the price paid on
(04:48):
the street by cocaine users. That's more like one hundred
and twenty dollars per gram. By the time the cocaine
has been smuggled across the Atlantic to Europe, it can
be even more expensive. And if it's moved all the
way to Australia, by which time it may have been
shipped through several different countries, the cost really goes up
(05:09):
as high as four hundred US dollars, meaning the difference
in price between raw cocaine and Colombia and cocaine brought
on the streets of Sydney is a sixty four million
percent markup, and those kind of profits can make people
commit violence. But also there's something else going on here.
(05:40):
While the markup is insane, there's another issue at play.
When the police make these big cocaine seizures, they're not
technically misrepresenting the figures, but what they do is pick
the very highest figure that they can, the street value,
which makes the size of that cocaine sea sound really
(06:01):
really impressive, when actually the value to the drug gang
involved is much much less, meaning the seizure isn't worth
what the authorities say it is. I'll explain that more
in just a moment, because as I'm starting to look
at the figures and getting ready to leave Columbia and
(06:21):
head north to Mexico. I get told, wait, there's somebody
else you need to talk to, and not just any someone.
This is someone flying in by helicopter. Especially I've brought
us targes Menta Gerald, thank you so much for agreeing
(06:42):
to be interviewed. Thank you. This is the boss of
the Colombian National Police Force, Director General William Rene Salamanca Ramirez.
He's the man leading the war against the cocaine cartels
in this country. He's rugged, with close cropped hair, and
where's in uniform with gold buttons. Only days before our interview,
(07:04):
a drug gang killed one of his officers. Speaking through
a translator, I asked him how dangerous their job Isumbian.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
It is a very demanding work. There are some settings
in the Columbian territory where we still need to be
accompanied by special detachment of security because of the security conditions.
There are many places around the country, in what we
(07:42):
call the deep Columbia, where there are very strong attacks
by terrorist troops.
Speaker 7 (07:51):
He talks about terrorists and an expression that's become common
in Columbia is narco terrorism. That word is used to
describe the actions of these commer or businesses. In Colombia,
I hired assassin charges as little as five hundred US
dollars to execute a police officer. About fourteen thousand people
are killed a year, some of them hacked to death
(08:14):
by drug gangs.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
See those criminality inquents.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
All criminals and offenders are always rethinking the way they
add the plice forces around the world to reinvent yourself,
to be retrained and to learn in order to be
able to face these challenges. And Columbia is.
Speaker 7 (08:38):
Not the exception. Columbia isn't the exception, he says. The
power of those running the cocaine business is international. It's
that sixty marked up driving the entire trade.
Speaker 5 (08:52):
So long as their supply and demand, there's going to
be a cost, and both stay be for this cost.
And there are some many families that have lost through children.
And we're losing. Both societies are losing both thous trillions
(09:13):
and Colombians.
Speaker 7 (09:16):
Both societies, he says, are losing from the drug trade. Now,
let's go back to those bags for cocaine bricks labeled
Javoni being unloaded onto the floor in the locked room
in the Port of Cartagena. The Australian police tell me
it's part of a Seizu're worth around six hundred million
US dollars, but actually that's not quite right. Sitting down
(09:40):
with a calculator on my phone, I'll work out that's
very much the maximum possible figure. Six hundred million is
what it's worth only at the end of the supply chain,
when it's cut up, divided into those little ziplock plastic
baggies and sold by the gram on the street in
Sydney or Melbourne. Do you understand why that's important. Imagine
(10:02):
you're having dinner at a really fancy restaurant because I'm
from Australia. Let's say it's the Opera House overlooking Sydney Harbor,
just about dusk. For dessert, you choose a crem caramel
from the menu. It cost you forty dollars and he's
made using another Columbian export sugar. That sugar has been harvested,
(10:24):
refined and shipped. Along the way. It's been bought and
sold in bulk by different companies or middle men who
each make a profit. Eventually it gets mixed with other
different ingredients. Sometimes it's baked, and then it's hand delivered
to your table, delicious as it is, you wouldn't use
(10:45):
the cost of that forty dollars pudding to calculate the
value of the sacoflour sugar lying at the docks in Carthagena.
That'd be madness, except that's exactly what law enforcement all
around the world is doing.
Speaker 8 (11:00):
You At eleven more than one million dollars worth of.
Speaker 7 (11:02):
Cocaine, forty million dollars worth of cocaine, thirty two hundred
pounds of cocaine street value seventy seven million dollars three
hundred and twenty million dollars street value of more than
one billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
In all drugs with a street value of one point
six billion pounds.
Speaker 7 (11:30):
That eight hundred kiliground of coke laid out on the
floor in Cardagena isn't worth six hundred million, not to
the cartail who bought it and will need to replace
it to them here in Colombia. It probably costs less
than a million US dollars, So it'd be wrong for
anyone to describe it as a six hundred million dollar
blow against the drug gangs. And that's important because throwing
(11:55):
crazy numbers around about the cocaine trade helps nobody to
understand it. But if I do want to understand the business,
which I'm trying to, I need to follow the money
through the process of that sixty four million percent markup.
