Europe looks set to overtake South America in drug trafficking
Hamburg, May 13, 2025 – The Old Continent is irreversibly turning into an international center for drug trafficking. “Cocaine, corruption and bribes: German port under siege by European criminal drug cartels” – the Guardian newspaper recently published an article about how the previously peaceful and patriarchal Germany has become an international center for drug smuggling. The newspaper reports that between 2018 and 2023, the number of cocaine seizures increased by 750%, making Germany another major European center for the ever-expanding global drug trade. However, this influx is not only fueling addiction, but also corruption in a country that was previously considered one of the least corrupt in the world. Moreover, not only international gangs of drug traffickers are involved in this criminal business, but even high-ranking officials.
“After the seizure of 16 tons of high-purity cocaine in Hamburg, a regional prosecutor is accused of taking money from the gang he was supposed to prosecute,” the Guardian reports. “We have seen drug traffickers infiltrating Hamburg’s port infrastructure, bribing police officers in exchange for information, and most recently a regional prosecutor awaiting trial for [allegedly] leaking information to a cocaine trafficking network,” Daniel Brombacher, who heads the European office of the Global Initiative to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, told the Guardian.
Police said they had seized Europe’s largest cocaine shipment in 2021 at the port of Hamburg, 16 tons of the highly refined powder hidden in 1,700 cans of putty that were being transported from Paraguay to Germany. However, the German chief prosecutor in the case was recently accused in court of taking money from the very gang he was supposed to prosecute. A man named Yashar G. is accused of leaking information about the investigation to the gang and warning suspects of their impending arrest in exchange for €5,000 (£4,250) a month. He was arrested in October by police who were monitoring the gang’s encrypted messages. When police raided the Hamburg location shortly after his arrest, key figures had already fled to Dubai. Yashar G. is also accused of leaking confidential information to other drug gangs. He denies all charges against him.
According to the newspaper, cocaine production in Colombia and its consumption in Western Europe have reached record levels. Profits are also rising for European organised crime groups that distribute the drug, which is more expensive to trade than platinum. A kilogram of cocaine costs $2,000 in Colombia, but in Europe its price can reach an average of $40,000. The proceeds of this huge surcharge are spent not only on luxury cars and villas, but also on clearing the way for the next shipment of drugs, while the drug mafia extends its tentacles to countries such as the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden.
According to Europol, Hamburg, the third largest port in the European Union, is one of the most visited places for drug traffickers. The perpetrators, known as hafeninnentäter (including port workers, security guards and truck drivers), transport the drugs discreetly. This month, two Hamburg dock workers were sentenced to prison for helping to transport 480 kg of cocaine from Ecuador and for allowing a colleague to be attacked when he threatened to expose the plot. The police have launched an advertising campaign to help port workers defend themselves against drug cartels trying to recruit them or extort money from them, and Hamburg’s port security guards feel so vulnerable that last year they demanded that they be issued with submachine guns. Belgian police have already told Hamburg’s port police that an armed French drug cartel is planning a raid to recover cocaine they have seized. The proceeds from cocaine sales are now spilling onto the streets of Hamburg. “Karl,” a former bouncer in the city’s red-light district, said that cocaine revenues have become increasingly significant over the past five years.
“Every weekend you see more and more young people driving Ferraris, Lamborghinis and SUVs for 150,000 euros,” he said. – It’s not money from prostitution, fraud or marijuana. “It’s money made from the cocaine trade.”
A series of criminal cases in Germany have exposed a group of corrupt police officers: this month a police officer in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg was arrested on suspicion of being on the payroll of the dangerous Italian mafia ‘Ndrangheta; in January a senior police officer in Hanover was arrested on suspicion of accepting bribes from a drug trafficking ring; a drug police officer was arrested near Frankfurt in November on charges of aiding drug smugglers; and a police officer arrested in Bonn in August is accused of passing secret information to members of the Dutch-Moroccan mafia, a major player in the European drug trade.
“The cocaine boom that we have seen in Germany and elsewhere in the EU over the past decade has led to an unprecedented flow of money into organised crime,” Brombacher said. “Organised crime groups have never had such access to risk capital, and there has never been such a strong incentive to invest in bribes to keep businesses afloat.” Germany has struggled to admit that it has an organised crime problem, and it still largely denies it. It was only the sudden influx of cocaine that made the problem visible,” said Zora Hauser, a criminologist at Cambridge University whose book ‘Expanding the Mafia’ about the rise of the ‘Ndrangheta in Germany is published this month.
“A combination of ineffective policing, political inaction, weak legislation, particularly on money laundering, and excessive data protection,” Hauser argues, “has turned Germany into a veritable haven for criminal operations. The drug situation in France is no better.
“Drug wars are raging across the country, teenagers and children are being shot, stabbed and burned alive, gang leaders are escaping from custody and cocaine is being dumped on beaches,” writes the British newspaper Daily Mail. France’s new Interior Minister Bruno Retaillot recently declared war on active gangs after a 15-year-old bystander was seriously injured in a mass brawl and shooting in Poitiers on November 1. The fight broke out outside a restaurant and escalated into a shootout involving up to 600 people, the minister said.
