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