The next step is to travel out across the Caribbean
Sea over the horizon, heading north to Mexico. This is Tijuana,
(12:28):
a gridlock city of over two million people that sits
right up against the Mexico US border. While most of
the cocaine that arrives in Mexico from Cartagena is carried
by ship, we flew and then drove north to get here.
Outside the car window, I can see the border wall
built by President Trump, made out of metal the color
(12:49):
of dried blood. It's one of the most contentious borders
anywhere in the world. Right now, on the Tijuana side
of the wall, a dusty suburb is made of houses,
some of them only shacks made of wood and concrete.
On the other side are broad roads and luxury shopping
centers in the US city of San Diego. The wall
(13:10):
exists to prevent the illegal movement of goods and people
between the two countries, which is why it represents a
crucial barrier in the cocaine business between Latin America where
the cocaine is produced and those richer countries where the
drog can be solved for vast profits. Meaning to someone
in the cocaine business, this wall doesn't present a problem
(13:32):
so much as an opportunity. Looking up, it seems like
nothing could get through the wall or over the top
of it, which is why I'm going to go underneath it.
Speaker 9 (13:44):
They put it like timbers.
Speaker 7 (13:46):
Are they good engineers? Are they well built tunnels?
Speaker 9 (13:49):
Or do they collapse.
Speaker 7 (13:51):
I'm in a small restaurant serving fish tacos, and I'm
told they have a really good spicy soup. It's not
really my go to meal, but it was really good.
It's here that I met an engineer from the Mexican
Criminal Investigation Agency, and I can't tell you his name
in order to protect him. He reaches out and takes
a paper napkin from the restaurant table. He starts sketching
(14:14):
the diagram of tunnels that he says go under the
wall on that US border. He's an expert on these tunnels.
It's his job to find them and shut them down,
and that makes him a target. So they don't just
dig it in They do it in a building, down
through a building, and then we're speaking to a translator,
(14:38):
so one building in Mexico to one building in the US.
Dozens of these tunnels have been discovered in recent years.
While it used to be the Colombians who dominated the
cocaine business, nowadays it's the Mexican cartels that are the
big players. At the port of Cardagenia, a quilo of
(14:59):
cocaine my be worth around twelve hundred US dollars wholesale
in Mexico, that value can be ten times higher. Get
that killer of cocaine across the border to the US,
and its value doubles again. We finish our tacos and
head outside. The engineer tells me tens of thousands of cars,
(15:19):
trucks and people cross between Tijuana and San Diego each day,
but all of them can be stopped and searched by
authorities at the border. We walk up to the lock
gates of what looks like an abandoned warehouse within sight
of the border wall. The engineer's colleagues from the Mexican
Criminal Investigation Agency are waiting. They're dressed in black, they're
(15:41):
wearing masks and carrying automatic rifles. One takes a pair
of bolt cutters to the padlock guns raised. The police
go down into the basement of the warehouse. We go
into the bathroom where next to a toilet cubicle, a
hole has been smashed into the floor. It's maybe a
(16:03):
meter wide. The police go down into the darkness and
I follow.
Speaker 8 (16:09):
So here we can see one of the chambers where
we can see the dorms, and part of the area
where they had all the tools. In the front, we
can see their rule where they say all the cleaning.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
Products this property, and then it's connecting to the other
property on the site.
Speaker 7 (16:41):
These tunnels of vital assets for the cartels. They're precious.
They can take months to build by gang members who
live down here in the dark and dirt all throughout
that time. It's dangerous and dirty work. They're forced to
do it. They've made an error and this is their punishment.
Or if I don't dig these tunnels, their family will
(17:03):
be killed.
Speaker 8 (17:04):
We have the border lane which connects them to the US.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
The engineer tells me how the tunnels work. The entries
are hidden in buildings controlled by the cast holes, often
their warehouses, but really any building near the border can
be used. Cocaine is carried through the tunnels and emerges
through the floor of a building on the other side
of the wall. In San Diego, California. There are no
customs checks down here. It's a short journey. Even the
(17:34):
longest tunnel ever discovered was a little over a kilometer.
On the Mexican side, Tunnel entrances are found everywhere. There
was even one across the road from the main station
of the country's police force, the National Guard. The tunnel
went right under their feet.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
And then when you go into the warehouse, then you'll
find the property on the other side. In the US, what.
Speaker 8 (18:02):
Looks it looks like we might be able to boy in, but.
Speaker 7 (18:08):
We walk into a long, low corridor. The floor is black,
muddy dirt, and on our left, cut into the foundations
of the building is an entrance.
Speaker 9 (18:23):
I'm down here in a Narco tunnel, or about eighty
minutes from the Mexican border, and to be honest, it's
just quite frightening. There's some timber that's been put in
here to try and reinforce the tunnel, but it's wet,
it's molder. You can actually feel the moisture on the timber.
As you're walking around, it's really really dark. We've got
some torches here and they're doing a bit, but not
that much. I've no idea how someone to live down here.
(18:46):
The air like. I'm actually trying to sucking air because
it's just really think there's not much oxygen. They have
sort of extractor fans that they use to try and
get air into it.
Speaker 7 (18:55):
I'm actually trying to struggling to breathe here.
Speaker 9 (18:58):
They've got to risk their lives every time they go
through the tunnel in case it collapses. It's just extreme
the lengths that people will go to to sell drugs.