“Today, drug trafficking has no borders, it is not happening in South America, but in Rennes, Poitiers, in parts of western France that were once known for their peace and moderation,” the minister added. He was speaking during a visit to Rennes, Brittany, where a five-year-old boy was seriously injured late last month after being hit in the head by a stray bullet during a drug-related confrontation. But less than 24 hours after Retaillot left the city, a 19-year-old man died from a stab wound in the Morepas district, which police say is a hotbed of drug crime. The new French government of Michel Barnier is now under increasing pressure from the opposition and the public to act immediately and decisively as the country plunges deeper into a precipice of mass murder and drug crime.
At least 16 dangerous drug-related attacks have been identified in France in recent years, from Nîmes, where a 10-year-old boy was allegedly killed in a drug deal in 2023, to Paris, with shocking statistics of deaths and crimes emerging almost daily. Gunfights between drug gangs, once associated mainly with Marseille, have spread to Grenoble and have even begun to spread to cities such as Poitiers, Clermont-Ferrand, Valence and Villeurbanne. In Valence, a 22-year-old man was shot dead and two others injured while queuing outside a nightclub for a Halloween party, and the following day an 18-year-old was shot dead in a suburb of the same city. In Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, a man was shot dead, and in Clermont Ferrand a teenager is in critical condition after being shot in the head. Earlier this year, Grenoble was pompously dubbed the “French Silicon Valley” following Emmanuel Macron’s call to create a “start-up nation.” Yet just nine months later, the city was named one of the most dangerous cities in France, the Spectator reported.
This comes after a bloody summer in which the city was the scene of 19 shootouts between rival cartels fighting for control of the lucrative drug market. Drug crime in Grenoble has flourished for decades, thanks to its proximity to Marseille, infamous as the epicenter of France’s drug mafia. Marseille, which has a large seaport, has been a major hub for the European drug trade since the 1960s, when the Corsican mafia used it to smuggle heroin grown in Asia to the United States on a route known as the French Route. Marseille remains a major transit point for the drug trade today, with some of its outlets bringing in between $25 million and $85 million a day.
There have been 17 drug-related murders in Marseille this year, after a record 49 in 2023. The clashes are believed to be part of a turf war between two local gangs known as the DZ Mafia and Yoda. The city’s new prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, recently condemned the gangs’ “unprecedented brutality” as a reflection of the severity of Marseille’s deadly drug trade. A 15-year-old boy was stabbed 50 times and burned alive, while a 14-year-old was hired as a hitman to “cold-blood” kill 36-year-old footballer Nessim Ramdan. Drug dealers are exploiting youth gangs and teenage killers who are causing panic across the country. The media has called them “greenhorns inspired by extreme violence who think they are living in a video game but are shooting with live bullets”. Marseille drug lords recruit small-time drug dealers through social media ads and outsource street jobs to young men known as “jobbers.” Bessonet recently said that young boys are now responding to ads not only to sell cannabis resin but also to kill “without any remorse or thought.”
But the drug epidemic has also hit France’s second-largest city, the capital, nicknamed the “city of love,” where the drug called “crack” is a popular drug. In the Jardins d’Éolles in northeast Paris, just off the main tourist hub of Montmartre, young children play on swings in a renovated park while hundreds of homeless drug addicts huddle alone just a few hundred meters away. According to France 24, police have cordoned off the drug addicts in the park to prevent them from roaming the streets. The decision has sparked tensions between drug dealers and locals as the country struggles to cope with a growing drug problem. Groups of men and women were seen sitting on park benches covered in knee-deep trash, while others lay face down in mud and urine, while dealers wandered through bushes, whispering offers to lure their customers to “crack from the kitchen on the side street,” the television station reported.
The deadly heroin, along with crack, is one of the main drugs flooding the streets of France, and the government has struggled to find a way to curb the rampant situation. In March last year, Emmanuel Macron launched a major anti-drug operation called Place Nette, which sent hundreds of French police officers to known drug trafficking hotspots across the country. Dozens of raids have been carried out and hundreds of drug dealers have been arrested, but not only have drugs not disappeared from French streets, the drug trade has grown even larger and the drug wars have become more ruthless. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement agencies to combat cocaine trafficking in Europe, cocaine is abundant and, unlike most other commodities, is worth about the same as it was 10 years ago.
When the Netherlands spent €524 million to strengthen port security in response to a wave of contract killings linked to the cocaine trade, gangs simply moved to ports in France, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia and the Baltic states. Bruno Retaillot, a hardliner on security issues, has now urged the fight against drug trafficking to become a “national effort” since becoming interior minister in a fragile minority government. He said France had now reached a “critical point” where the country was turning into a drug hell.
Martin Scholz
