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In my opinion, it's stupid to look at cocaine trade on a national level because this is an international trade. It's just a commodity that has to go from A to B. Actually, it works like regular trade, but it has a dark side to it as well. Just a recommendation, you know, the labels with the information. It's not seen because that's judicial evidence. Okay. Okay.
Cartagena is a city on the north coast of Colombia. It's picturesque, full of cobbled streets and brightly coloured colonial buildings that look out over the Caribbean Sea. Centuries ago, wooden ships would arrive here to be loaded with gold bound for Europe.
Today, Stephen Drill is at the city's port, where hundreds of container ships still arrive every year, but to be filled with another kind of precious cargo. Right now, Stephen's been shown into a locked room, which is mostly empty, except for a huge pile of bags stuffed full of cocaine, containing the small mountain of drugs that has been seized by customs in the past month.
Yesterday they seized 800 kilograms in the ceiling of two containers. Think about that for a moment. 800 kilograms of cocaine seized in a single day. And no one seems to think that's unusual. One of the customs officials goes over and picks out a black duffel bag, drags it back across the floor.
These are the tulas that are used to contaminate the ships on board. Usually 50, 60 kilograms. The customs official opens the bag up. This is one brick. You can see the drop. And starts pulling out blocks the size of bricks, which are shrink-wrapped in black plastic, labelled with the name Givenchy.
Inside is a solid block of white powder, which has nothing to do with the luxury fashion house. So 800 kilos yesterday in the black bags. Just the black stuff, but the white stuff. As brick after brick of cocaine is unloaded on the tiled floor, Stephen is told the street value of this 800 kilo haul would be about 600 million US dollars.
That's the total amount people will pay for it in countries like the UK and Australia. 600 million US is almost half a billion pounds, or nearly a billion Aussie dollars. It's pretty hard to get your head around those numbers. But what really makes my head spin is this. If you're the drug gang hoping to sell this cocaine, then actually while it's still here in Cartagena, it isn't worth very much at all.
In fact, if you were running an international drug smuggling operation, it's the kind of loss you wouldn't even notice. I'm Fiona Hamilton, and from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia, this is Cocaine Inc. Episode 3, the 64 million percent markup. I'll leave it to Stephen, who's looking at this drug haul, to explain it. OK, think about it this way.
In the Colombian jungles, the raw coca leaves that are used to make cocaine are worth about 0.00062 US dollars per gram. That's according to figures from the United Nations. Now, that's not much. Here in Cartagena, the price of processed cocaine, it's much higher. It's about 1.2 dollars per gram. And once it's shipped from here to the US, where these blocks of coke were likely headed, the price goes up again.
to 30 US dollars. And that's the wholesale price, meaning the price paid by the drug gangs. The retail price, so the price paid on the street by cocaine users, that's more like 120 dollars per gram. By the time the cocaine's been smuggled across the Atlantic to Europe, it can be even more expensive. And if it's moved all the way to Australia, by which time it may have been shipped through several different countries, the cost really goes up.
as high as 400 US dollars. Meaning the difference in price between raw coca in Colombia and cocaine bought on the streets of Sydney is a 64 million percent markup. And those kind of profits can make people commit violence. But also, there's something else going on here. While the markup is insane, there's another issue at play. When the police make these big cocaine seizures, they're not technically misrepresenting the figures.
But what they do is pick the very highest figure that they can, the street value, which makes the size of that cocaine seizure sound really, really impressive. When actually, the value to the drug gang involved is much, much less. Meaning the seizure isn't worth what the authorities say it is. I'll explain that more in just a moment. Because as I'm starting to look at the figures and getting ready to leave Colombia and head north for Mexico...
I get told, wait, there's somebody else you need to talk to. And not just any someone. This is someone flying in by helicopter especially. Buenas tardes, Major General. Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed. Thank you. This is the boss of the Colombian National Police Force, Director General William Rene Salamanca Ramirez.