Speaker 7 (19:13):
Climbing out of the tunnel, I'm covered in mud and dirt.
It's a relief to see the light again. The engineer
I met in the Fish Taco restaurant and the translator
walk out with me. They tell me the border is
riddled with these tunnels. No one knows how many. Over
the years, dozens have been discovered by authorities, but given
(19:35):
the border itself stretches for over three thousand kilometers, there
must be others down there. Later, after we've cleaned ourselves up,
the translator and I set out to find out more.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Felipe my name is Phelipe.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
Felipe is the head of Mexico's criminal investigation agency. He's
a broad man, square shouldered, the side party and black
classes wearing a dark suit. He looks more like a
bank executive than a policeman, the kind of person you
could do business with. I asked him to tell me
(20:17):
about the drug cartels.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
They have involved a lot. Our main client or customer
would be the US. We know and we have the
evidence that there are lots of presence of Mexican cartails
in Europe, in Alexandro and other countries abroad. There are lots.
Speaker 10 (20:41):
Of criminal organizations that come here to do some tourist
activities to try to obtain contacts.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
They don't really operate in Mexico because the cartoons in
Mexico they have a really good control of all the activities.
Is that they're on their teach. However, there are clients.
They don't look like they're criminals. There are just sending
messages across different places.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
So the broker in deals, they are arranging shipments here
to buy from the cartels.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Yes, that's correct.
Speaker 7 (21:20):
The cartails are building business relationships with organized crime in China,
Southeast Asia. The Middle East and Europe anywhere you can
get a cargo ship or a plane to another. Way
they are changing is through what other businesses would call diversification.
For the cartails, this has meant new product lines expanding
into other addictive legal and illegal drugs like methanphetamine and fentanyl,
(21:45):
a prescription opioid.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
It is profitable because it's just a business.
Speaker 7 (21:51):
In terms of the business operation. While cocaine has smuggled
through the tunnels heading north, I'd also heard about guns
from the US on any other direction. I asked Felipe
about it.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
That's our main concern because we verified that after three
or four days that someone purchased a weapon in Texas.
We have it here in Mexico and you only need
to have triber license in the US to be able
(22:30):
to buy a gun.
Speaker 7 (22:35):
Those high colorable weapons brought in from Texas have made
Mexico quite simply frightening. The power of those guns make
murder easy.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Organization analysis the problems.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Between the different cartails. I normally they solved that through
killing people, and unfortunately we have lots of corpse and
we have not been able to identify most people belong
to that, and there are lots of clandestine grapes.
Speaker 7 (23:14):
The wayfully Paid describes it, the Mexican place sometimes struggle
to find, identify, or't even count the tens of thousands
of Mexicans every year who were killed in drug related murders.
As an outsider visiting his country, it's hard to come
to terms with that fact. But also as an outsider,
it's easy to think of it as a Mexican problem,
(23:36):
something caused by the fact the world supply of cocaine
comes from here and from nearby countries.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
It's difficult to combat such a serious crime, and Mexico
alone cannot do it. So we need to work together
to find out the routes and different information about all
this criminals activities.
Speaker 7 (24:03):
Felipe says, Mexico can't do this alone. They need other
countries to help them, not just the US where cocaine
is smuggled under the border in those tunnels much further afield.
I'm thinking about that eight hundred kilo hall of cocaine
seized by police in Cartagena at the start of this episode.
(24:24):
For centuries, ships have come to ports like Cartagena and
others across Latin America and loaded up with commodities like gold,
sugar or coffee before transporting them to where they could
make much more profit. Today, the same thing happened with cocaine.
To really understand that global business, we want to follow
(24:47):
this trade and that's going to take us on the
next part of our journey away from the US Mexico
border to another lucrative market, one that's over five thousand
miles away across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. It's here
I'll hand the story over at Fiona Hamilton, the chief
(25:08):
reporter on The Times who started this episode.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
This is Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. I've just
got off the train. It's drizzling, it's gray, it's a
little bit drab and cold, but it takes just a
few minutes to walk over a busy intersection of trams
and cyclists to reach the beautiful central area, the famous
network of canals lined by old terraced houses and cobbled streets.
(25:39):
I'm here though, because in recent years the Netherlands has
become a key distribution hub for the international cocaine business.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
I used to work in a coffee shop in the
Red Light district and there were people talking about what
was going on in the marijuana and I find that
quite fascinating because it's like a shadow economy where a
lot is going on which normal public will never see.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
This is Valutllowman's I'm working for the Dutch newspaper her
Baro and I'm covering the crime beat and I'm writing
about organized crime. Wuta has spent fifteen years reporting on
the drugs business. He says the Netherlands has a unique
position in the global cocaine supply market.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
In my opinion, it's stupid to look at cocaine trade
on a national level because this is an international trade.
It's just a commodity that has to go from A
to B.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Actually it works like regular trade, but it has a
dark side to it as well.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Somewhere in the noughties cocaine lords from South America started
to target European market. What they did was they shipped
it to West Africa, then they would move it over Morocco.
