Each small plastic packet was barely the size of a fingernail and weighed 0.2 grams. Still, bags of white powder seized by police from a Brussels basement were another indication that a surge in cocaine and crack supplies is hitting Europe hard.
And with it comes unprecedented drug violence in Belgium and the Netherlands, whose ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam have proven to be the main gateway for Latin American cocaine cartels to the continent.
In Belgium, the justice minister is forced to live in a safe house, out of the reach of drug gangs. In the Netherlands, murders are hitting more and more prominent people and there are suspicions that the reason the heiress to the Dutch throne had to leave her student life and return home was also related to threats from drug lords. drug.
“We almost have to see it as a war,” said Aukje de Vries, the Netherlands’ state secretary for customs.
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Authorities in the northern Belgian port of Antwerp announced on Tuesday another annual record for cocaine seizures last year: 110 tons, 23% more than in 2021 and more than double the amount seized five years ago.
“It amazed us,” Belgian Finance Minister Vincent Van Peteghem said. “It also means that drugs entering Europe (undetected) through our ports are also increasing. And that of course has a big impact,” he told The Associated Press.
Because with cocaine comes not only addiction, decay, and death, but also violence and gang warfare.
Over the past three years, Antwerp has seen dozens of grenade, arson and small bomb attacks, often linked to gangs trying to carve up the thriving cocaine trade.
On Monday night, the city best known for painter Peter-Paul Rubens and a famous fashion school witnessed the fatal shooting of a child, likely an unwitting victim of the war on drugs.
“An 11-year-old girl who obviously has nothing to do with criminal gangs is now the victim of drug terror that is becoming more and more ruthless,” Antwerp prosecutor Franky De Keyzer said.
A customs officer watches as a truck carrying a container enters an X-ray cargo scanning facility at the Maasvlakte container terminal location in the port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on January 9, 2023. The Cocaine is spreading at an alarming rate in Europe, much of it through the world ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam.
(AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
The situation in Belgium has gotten so bad that even Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne is living in hiding after evidence emerged that drug gangs may be trying to kidnap him, or worse.
In the Netherlands too, where the global port of Rotterdam is located, murder and intimidation have become increasingly common as drug lords go to great lengths to protect their share of the multibillion-dollar market. And last year 50 tons of cocaine was seized which, combined with Antwerp, marked another record year.
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Among the high-profile murder victims in the Netherlands in recent years were a lawyer representing a witness in a drug gangster trial and crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, who was a confidant of the same witness.
Unspecified threats to the heir to the Dutch throne, Princess Amalia, forced her last year to abandon student life in Amsterdam and return home. Security has also reportedly been tightened around Prime Minister Mark Rutte. In both cases, drug-related crime is suspected as a factor.
And in places like Brussels, where the violence might be less spectacular, cocaine and crack are beginning to have a chilling effect in areas like Marolles, a neighborhood so folksy and quaint that it featured in the cartoon adventures of Tintin.
Neighborhood Police Chief Inspector Kris Verborgh said South American cocaine “seems to be, or seems to have become, the new normal.”
Verborgh says that the cost of the base product in Colombia amounts to about 536 dollars per kilo. One kilogram of the finished product can turn into around 70,000 euros on the streets of Belgium.
“It’s a huge amount of money that you can earn relatively easily,” he said.
Because of that, seizures of tens of tons in Antwerp and Rotterdam may still constitute a losing battle in a multi-billion dollar global trade from the Latin American nations of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia to the major cities of Europe.
Brussels’ Marolles is hardly ground zero for that trade and many of the 11,000 people who live in its maze of narrow streets are among the poorest in the city of 1.2 million.
However, in recent months they have been wanted for selling cocaine and crack. Verborgh said each small 0.2-gram dose sells for 20 euros, within the reach of even a beggar seeking instant gratification for whom a traditional 0.8-gram dose costing 50 euros is too expensive.
“They’re really targeting the homeless,” Verborgh said. In the world of a cocaine dealer, it makes economic sense.
Bondsmen sometimes sell ready-to-smoke crack on the sidewalk of once-quiet streets, even in a subway station with families walking by. The gangs begin to intimidate the locals into not screaming, throw rocks at passing police vans and try to turn the streets into no-go zones for the police, who, Verborgh emphasizes, are not giving up.
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Since mid-October there have been 115 arrests in the neighborhood. However, the power of the gangs is such that in half an hour a new vendor can be on the same corner.
And increasingly, young people are attracted to the expanding trade. “Several years ago, we never saw anyone who was 12 or 14 years old. Now we see them being more or less part of gangs,” doing things like policing, Verborgh said.
Last week, Marolles police stumbled upon a cache in an apparently deserted basement where they found cocaine and other drugs, precision scales, a drone, pepper spray and two swords. One of the two teenagers detained there was 14 years old.
“Well, it’s a problem because normally a 12- or 14-year-old should be in school,” Verborgh said.
