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, the you know, the labels with the information.
It's nothing because that's judicial evidence. See.
Cartagena is a city on the north coast of Columbia. It's picturesque, full of cobbled streets and brightly colored 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.
That's with better security than this week.
Right now, Stephen's been shown into a locked room which is mostly empty except for a huge pile of bags stuff full of cocaine, containing the small mountain of drugs that has been seized by customs in the past month.
Eight hundred kilo ceiling of two containers.
Think about that for a moment. Eight hundred 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.
This doesn't paches.
The book is usually fifty sixty.
The customs official opens the bagger, you can see the dur and starts pulling out blocks the size of bricks, which are shrink wrapped in black plastic labeled with the name Juvonci. Inside is a solid block of white powder, which has nothing to do with the luxury fashion house, so white as brick after brick of cocaine is unloaded on the tile floor, Stephen is told the street value of this eight hundred kilo hall would be about six
hundred million US dollars. That's the total amount people will pay for it in countries like the UK and Australia. Six hundred million US is on most 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 three, the sixty four million percent markup. I'll leave it to Stephen, who's looking at this drug hall, to explain it.
Okay, think about it this way. In the Colombian jungles, the raw coca leaves that are used to make cocaine are worth about point zero zero zero six two US dollars per gram. That's according to figures from the United Nations. Now that's not much here in Cartagena. The price of process cocaine it's much higher. It's about one point two 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 thirty 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 one hundred and twenty dollars per gram. By the time the cocaine has 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 four hundred US dollars, meaning the difference in price between raw cocaine and Colombia and cocaine brought on the streets of Sydney is a sixty four 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 sea 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 Columbia and head north to 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 I've brought us targes Menta Gerald, 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 where's in uniform with gold buttons. Only days before our interview, a drug gang killed one of his officers. Speaking through a translator, I asked him how dangerous their job Isumbian.
It is a very demanding work. There are some settings in the Columbian 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 Columbia, where there are very strong attacks by terrorist troops.
He talks about terrorists and an expression that's become common in Columbia is narco terrorism. That word is used to describe the actions of these commer or businesses. In Colombia, I hired assassin charges as little as five hundred US dollars to execute a police officer. About fourteen thousand people are killed a year, some of them hacked to death by drug gangs.
See those criminality inquents.
All criminals and offenders are always rethinking the way they add the plice forces around the world to reinvent yourself, to be retrained and to learn in order to be able to face these challenges. And Columbia is.
Not the exception. Columbia isn't the exception, he says. The power of those running the cocaine business is international. It's that sixty marked up driving the entire trade.
So long as their supply and demand, there's going to be a cost, and both stay be for this cost. And there are some many families that have lost through children. And we're losing. Both societies are losing both thous trillions and Colombians.
Both societies, he says, are losing from the drug trade. Now, let's go back to those bags for cocaine bricks labeled Javoni being unloaded onto the floor in the locked room in the Port of Cartagena. The Australian police tell me it's part of a Seizu're worth around six hundred million US dollars, but actually that's not quite right. Sitting down with a calculator on my phone, I'll work out that's
very much the maximum possible figure. Six hundred 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 Harbor, just about dusk. For dessert, you choose a crem caramel
from the menu. It cost you forty dollars and he's made using another Columbian 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 middle men 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 forty dollars pudding to calculate the value of the sacoflour sugar lying at the docks in Carthagena. That'd be madness, except that's exactly what law enforcement all around the world is doing.
You At eleven more than one million dollars worth of.
Cocaine, forty million dollars worth of cocaine, thirty two hundred pounds of cocaine street value seventy seven million dollars three hundred and twenty million dollars street value of more than one billion dollars.
In all drugs with a street value of one point six billion pounds.
That eight hundred kiliground of coke laid out on the floor in Cardagena isn't worth six hundred million, not to the cartail 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 six hundred million dollar 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 sixty four 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 gridlock city of over two 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 drog can be solved 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.