They were smuggling hashis into Europe and they were using
those old lines to smuggle cocaine into Europe. And who
(27:18):
were involved in this young Moroccan guys who had family
in the Netherlands, and they worked together with local guys
and after a while they decided, okay, so let's shortened
the line. So if we could get it directly to
Antwerp or to Rotterdam, it's easier for us cheaper as
well because we have to bribe less people. So that's
(27:39):
when they started to shift the lines from Africa towards
Rotterdam and Antwerp.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Those two ports, Rotterdam and the Netherlands, where almost half
a billion tons of goods moved through each year, and
Antwerp in Belgium are the biggest in Europe. They sit
in a huge river delta that connects the North Sea
to multiple European countries.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Most of the cocaine that get smuggled through the ports
of Rotterdam and Antwerp is used for the foreign markets,
so it's actually like a transfer hub for European cocaine.
That's the way she look at it. England's always been
one of the biggest drugs markets from the Netlands. The
bulk of cocaine that comes through the Netlands will go
(28:28):
to England. What has been happening since twenty twelve is
that we saw the rise of a new generation of
criminals and that was first established in Amsterdam where we
had like a double murder. Two young boys got shocked
to pieces with AK forty sevens.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
The victims were aged just twenty one and twenty eight.
And we're gone down in a drive by shooting on
New Year's Eve after a shipment of cocaine went missing.
The likely target of the attack was another man, a
suspected gang boss. The murders happened in front of family homes.
The next day, the city's mayor called Amsterdam quote the
(29:10):
wild West.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
There have always been murders in the underworld, but the
level of violence that was something new and what happened
was from twenty thirteen to two thy and sixteen, there
were a lot of murders. We saw a severed head
being put in front of a coffee shop in Amslam,
and we have a lot of explosions nowadays. You've got
(29:34):
bombs being put in front of people's houses and stuff
like that. All these things were like unheard of before
in the Nelans.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
So why is the cocaine business so violent? Yes, the
answer is partly money. People will do a lot of
things to make themselves rich, especially without sixty four million
percent markup. But it's also because the cocaine industry is illegal,
meaning it's not regulated. If you're a drug boss who
(30:06):
has a problem with arrival, there's no competition and market
authority you can turn to. There's no watchdog or civil
court to decide your dispute, so you turn to violence.
The kind of violence we once associated with places like
Columbia and Mexico is now on the streets of Europe.
In this way, the cocaine trade actually changes the countries
(30:28):
in which it takes place.
Speaker 7 (30:33):
It corrupts them corruption.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
I mean, the best way to get cocaine into a
country is if you have corrupt guys at customs.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
I want to look more closely at that part of
this multinational business. So my next stop is Rotterdam, one
of the biggest ports in Europe, struggling to keep the
cartels at bay.
Speaker 7 (31:01):
We have a big problem in the port of Rotterdam
with cocaine. Are you trustworthy or are you also corrupt?
Be mentored to customs and be important.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
To contain it for him, And from that moment you were.
Speaker 7 (31:14):
In and from that moment I was in Yep.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
And I go to the scene where one of the
Netherlands drug bosses had something planned for his rivals that
could have come straight out of a horror film.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
The cameras it's too dangerous.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
You're worried, it's too dangerous to get out. Are you
worried about my safety?
Speaker 7 (31:37):
Of course you are my guest.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
That's next time on Cocaine Inc. Cocaine Inc. Is a
joint investigation from the Times for Sunday Times and News
Call for Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Steven Drill
(32:02):
and me Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam Chanterassak.
The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio
production and editing is by Jasper Lee, with original music
by Tom Burchell additional recording by Jason Edwards and If
you want to get in touch with any questions or
(32:24):
thoughts on the series, email Cocaine Inc. At The Times
dot co dot uk.
In my opinion, it's stupid to look at cocaine trade
on a national level because this is an international trade.
It's just a commodity that has to go from A
to B.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Actually it works like regular trade, but it has a
dark side to it as well.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Just a recommendation, the you know, the labels with the information.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
It's nothing because that's judicial evidence. See.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
Cartagena is a city on the north coast of Columbia.
It's picturesque, full of cobbled streets and brightly colored colonial
buildings that look out over the Caribbean Sea. Centuries ago,
wooden ships would arrive here to be loaded with gold
bound for Europe. Today, Stephen Drill is at the city's port,
(01:01):
where hundreds of container ships still arrive every year, but
to be filled with another kind of precious cargo.
Speaker 5 (01:09):
That's with better security than this week.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Right now, Stephen's been shown into a locked room which
is mostly empty except for a huge pile of bags
stuff full of cocaine, containing the small mountain of drugs
that has been seized by customs in the past month.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
Eight hundred kilo ceiling of two containers.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
Think about that for a moment. Eight hundred kilograms of
cocaine seized in a single day, and no one seems
to think that's unusual. One of the customs officials goes
over and picks out a black duffel bag drags it
back across the floor.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
This doesn't paches.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
The book is usually fifty sixty.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
The customs official opens the bagger, you can see the
dur and starts pulling out blocks the size of bricks,
which are shrink wrapped in black plastic labeled with the
name Juvonci. Inside is a solid block of white powder,
(02:27):
which has nothing to do with the luxury fashion house,
so white as brick after brick of cocaine is unloaded
on the tile floor, Stephen is told the street value
of this eight hundred kilo hall would be about six
(02:49):
hundred million US dollars. That's the total amount people will
pay for it in countries like the UK and Australia.