He's the man leading the war against the cocaine cartels in this country. He's rugged with close cropped hair and wears a green uniform with gold buttons. Only days before our interview, a drug gang killed one of his officers. Speaking to a translator, I asked him how dangerous their job is. How dangerous is the work of the Colombian police?
It is a very demanding work. There are some settings in the Colombian territory
where we still need to be accompanied by special detachment of security because of the security conditions. There are many places around the country in what we call the deep Colombia where there are very strong attacks by terrorist groups. He talks about terrorists.
And an expression that's become common in Colombia is narco-terrorism. That word is used to describe the actions of these criminal businesses. In Colombia, a hired assassin charges as little as 500 US dollars to execute a police officer. About 14,000 people are killed a year, some of them hacked to death by drug gangs.
Yes, all criminals and offenders are always rethinking the way they act for the police forces around the world to reinvent themselves, to be retrained and to learn in order to be able to face these challenges. And Colombia is not the exception. Colombia isn't the exception, he says. The power of those running the cocaine business is international.
It's that 64 million percent markup driving the entire trade. So long as there is supply and demand,
There's going to be a cost. And both states pay for this cost. And there are some families that have lost their children. And so we're losing, both societies are losing, both Australians and Colombians. Both societies, he says, are losing from the drug trade.
Now let's go back to those bags full of cocaine bricks labeled Givenchy being unloaded onto the floor in a locked room in the port of Cartagena. The Australian police tell me it's part of a seizure worth around 600 million US dollars. But actually that's not quite right. Sitting down with a calculator on my phone, I work out that's very much the maximum possible figure.
$600 million is what it's worth only at the end of the supply chain. When it's cut up, divided into those little ziplock plastic baggies and sold by the gram on the street in Sydney or Melbourne. Do you understand why that's important? Imagine you're having dinner at a really fancy restaurant. Because I'm from Australia, let's say it's the Opera House overlooking Sydney Harbour, just about dusk. For dessert, you choose a creme caramel from the menu. It costs you $40.
and is made using another Colombian export, sugar. That sugar has been harvested, refined and shipped. Along the way, it's been bought and sold in bulk by different companies or middlemen who each make a profit. Eventually, it gets mixed with other different ingredients. Sometimes it's baked and then it's hand delivered to your table. Delicious as it is, you wouldn't use the cost of that $40 pudding to calculate the value of the saccharofluorose sugar lying at the docks in Cartagena.
That'd be madness. Except that's exactly what law enforcement all around the world is doing.
New at 11, more than $1 million worth of cocaine. $40 million worth of cocaine. 3,200 pounds of cocaine. Street value, $77 million. $320 million. Street value of more than $1 billion. In all, drugs with a street value of 1.6 billion pounds. 1.6 billion pounds.
That 800 kilograms of coke laid out on the floor in Cartagena isn't worth $600 million. Not to the cartel who bought it and will need to replace it. To them, here in Colombia, it probably costs less than a million US dollars. So it'd be wrong for anyone to describe it as a $600 million blow against the drug gangs. And that's important because throwing crazy numbers around about the cocaine trade helps nobody to understand it.
But if I do want to understand the business, which I'm trying to, I need to follow the money through the process of that 64 million percent markup. The next step is to travel out across the Caribbean Sea over the horizon, heading north to Mexico. This is Tijuana, a gridlocked city of over 2 million people that sits right up against the Mexico-US border. While most of the cocaine that arrives in Mexico from Cartagena is carried by ship,
We flew and then drove north to get here. Outside the car window, I can see the border wall built by President Trump. Made out of metal the color of dried blood. It's one of the most contentious borders anywhere in the world right now. On the Tijuana side of the wall, a dusty suburb is made of houses. Some of them only shacks made of wood and concrete. On the other side are broad roads and luxury shopping centers in the US city of San Diego.
The wall exists to prevent the illegal movement of goods and people between the two countries, which is why it represents a crucial barrier in the cocaine business between Latin America, where the cocaine is produced, and those richer countries where the drug can be sold for vast profits. Meaning, to someone in the cocaine business, this wall doesn't present a problem so much as an opportunity. Looking up, it seems like nothing could get through the wall or over the top of it.
