https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/12/28/cocaine-consumption-soars-europe-asia/A global boom in cocaine trafficking defies decades of anti-drug efforts
The cocaine trade is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history as Albanian traffickers expand the market in Europe for the drug.
December 28, 2024
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador — The drug lord had already escaped the law in three countries, and he planned to do it again.
In less than a decade, Dritan Rexhepi had built a smuggling business that ran from the fields of Colombia to the ports of Ecuador and on to the streets of Europe, Italian and Latin American investigators said, rivaling the influence of Mexico’s powerful cartels. His brand, carved into cocaine packages, was “Bello” — beautiful.
The Albanian’s rise from gunman in his home country to transatlantic kingpin is part of a global explosion in the cocaine industry, a trade that is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history. South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Cultivation of coca crops in Colombia, the origin of most of the world’s cocaine, has tripled, according to U.S. figures, and the amount of land used to grow the drug’s base ingredient is more than five times what it was when the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993. And production keeps soaring. A record 2,757 tons of cocaine was produced worldwide in 2022, a 20 percent increase over 2021, according to the most recent global drug report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
“It’s going up and up and up,” said Thomas Pietschmann, a research officer at the UNODC. “A few years ago, people were saying the future is synthetic drugs. … Right now, it’s still cocaine.”
For decades, cocaine consumers were primarily Americans, and interdiction was a U.S. government priority. But despite the tens of billions of dollars spent in the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America, the industry has not only grown, it has globalized, with new routes, new markets and new criminal enterprises. Nearly every one of Latin America’s mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug, with Ecuador now one of the most important cocaine transit points in the world. Demand is soaring in Europe, which rivals the United States as the world’s top cocaine destination. Cocaine seizures in E.U. countries grew fivefold between 2011 and 2021, and exceeded those in the United States in 2022. While the United States remains a huge market, cocaine use has declined by about 20 percent since 2006, according to UNODC.
Balkan, Italian, Turkish and Russian criminal groups have all swept into Latin America for a piece of the action. Few have managed to muscle their way into cocaine trafficking quite like Albanian criminal networks, investigators and analysts say.
“We know there’s not only one channel for cocaine,” said Marco Martino, a senior Italian police official in charge of coordinating counternarcotics operations. But “the Albanians,” he said, “are the best and the biggest.”
As cocaine production was exploding, investigators said, Albanian criminal networks rode the opportunity it presented. They were critical to getting the drug to Europe and fueling consumption across the continent.
Rexhepi, 44, built much of his empire from an Ecuadorian prison cell, fostering connections with Latin American gangs and turning his cellblock into an executive suite. A lawyer representing him in Albania declined to comment. Rexhepi, in a 2015 appeal, denied any involvement in drug trafficking, “either as a perpetrator, accomplice or accessory.” But in 2021, Italy sought his extradition, warning the authorities in Ecuador in a letter from its embassy in Quito that Rexhepi was the “undisputed leader” of an Albanian drug trafficking network with global reach and access to “infinite quantities of cocaine.”
Rexhepi’s emergence as a feared power broker within a federal prison in Cotopaxi province was symptomatic of the collapse of government control in Ecuador. But with the authorities in Rome seeking to imprison him for drug trafficking, he decided it was time to move again.
A local judge, citing a medical need, ordered him into home detention in an upscale neighborhood here in the port city of Guayaquil in August 2021, according to Ecuadorian officials.
Then, predictably, Rexhepi vanished.
This investigation into the global expansion of the cocaine business and the rise of Albanian drug traffickers is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials in Ecuador, Colombia, Europe and the United States, gang members in Ecuador, and thousands of pages of court documents from Ecuador, Albania and Italy. It reveals how criminal networks led by Albanians infiltrated Ecuador’s ports, judiciary, prison system and security forces to gain control of key parts of the cocaine supply chain and trigger a deluge of the drug in Europe — a more than $12 billion annual cocaine market, according to the E.U. Drugs Agency.
“With these profits, these organizations manage to permeate all public and private institutions, corrupting any structure,” said Ecuador’s former anti-narcotics director, Gen. Willian Villarroel, in an interview.
Drug trafficking entrepreneurs from Albania, a country of only about 2.8 million people, have begun to rival the world’s most powerful cartels by working with them, not against them, transforming how the trade is run. The new networks, investigators say, are often criminal coalitions of disparate and independent groups, rather than hierarchical, violently competitive cartels.
A boom in cocaine production and the expanding power of criminal organizations pose a growing threat in Latin America, the United States’ biggest trading partner. In a multipart series, The Washington Post is examining how organized crime groups have vastly expanded their influence, corroding the region’s democracies, strangling commerce and propelling thousands of people to the U.S. southern border. Europol is aware of dozens of “Albanian-speaking” clans or organized criminal networks currently operating in Europe, Robert Fay, the head of Europol’s drug unit, said in an interview.