Six hundred million US is on most half a billion
pounds or nearly a billion Aussie dollars. It's pretty hard
to get your head around those numbers. But what really
makes my head spin is this. If you're the drug
(03:12):
gang hoping to sell this cocaine, then actually while it's
still here in Cartagena. It isn't worth very much at all.
In fact, if you were running an international drug smuggling operation,
it's the kind of loss you wouldn't even notice. I'm
(03:36):
Fiona Hamilton and from The Times, the Sunday Times and
News Corp Australia. This is Cocaine Inc. Episode three, the
sixty four million percent markup. I'll leave it to Stephen,
(03:57):
who's looking at this drug hall, to explain it.
Speaker 7 (04:03):
Okay, think about it this way. In the Colombian jungles,
the raw coca leaves that are used to make cocaine
are worth about point zero zero zero six two US
dollars per gram. That's according to figures from the United Nations.
Now that's not much here in Cartagena. The price of
(04:24):
process cocaine it's much higher. It's about one point two
dollars per gram. And once it's shipped from here to
the US, where these blocks of coke were likely headed,
the price goes up again to thirty US dollars. And
that's the wholesale price, meaning the price paid by the
drug gangs. The retail price, so the price paid on
(04:48):
the street by cocaine users. That's more like one hundred
and twenty dollars per gram. By the time the cocaine
has been smuggled across the Atlantic to Europe, it can
be even more expensive. And if it's moved all the
way to Australia, by which time it may have been
shipped through several different countries, the cost really goes up
(05:09):
as high as four hundred US dollars, meaning the difference
in price between raw cocaine and Colombia and cocaine brought
on the streets of Sydney is a sixty four million
percent markup, and those kind of profits can make people
commit violence. But also there's something else going on here.
(05:40):
While the markup is insane, there's another issue at play.
When the police make these big cocaine seizures, they're not
technically misrepresenting the figures, but what they do is pick
the very highest figure that they can, the street value,
which makes the size of that cocaine sea sound really
(06:01):
really impressive, when actually the value to the drug gang
involved is much much less, meaning the seizure isn't worth
what the authorities say it is. I'll explain that more
in just a moment, because as I'm starting to look
at the figures and getting ready to leave Columbia and
(06:21):
head north to Mexico. I get told, wait, there's somebody
else you need to talk to, and not just any someone.
This is someone flying in by helicopter. Especially I've brought
us targes Menta Gerald, thank you so much for agreeing
(06:42):
to be interviewed. Thank you. This is the boss of
the Colombian National Police Force, Director General William Rene Salamanca Ramirez.
He's the man leading the war against the cocaine cartels
in this country. He's rugged, with close cropped hair, and
where's in uniform with gold buttons. Only days before our interview,
(07:04):
a drug gang killed one of his officers. Speaking through
a translator, I asked him how dangerous their job Isumbian.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
It is a very demanding work. There are some settings
in the Columbian territory where we still need to be
accompanied by special detachment of security because of the security conditions.
There are many places around the country, in what we
(07:42):
call the deep Columbia, where there are very strong attacks
by terrorist troops.
Speaker 7 (07:51):
He talks about terrorists and an expression that's become common
in Columbia is narco terrorism. That word is used to
describe the actions of these commer or businesses. In Colombia,
I hired assassin charges as little as five hundred US
dollars to execute a police officer. About fourteen thousand people
are killed a year, some of them hacked to death
(08:14):
by drug gangs.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
See those criminality inquents.
Speaker 5 (08:20):
All criminals and offenders are always rethinking the way they
add the plice forces around the world to reinvent yourself,
to be retrained and to learn in order to be
able to face these challenges. And Columbia is.
Speaker 7 (08:38):
Not the exception. Columbia isn't the exception, he says. The
power of those running the cocaine business is international. It's
that sixty marked up driving the entire trade.
Speaker 5 (08:52):
So long as their supply and demand, there's going to
be a cost, and both stay be for this cost.
And there are some many families that have lost through children.
And we're losing. Both societies are losing both thous trillions
(09:13):
and Colombians.
Speaker 7 (09:16):
Both societies, he says, are losing from the drug trade. Now,
let's go back to those bags for cocaine bricks labeled
Javoni being unloaded onto the floor in the locked room
in the Port of Cartagena. The Australian police tell me
it's part of a Seizu're worth around six hundred million
US dollars, but actually that's not quite right. Sitting down
(09:40):
with a calculator on my phone, I'll work out that's
very much the maximum possible figure. Six hundred million is
what it's worth only at the end of the supply chain,
when it's cut up, divided into those little ziplock plastic
baggies and sold by the gram on the street in
Sydney or Melbourne. Do you understand why that's important. Imagine
(10:02):
you're having dinner at a really fancy restaurant because I'm
from Australia. Let's say it's the Opera House overlooking Sydney Harbor,
just about dusk. For dessert, you choose a crem caramel
from the menu. It cost you forty dollars and he's
made using another Columbian export sugar. That sugar has been harvested,
(10:24):
refined and shipped. Along the way. It's been bought and
sold in bulk by different companies or middle men who
each make a profit. Eventually it gets mixed with other
different ingredients. Sometimes it's baked, and then it's hand delivered
to your table, delicious as it is, you wouldn't use
(10:45):
the cost of that forty dollars pudding to calculate the
value of the sacoflour sugar lying at the docks in Carthagena.
