Africa is threatening to become the world’s newest drug nightmare as Colombian narcotics barons scheme to turn the continent into a hub for shipping cocaine to Europe, the head of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said on Tuesday.
In an exclusive interview with the Associated Press, DEA administrator Karen Tandy said drug-interdiction officials battling the $300-billion a year global drug trade are also very worried about Africa’s new role as a weigh-station for Europe-bound heroin from south-west Asia, particularly Afghanistan.
”Africa will be, in terms of a drug hotbed, one of our worst nightmares if we don’t get ahead of that curve now,” Tandy said on the sidelines of a major international anti-drug conference being held in Madrid by the DEA and Spain.
Lured by Europe’s voracious appetite for cocaine, the strong value of the euro and lax law-enforcement structures in the poor countries of Africa, Latin American drug-trafficking networks are ”setting up shop” in nations such as Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau and Côte d’Ivoire in the west of the continent and Kenya in the east, Tandy and other DEA officials said in the interview.
Africa ”has emerged as a drug hot spot, a hub, in just the last several years”, Tandy said.
In the case of cocaine, the drug is shipped ready-to-consume by boat to Africa and sent on to Europe by land, plane or ship, or it is stored in Africa, said Russell Benson, the DEA regional director for Europe and Africa.
Traffickers also carry on with traditional smuggling routes, with Spain as the main gateway for cocaine entering Europe, but Africa is a tempting, new and additional conduit because of its spotty law enforcement and porous borders.
”They are looking for a vulnerable spot,” Benson said. ”It is the path of least resistance.”
Added Tandy: ”Drug networks are criss-crossing the globe. There are no direct routes anymore.”
Europe’s appetite for cocaine is strong and growing — Tandy said it is similar to the cocaine craze of the 1980s in the United States — and users on the continent pay in euros, a currency that has risen sharply against the dollar in recent years, making the these consumers an irresistible target for Colombian drug cartels, the DEA said.
The cash flow has led the traffickers to come up with a new money-laundering technique in which they simply smuggle euro notes back home in bulk, millions of euros at a time, rather than employ the old, traceable method of bank transfers.
In Colombia, for instance, traffickers then sell euros on the black market to currency traders at a rate slightly below the aboveboard rate. They lose a bit in the transaction but don’t care because they thus obtain clean Colombian pesos. And euros from drug profits then trickle their way into the economy.
There are so many euros floating around in Latin America these days that of the â,¬1,7-billion that entered the United States in 2006, 90% of that came from Latin America, not Europe, Tandy said.
Tandy was in Madrid to attend the International Drug Enforcement Conference, a 25-year-old forum that the DEA holds each year to meet with colleagues from around the world to discuss the war on illegal drugs.
This is the first time it has been held outside the Americas, and Spain was chosen because of its role as the main gateway for drugs entering Europe and what DEA officials called its tenacious effort to fight this onslaught.
Spain leads Europe for cocaine seizures and is fourth in the world, and accounts for half of all hashish seizures, Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said.
And it and other countries face increasingly ingenious traffickers, now known to use techniques such as dropping loads of cocaine fitted with radio-transmitting buoys into the Atlantic and having ships pick up the drugs, said Maria Marcos Salvador, head of Spain’s Organised Crime Intelligence Centre. — Sapa-AP