Which is why I'm going to go underneath it. Do they put like timber, are they good engineers? Are they well built tunnels or do they collapse? I'm in a small restaurant serving fish tacos and I'm told they have a really good spicy soup. It's not really my go-to meal but it was really good. It's here that I met an engineer from the Mexican Criminal Investigation Agency and I can't tell you his name in order to protect him.
He reaches out and takes a paper napkin from the restaurant table. He starts sketching the diagram of tunnels that he says go under the wall on that US border. He's an expert on these tunnels. It's his job to find them and shut them down. And that makes him a target. So they don't just dig in. They do it in a building, down through a building and then... We're speaking through a translator.
So one building in Mexico to one building in the US. Dozens of these tunnels have been discovered in recent years. While it used to be the Colombians who dominated the cocaine business, nowadays it's the Mexican cartels that are the big players. At the port of Cartagena, a kilo of cocaine might be worth around 1200 US dollars wholesale. In Mexico, that value can be 10 times higher.
Get that kilo of cocaine across the border to the US and its value doubles again. We finish our tacos and head outside. The engineer tells me tens of thousands of cars, trucks and people cross between Tijuana and San Diego each day, but all of them can be stopped and searched by authorities at the border. We walk up to the locked gates of what looks like an abandoned warehouse within sight of the border wall. The engineer's colleagues from the Mexican Criminal Investigation Agency are waiting.
They're dressed in black, they're wearing masks and carrying automatic rifles. One takes a pair of bolt cutters to the padlock. Guns raised, the police go down into the basement of the warehouse. We go into the bathroom where next to a toilet cubicle a hole has been smashed into the floor. It's maybe a metre wide. The police go down into the darkness and I follow.
So here we can see one of the chambers where we can see the dorms and part of the area where they had all the tools. And at the end, in front, we can see their...
The room where they save all the cleaning products. This is the end of this property. And then it's connected to the other property on the side. These tunnels are vital assets for the cartels. They're precious. They can take months to build by gang members who live down here in the dark and dirt all throughout that time.
It's dangerous and dirty work. They're forced to do it. They've made an error and this is their punishment. Or if they don't dig these tunnels, their family will be killed. We have 80 meters to the borderline which connects them to the US. The engineer tells me how the tunnels work. The entries are hidden in buildings controlled by the cartels. Often they're warehouses, but really any building near the border can be used.
Cocaine is carried through the tunnels and emerges through the floor of a building on the other side of the wall in San Diego, California. There are no customs checks down here. It's a short journey. Even the longest tunnel ever discovered was a little over a kilometer. On the Mexican side, tunnel entrances are found everywhere. There was even one across the road from the main station of the country's police force, the National Guard. The tunnel went right under their feet.
And then when you go into the warehouse, then you'll find the property on the other side in the US. It looks like we might be able to go in both. We walk into a long, low corridor. The floor is black, muddy dirt. And on our left, cut into the foundations of the building, is an entrance. I'm down here in a narco tunnel.
We're about 80 metres from the Mexican border and to be honest it's just quite frightening. There's some timber that's been put in here to try and reinforce the tunnel but it's wet, it's mouldy, you can actually feel the moisture on the timber as you're walking around. It's really really dark, we've got some torches here and they're doing a bit but not that much.
I've no idea how someone would live down here. The air, like I'm actually trying to suck in air because it's just really thin, there's not much oxygen. They have sort of extractor fans that they use to try and get air into it. I'm actually just kind of struggling to breathe here. They've got to risk their lives every time they go through the tunnel in case it collapses. It's just extreme the lengths that people will go to to sell drugs.