That'd be madness, except that's exactly what law enforcement all
around the world is doing.
Speaker 8 (11:00):
You At eleven more than one million dollars worth of.
Speaker 7 (11:02):
Cocaine, forty million dollars worth of cocaine, thirty two hundred
pounds of cocaine street value seventy seven million dollars three
hundred and twenty million dollars street value of more than
one billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
In all drugs with a street value of one point
six billion pounds.
Speaker 7 (11:30):
That eight hundred kiliground of coke laid out on the
floor in Cardagena isn't worth six hundred million, not to
the cartail who bought it and will need to replace
it to them here in Colombia. It probably costs less
than a million US dollars, So it'd be wrong for
anyone to describe it as a six hundred million dollar
blow against the drug gangs. And that's important because throwing
(11:55):
crazy numbers around about the cocaine trade helps nobody to
understand it. But if I do want to understand the business,
which I'm trying to, I need to follow the money
through the process of that sixty four million percent markup.
The next step is to travel out across the Caribbean
Sea over the horizon, heading north to Mexico. This is Tijuana,
(12:28):
a gridlock city of over two million people that sits
right up against the Mexico US border. While most of
the cocaine that arrives in Mexico from Cartagena is carried
by ship, we flew and then drove north to get here.
Outside the car window, I can see the border wall
built by President Trump, made out of metal the color
(12:49):
of dried blood. It's one of the most contentious borders
anywhere in the world. Right now, on the Tijuana side
of the wall, a dusty suburb is made of houses,
some of them only shacks made of wood and concrete.
On the other side are broad roads and luxury shopping
centers in the US city of San Diego. The wall
(13:10):
exists to prevent the illegal movement of goods and people
between the two countries, which is why it represents a
crucial barrier in the cocaine business between Latin America where
the cocaine is produced and those richer countries where the
drog can be solved for vast profits. Meaning to someone
in the cocaine business, this wall doesn't present a problem
(13:32):
so much as an opportunity. Looking up, it seems like
nothing could get through the wall or over the top
of it, which is why I'm going to go underneath it.
Speaker 9 (13:44):
They put it like timbers.
Speaker 7 (13:46):
Are they good engineers? Are they well built tunnels?
Speaker 9 (13:49):
Or do they collapse.
Speaker 7 (13:51):
I'm in a small restaurant serving fish tacos, and I'm
told they have a really good spicy soup. It's not
really my go to meal, but it was really good.
It's here that I met an engineer from the Mexican
Criminal Investigation Agency, and I can't tell you his name
in order to protect him. He reaches out and takes
a paper napkin from the restaurant table. He starts sketching
(14:14):
the diagram of tunnels that he says go under the
wall on that US border. He's an expert on these tunnels.
It's his job to find them and shut them down,
and that makes him a target. So they don't just
dig it in They do it in a building, down
through a building, and then we're speaking to a translator,
(14:38):
so one building in Mexico to one building in the US.
Dozens of these tunnels have been discovered in recent years.
While it used to be the Colombians who dominated the
cocaine business, nowadays it's the Mexican cartels that are the
big players. At the port of Cardagenia, a quilo of
(14:59):
cocaine my be worth around twelve hundred US dollars wholesale
in Mexico, that value can be ten times higher. Get
that killer of cocaine across the border to the US,
and its value doubles again. We finish our tacos and
head outside. The engineer tells me tens of thousands of cars,
(15:19):
trucks and people cross between Tijuana and San Diego each day,
but all of them can be stopped and searched by
authorities at the border. We walk up to the lock
gates of what looks like an abandoned warehouse within sight
of the border wall. The engineer's colleagues from the Mexican
Criminal Investigation Agency are waiting. They're dressed in black, they're
(15:41):
wearing masks and carrying automatic rifles. One takes a pair
of bolt cutters to the padlock guns raised. The police
go down into the basement of the warehouse. We go
into the bathroom where next to a toilet cubicle, a
hole has been smashed into the floor. It's maybe a
(16:03):
meter wide. The police go down into the darkness and
I follow.
Speaker 8 (16:09):
So here we can see one of the chambers where
we can see the dorms, and part of the area
where they had all the tools. In the front, we
can see their rule where they say all the cleaning.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
Products this property, and then it's connecting to the other
property on the site.
Speaker 7 (16:41):
These tunnels of vital assets for the cartels. They're precious.
They can take months to build by gang members who
live down here in the dark and dirt all throughout
that time. It's dangerous and dirty work. They're forced to
do it. They've made an error and this is their punishment.
Or if I don't dig these tunnels, their family will
(17:03):
be killed.
Speaker 8 (17:04):
We have the border lane which connects them to the US.
Speaker 7 (17:11):
The engineer tells me how the tunnels work. The entries
are hidden in buildings controlled by the cast holes, often
their warehouses, but really any building near the border can
be used. Cocaine is carried through the tunnels and emerges
through the floor of a building on the other side
of the wall. In San Diego, California. There are no
customs checks down here. It's a short journey. Even the
(17:34):
longest tunnel ever discovered was a little over a kilometer.