“It’s not about how many people you have,” said Fatjona Mejdini, an Albanian analyst with the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “It’s about the right alliances you can form.”
From his prison cell in Ecuador, Rexhepi paved the way. He befriended leaders of Ecuador’s most powerful gang, Los Choneros, who were already working for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, according to one of the gang’s founding members, who, like some others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
That led to strategic partnerships with both South American traffickers and gang leaders across Europe. His goal was simple, investigators and analysts said: sell as much cocaine as possible with abundant profit for all parties to the deals.
“Rexhepi is the pioneer,” Mejdini said.
Soaring cocaine production
The explosion in cocaine production can be traced back to the demobilization of Colombia’s largest leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). A historic peace deal with the country’s government in 2016 ended the longest-running civil conflict in the hemisphere, a conflict in which the United States played a critical role.
Since the start of the counternarcotics and security package known as Plan Colombia in 2000, the United States has sent about $14 billion in funding to Colombia, at least 60 percent of it for the military and police. The plan focused in large part on combating the country’s cocaine production and export, which the FARC controlled, using the proceeds to fund its insurgency and secure territory.
When the guerrillas laid down their weapons, a proliferation of smaller armed groups, driven by profit rather than ideology, swept into coca-producing areas.
These drug traffickers “no longer have political interests,” said Leonardo Correa, the head of the UNODC mission in Colombia. “What they want is to get the drug out as fast as possible, to make the most money possible.”
Instead of sourcing coca leaves from fields in the center of the country, Colombia’s cocaine producers have created “enclaves” near the country’s borders and coasts, to more easily export the drug. These enclaves became a one-stop shop for a process that was previously dispersed — now, the cultivation, extraction and refining of the drug all happen in the same area before it is moved across nearby borders. Three of the four most productive enclaves border Ecuador.
Producers have even improved the plant itself, creating remarkably productive hybrid crops that extract more alkaloid from the same quantity of leaves. The government of Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president and a fierce opponent of the U.S.-led “war on drugs,” has vowed to dismantle drug trafficking networks, but it shifted its focus away from the eradication of coca crops. Analysts say this has only further fueled cultivation, and could draw harsh criticism from the incoming Trump administration.
The amount of land used to plant coca in Colombia grew by 10 percent in 2023, but the productivity of that land exploded: Cocaine production grew by 53 percent, according to the UNODC. As a result, these enclaves — making up 14 percent of Colombian territory that has coca crops — produce about 40 percent of the country’s coca, according to the UNODC. This has left other areas of the country struggling to sell their coca crops.
As Colombian criminal groups industrialized their systems, European mafias offered the prospect of new routes to avoid intensified U.S. patrols along Colombia’s coast. Cocaine started to move in ever bigger quantities through countries including Ecuador, Costa Rica and Paraguay and onto ships bound for Europe.
In Ecuador, a country that does not produce cocaine, authorities seized more of the drug in 2023 than the combined total seizures of Peru and Bolivia, the second- and third-largest production countries. This year, through mid-December, Ecuador seized 251 tons of cocaine, up from 197 last year. More than 81 tons were destined for Europe, compared with only about 18 that were intended for the United States and Mexico.
For just one kilogram of cocaine, worth $2,000 or so in Colombia, drug traffickers could earn $25,000 by smuggling it to the United States but at least $31,500 if it reached Europe, according to U.N. and E.U. officials.
In 2022, for the sixth year in a row, E.U. states reported a record number of cocaine seizures, with Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands registering the most. Almost 70 percent of those drug seizures were from container ships that arrived from Latin America.
A crucial transit point
It was one of the world’s largest single cocaine seizures on record — and authorities stumbled on it by accident.
In late January, Ecuadorian military officers followed a lead about a cache of weapons and explosives hidden at a pig farm in Los Ríos province. Instead, in an underground cellar, they found 22,000 bricks of cocaine — 22 tons in total, a haul valued at more than $660 million on the European market. The packages were labeled with airline logos: Iberia, KLM, Qatar, Jet2.
The cache belonged to an Albanian criminal group, according to intelligence officials and Ecuadorian court records.
For an Ecuadorian government that had nearly collapsed due to drug violence, it was hailed as a major blow to the country’s cocaine trade. It also confirmed Ecuador’s global role as a crucial transit point and logistical hub for the world’s most powerful drug traffickers.
Wedged between the cocaine-producing countries of Colombia and Peru, Ecuador became an ideal location for traffickers, investigators said. It had limited coastal surveillance, fragile institutions that were corruptible, lenient visa policies allowing long-term residence for foreigners, and a robust pool of local gangs eager to team up with European groups to transport drugs.