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on trial Hillsong ad free on Crymax Plus on Apple Podcasts today or wherever you get your podcasts. Climbing out of the tunnel, I'm covered in mud and dirt. It's a relief to see the light again. The engineer I met in the fish taco restaurant and the translator walk out with me. They tell me the border is riddled with these tunnels. No one knows how many. Over the years, dozens have been discovered by authorities. But given the border itself stretches for over 3,000 kilometres,
there must be others down there later after we've cleaned ourselves up the translator and i set out to find out more my name is felipe de jesus felipe is the head of mexico's criminal investigation agency he's a broad man square-shouldered
with a side parting and black glasses. Wearing a dark suit, he looks more like a bank executive than a policeman, the kind of person you could do business with. I asked him to tell me about the drug cartels.
They have evolved a lot. Our main client or customer would be the US. We know and we have the evidence that there are lots of presence of Mexican cartels in Europe.
In other countries abroad, there are lots of criminal organizations that come here to do some tourist activities to try to obtain contacts. They don't really operate in Mexico because the cartels in Mexico, they have a really good control of all the activities that they undertake.
However, they are clients. They don't look like they're criminals. They are just sending messages across different places. So they're brokering deals, they're arranging shipments here to buy from the cartels. That's correct. Yes, that's correct. The cartels are building business relationships with organised crime in China, South East Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Anywhere you can get a cargo ship or a plane to.
Another way they are changing is through what other businesses would call diversification. For the cartels, this has meant new product lines, expanding into other addictive legal and illegal drugs, like methamphetamine and fentanyl, a prescription opioid. It is profitable because it's just a business. In terms of the business operation, while cocaine is smuggled through the tunnels heading north, I'd also heard about guns from the US going in the other direction. I asked Felipe about it.
That's our main concern. Weapons. Because we've verified that after three or four days that someone purchased a weapon in Texas,
We have it here in Mexico and you only need to have your driver's license in the US to be able to buy a gun there. Those high-caliber weapons brought in from Texas have made Mexico quite simply frightening. The power of those guns make murder easy. The problems between the different cartels are
Normally, they solve that through killing people. And unfortunately, we have lots of corpses, and we have not been able to identify those people who belong to that, and there are lots of clandestine graves. Why Felipe describes it?
The Mexican police sometimes struggle to find, identify, or even count the tens of thousands of Mexicans every year who are killed in drug-related murders. As an outsider visiting his country, it's hard to come to terms with that fact. But also as an outsider, it's easy to think of it as a Mexican problem. Something caused by the fact the world's supply of cocaine comes from here
and from nearby countries. So it's difficult to combat such a serious crime, and Mexico alone cannot do it, so we need to work together to find out the routes and different information about all these criminal activities. Felipe says Mexico can't do this alone. They need other countries to help them.
Not just the US, where cocaine is smuggled under the border in those tunnels. Much further afield. I'm thinking about that 800 kilo haul of cocaine seized by police in Cartagena at the start of this episode. For centuries, ships have come to ports like Cartagena and others across Latin America and loaded up with commodities like gold, sugar or coffee before transporting them to where they could make much more profit. Today, the same thing happens with cocaine.
to really understand that global business. We want to follow this trade, and that's going to take us on the next part of our journey, away from the US-Mexico border to another lucrative market, one that's over 5,000 miles away across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. It's here I'll hand the story over to Fiona Hamilton, the chief reporter on The Times, who started this episode.
This is Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. I've just got off the train. It's drizzling, it's grey, it's a little bit drab and cold, but it takes just a few minutes to walk over a busy intersection of trams and cyclists to reach the beautiful central area, the famous network of canals lined by old terraced houses and cobbled streets.
I'm here though because in recent years the Netherlands has become a key distribution hub for the international cocaine business. I used to work in a coffee shop in the red light district and there were people talking about what was going on in like the marijuana trade and I found that quite fascinating because it's like a shadow economy where a lot is going on which normal public will never see.
This is Wouter Louwmans. I'm working for the Dutch newspaper Het Parool and I'm covering the crime beat and I'm writing about organised crime. Wouter has spent 15 years reporting on the drugs business. He says the Netherlands has a unique position in the global cocaine supply market. In my opinion, it's stupid to look at cocaine trade on a national level because this is an international trade.