On the Mexican side, Tunnel entrances are found everywhere. There
was even one across the road from the main station
of the country's police force, the National Guard. The tunnel
went right under their feet.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
And then when you go into the warehouse, then you'll
find the property on the other side. In the US, what.
Speaker 8 (18:02):
Looks it looks like we might be able to boy in, but.
Speaker 7 (18:08):
We walk into a long, low corridor. The floor is black,
muddy dirt, and on our left, cut into the foundations
of the building is an entrance.
Speaker 9 (18:23):
I'm down here in a Narco tunnel, or about eighty
minutes from the Mexican border, and to be honest, it's
just quite frightening. There's some timber that's been put in
here to try and reinforce the tunnel, but it's wet,
it's molder. You can actually feel the moisture on the timber.
As you're walking around, it's really really dark. We've got
some torches here and they're doing a bit, but not
that much. I've no idea how someone to live down here.
(18:46):
The air like. I'm actually trying to sucking air because
it's just really think there's not much oxygen. They have
sort of extractor fans that they use to try and
get air into it.
Speaker 7 (18:55):
I'm actually trying to struggling to breathe here.
Speaker 9 (18:58):
They've got to risk their lives every time they go
through the tunnel in case it collapses. It's just extreme
the lengths that people will go to to sell drugs.
Speaker 7 (19:13):
Climbing out of the tunnel, I'm covered in mud and dirt.
It's a relief to see the light again. The engineer
I met in the Fish Taco restaurant and the translator
walk out with me. They tell me the border is
riddled with these tunnels. No one knows how many. Over
the years, dozens have been discovered by authorities, but given
(19:35):
the border itself stretches for over three thousand kilometers, there
must be others down there. Later, after we've cleaned ourselves up,
the translator and I set out to find out more.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
Felipe my name is Phelipe.
Speaker 7 (19:56):
Felipe is the head of Mexico's criminal investigation agency. He's
a broad man, square shouldered, the side party and black
classes wearing a dark suit. He looks more like a
bank executive than a policeman, the kind of person you
could do business with. I asked him to tell me
(20:17):
about the drug cartels.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
They have involved a lot. Our main client or customer
would be the US. We know and we have the
evidence that there are lots of presence of Mexican cartails
in Europe, in Alexandro and other countries abroad. There are lots.
Speaker 10 (20:41):
Of criminal organizations that come here to do some tourist
activities to try to obtain contacts.
Speaker 3 (20:52):
They don't really operate in Mexico because the cartoons in
Mexico they have a really good control of all the activities.
Is that they're on their teach. However, there are clients.
They don't look like they're criminals. There are just sending
messages across different places.
Speaker 7 (21:12):
So the broker in deals, they are arranging shipments here
to buy from the cartels.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
Yes, that's correct.
Speaker 7 (21:20):
The cartails are building business relationships with organized crime in China,
Southeast Asia. The Middle East and Europe anywhere you can
get a cargo ship or a plane to another. Way
they are changing is through what other businesses would call diversification.
For the cartails, this has meant new product lines expanding
into other addictive legal and illegal drugs like methanphetamine and fentanyl,
(21:45):
a prescription opioid.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
It is profitable because it's just a business.
Speaker 7 (21:51):
In terms of the business operation. While cocaine has smuggled
through the tunnels heading north, I'd also heard about guns
from the US on any other direction. I asked Felipe
about it.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
That's our main concern because we verified that after three
or four days that someone purchased a weapon in Texas.
We have it here in Mexico and you only need
to have triber license in the US to be able
(22:30):
to buy a gun.
Speaker 7 (22:35):
Those high colorable weapons brought in from Texas have made
Mexico quite simply frightening. The power of those guns make
murder easy.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Organization analysis the problems.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
Between the different cartails. I normally they solved that through
killing people, and unfortunately we have lots of corpse and
we have not been able to identify most people belong
to that, and there are lots of clandestine grapes.
Speaker 7 (23:14):
The wayfully Paid describes it, the Mexican place sometimes struggle
to find, identify, or't even count the tens of thousands
of Mexicans every year who were killed in drug related murders.
As an outsider visiting his country, it's hard to come
to terms with that fact. But also as an outsider,
it's easy to think of it as a Mexican problem,
(23:36):
something caused by the fact the world supply of cocaine
comes from here and from nearby countries.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
It's difficult to combat such a serious crime, and Mexico
alone cannot do it. So we need to work together
to find out the routes and different information about all
this criminals activities.
Speaker 7 (24:03):
Felipe says, Mexico can't do this alone. They need other
countries to help them, not just the US where cocaine
is smuggled under the border in those tunnels much further afield.
I'm thinking about that eight hundred kilo hall of cocaine
seized by police in Cartagena at the start of this episode.
(24:24):
For centuries, ships have come to ports like Cartagena and
others across Latin America and loaded up with commodities like gold,
sugar or coffee before transporting them to where they could
make much more profit. Today, the same thing happened with cocaine.