They put it like timbers.
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 it in They do it in a building, down through a building, and then we're speaking to 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 Cardagenia, a quilo of cocaine my be worth around twelve hundred US dollars wholesale in Mexico, that value can be ten times higher. Get that killer 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 lock 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 meter 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. In the front, we can see their rule where they say all the cleaning.
Products this property, and then it's connecting to the other property on the site.
These tunnels of 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 I don't dig these tunnels, their family will be killed.
We have the border lane which connects them to the US.
The engineer tells me how the tunnels work. The entries are hidden in buildings controlled by the cast holes, often their 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, what.
Looks it looks like we might be able to boy in, but.
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, or about eighty minutes 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 molder. 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 to live down here.
The air like. I'm actually trying to sucking air because it's just really think there's not much oxygen. They have sort of extractor fans that they use to try and get air into it.
I'm actually trying to 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.
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 three thousand kilometers, there
must be others down there. Later, after we've cleaned ourselves up, the translator and I set out to find out more.
Felipe my name is Phelipe.
Felipe is the head of Mexico's criminal investigation agency. He's a broad man, square shouldered, the side party and black classes 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 involved 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 cartails in Europe, in Alexandro and 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 cartoons in Mexico they have a really good control of all the activities. Is that they're on their teach. However, there are clients. They don't look like they're criminals. There are just sending messages across different places.
So the broker in deals, they are arranging shipments here to buy from the cartels.
Yes, that's correct.
The cartails are building business relationships with organized crime in China, Southeast 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 cartails, this has meant new product lines expanding into other addictive legal and illegal drugs like methanphetamine and fentanyl, a prescription opioid.
It is profitable because it's just a business.
In terms of the business operation. While cocaine has smuggled through the tunnels heading north, I'd also heard about guns from the US on any other direction. I asked Felipe about it.
That's our main concern because we 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 triber license in the US to be able to buy a gun.
Those high colorable weapons brought in from Texas have made Mexico quite simply frightening. The power of those guns make murder easy.
Organization analysis the problems.
Between the different cartails. I normally they solved that through killing people, and unfortunately we have lots of corpse and we have not been able to identify most people belong to that, and there are lots of clandestine grapes.
The wayfully Paid describes it, the Mexican place sometimes struggle to find, identify, or't even count the tens of thousands of Mexicans every year who were 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 supply of cocaine comes from here and from nearby countries.
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 this criminals 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 eight hundred kilo hall 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 happened 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 five thousand miles away across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. It's here I'll hand the story over at 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 gray, 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 the marijuana and I find that quite fascinating because it's like a shadow economy where a lot is going on which normal public will never see.
This is Valutllowman's I'm working for the Dutch newspaper her Baro and I'm covering the crime beat and I'm writing about organized crime. Wuta has spent fifteen 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 market. What they did was they shipped it to West Africa, then they would move it over Morocco. They were smuggling hashis 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 shortened
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 moved through each year, and Antwerp in 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 get 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 she look at it. England's always been one of the biggest drugs markets from the Netlands. The bulk of cocaine that comes through the Netlands will go
to England. What has been happening since twenty twelve 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 shocked to pieces with AK forty sevens.
The victims were aged just twenty one and twenty eight. And we're gone 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 twenty thirteen to two thy and sixteen, there were a lot of murders. We saw a severed head being put in front of a coffee shop in Amslam, 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 Nelans.
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 without sixty four 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 arrival, 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 Columbia 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? Be mentored to customs and be important.
To contain it for him, And from that moment you were.
In and from that moment I was in Yep.
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 for Sunday Times and News Call for Australia. The reporters are David Collins, Steven Drill and me Fiona Hamilton. The series is produced by Sam Chanterassak.
The executive producers are Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio production and editing is by Jasper Lee, with original music by Tom Burchell additional recording by Jason Edwards and If you want to get in touch with any questions or thoughts on the series, email Cocaine Inc. At The Times dot co dot uk.