It's just a commodity that has to go from A to B. Actually, it works like regular trade, but it has a dark side to it as well. Somewhere in the noughties, cocaine lords from South America started to target European markets. What they did was they shipped it to West Africa. Then they would move it over Morocco. They were smuggling hashish into Europe and they were using those old lines
to smuggle cocaine into Europe. And who were involved in this? Young Moroccan guys who had family in the Netherlands. And they worked together with local guys. And after a while, they decided, okay, so let's shorten the line. So if we could get it directly to Antwerp or to Rotterdam, it's easier for us. Cheaper as well, because we have to bribe less people. So that's when they started to shift the lines from...
Africa towards Rotterdam and Antwerp. Those two ports, Rotterdam and the Netherlands, where almost half a billion tons of goods move through each year, and Antwerp and Belgium, are the biggest in Europe. They sit in a huge river delta that connects the North Sea to multiple European countries. Most of the cocaine that gets smuggled through the ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp is used for the foreign markets. So it's actually like a transfer hub
for European cocaine. That's the way you should look at it. England's always been one of the biggest drug markets from the Netherlands. The bulk of cocaine that comes through the Netherlands will go to England. What has been happening since 2012 is that we saw the rise of a new generation of criminals. And that was first established in Amsterdam, where we had like a double murder. Two young boys got shot to pieces with AK-47s.
The victims were aged just 21 and 28 and were gunned down in a drive-by shooting on New Year's Eve after a shipment of cocaine went missing. The likely target of the attack was another man, a suspected gang boss. The murders happened in front of family homes. The next day, the city's mayor called Amsterdam, quote, the Wild West. There have always been murders in the underworld, but the level of violence, that was something new and...
What happened was from 2013 to 2016, there were a lot of murders. We saw a severed head being put in front of a coffee shop in Amsterdam. And we have a lot of explosions nowadays. You've got bombs being put in front of people's houses and stuff like that. All these things were like unheard of before in the Netherlands. So why is the cocaine business so violent?
Yes, the answer is partly money. People will do a lot of things to make themselves rich, especially with that 64 million percent markup. But it's also because the cocaine industry is illegal, meaning it's not regulated. If you're a drug boss who has a problem with a rival, there's no competition and market authority you can turn to. There's no watchdog or civil court to decide your dispute. So you turn to violence.
The kind of violence we once associated with places like Colombia and Mexico is now on the streets of Europe. In this way, the cocaine trade actually changes the countries in which it takes place. It corrupts them. Corruption. I mean, the best way to get cocaine into a country is if you have corrupt guys at customs. I want to look more closely at that part of this multinational business.
So my next stop is Rotterdam, one of the biggest ports in Europe, struggling to keep the cartels at bay. We have a big problem in the port of Rotterdam with cocaine. Are you trustworthy or are you also corrupt? We went to the customs and we imported the container for him. And from that moment you were in? And from that moment I was in, yeah.
And I go to the scene where one of the Netherlands' drug bosses had something planned for his rivals that could have come straight out of a horror film. The cameras, it's too dangerous. You're worried it's too dangerous to get out? Are you worried about my safety? Of course. You are my guest. That's next time on Cocaine Inc.
Cocaine Inc. is a joint investigation from The Times, The Sunday Times and News Corp Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Stephen Drill and me, Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam Chantarassak. The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Leake with original music by Tom Birchall. Additional recording by Jason Edwards.
And if you want to get in touch with any questions or thoughts on the series, email cocaineinc at thetimes.co.uk.
The podcast Faith on Trial looks into Hillsong, both in Australia and the U.S., and takes both the listener and hosts on unexpected twists and turns in the story of Brian Houston and the singing preachers. There are two incidents involving Pastor Brian. The Australian journalists uncovered a litany of alleged criminal behavior in the megachurch. Financial gifts were being given to the leaders of the church. Listen to Faith on Trial.
on Apple Podcasts today or wherever you get your podcasts.