To really understand that global business, we want to follow
(24:47):
this trade and that's going to take us on the
next part of our journey away from the US Mexico
border to another lucrative market, one that's over five thousand
miles away across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. It's here
I'll hand the story over at Fiona Hamilton, the chief
(25:08):
reporter on The Times who started this episode.
Speaker 4 (25:17):
This is Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. I've just
got off the train. It's drizzling, it's gray, it's a
little bit drab and cold, but it takes just a
few minutes to walk over a busy intersection of trams
and cyclists to reach the beautiful central area, the famous
network of canals lined by old terraced houses and cobbled streets.
(25:39):
I'm here though, because in recent years the Netherlands has
become a key distribution hub for the international cocaine business.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
I used to work in a coffee shop in the
Red Light district and there were people talking about what
was going on in the marijuana and I find that
quite fascinating because it's like a shadow economy where a
lot is going on which normal public will never see.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
This is Valutllowman's I'm working for the Dutch newspaper her
Baro and I'm covering the crime beat and I'm writing
about organized crime. Wuta has spent fifteen years reporting on
the drugs business. He says the Netherlands has a unique
position in the global cocaine supply market.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
In my opinion, it's stupid to look at cocaine trade
on a national level because this is an international trade.
It's just a commodity that has to go from A
to B.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Actually it works like regular trade, but it has a
dark side to it as well.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
Somewhere in the noughties cocaine lords from South America started
to target European market. What they did was they shipped
it to West Africa, then they would move it over Morocco.
They were smuggling hashis into Europe and they were using
those old lines to smuggle cocaine into Europe. And who
(27:18):
were involved in this young Moroccan guys who had family
in the Netherlands, and they worked together with local guys
and after a while they decided, okay, so let's shortened
the line. So if we could get it directly to
Antwerp or to Rotterdam, it's easier for us cheaper as
well because we have to bribe less people. So that's
(27:39):
when they started to shift the lines from Africa towards
Rotterdam and Antwerp.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Those two ports, Rotterdam and the Netherlands, where almost half
a billion tons of goods moved through each year, and
Antwerp in Belgium are the biggest in Europe. They sit
in a huge river delta that connects the North Sea
to multiple European countries.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
Most of the cocaine that get smuggled through the ports
of Rotterdam and Antwerp is used for the foreign markets,
so it's actually like a transfer hub for European cocaine.
That's the way she look at it. England's always been
one of the biggest drugs markets from the Netlands. The
bulk of cocaine that comes through the Netlands will go
(28:28):
to England. What has been happening since twenty twelve is
that we saw the rise of a new generation of
criminals and that was first established in Amsterdam where we
had like a double murder. Two young boys got shocked
to pieces with AK forty sevens.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
The victims were aged just twenty one and twenty eight.
And we're gone down in a drive by shooting on
New Year's Eve after a shipment of cocaine went missing.
The likely target of the attack was another man, a
suspected gang boss. The murders happened in front of family homes.
The next day, the city's mayor called Amsterdam quote the
(29:10):
wild West.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
There have always been murders in the underworld, but the
level of violence that was something new and what happened
was from twenty thirteen to two thy and sixteen, there
were a lot of murders. We saw a severed head
being put in front of a coffee shop in Amslam,
and we have a lot of explosions nowadays. You've got
(29:34):
bombs being put in front of people's houses and stuff
like that. All these things were like unheard of before
in the Nelans.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
So why is the cocaine business so violent? Yes, the
answer is partly money. People will do a lot of
things to make themselves rich, especially without sixty four million
percent markup. But it's also because the cocaine industry is illegal,
meaning it's not regulated. If you're a drug boss who
(30:06):
has a problem with arrival, there's no competition and market
authority you can turn to. There's no watchdog or civil
court to decide your dispute, so you turn to violence.
The kind of violence we once associated with places like
Columbia and Mexico is now on the streets of Europe.
In this way, the cocaine trade actually changes the countries
(30:28):
in which it takes place.
Speaker 7 (30:33):
It corrupts them corruption.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
I mean, the best way to get cocaine into a
country is if you have corrupt guys at customs.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
I want to look more closely at that part of
this multinational business. So my next stop is Rotterdam, one
of the biggest ports in Europe, struggling to keep the
cartels at bay.
Speaker 7 (31:01):
We have a big problem in the port of Rotterdam
with cocaine. Are you trustworthy or are you also corrupt?
Be mentored to customs and be important.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
To contain it for him, And from that moment you were.
Speaker 7 (31:14):
In and from that moment I was in Yep.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
And I go to the scene where one of the
Netherlands drug bosses had something planned for his rivals that
could have come straight out of a horror film.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
The cameras it's too dangerous.
Speaker 4 (31:32):
You're worried, it's too dangerous to get out. Are you
worried about my safety?
Speaker 7 (31:37):
Of course you are my guest.
Speaker 4 (31:42):
That's next time on Cocaine Inc. Cocaine Inc. Is a
joint investigation from the Times for Sunday Times and News
Call for Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Steven Drill
(32:02):
and me Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam Chanterassak.
The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio
production and editing is by Jasper Lee, with original music
by Tom Burchell additional recording by Jason Edwards and If
you want to get in touch with any questions or
(32:24):
thoughts on the series, email Cocaine Inc. At The Times
dot co dot uk.
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