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 The Belgian city of Antwerp is famous worldwide for its unique diamonds. However, another infamous job is also starting to prove very profitable there. The city's port is being used to supply cocaine throughout Europe.
It is the second largest port in Europe with millions of containers passing through it every year. It is believed to have become the main entry point for cocaine in Europe and has overtaken the Galician coast in northwestern Spain, where most of the drug's shipments were made until a few years ago.


Over the past five years, one record after another has been broken in terms of drug seizures. During the year 2022, Belgian authorities seized 110 tons of drugs, which was 23% more than last year. The figures were released by the country's Public Finance Service, which oversees customs.

You can get an idea of ​​how big this is, considering that it accounts for 40% of the total cocaine seizures across the country. In second place is the Dutch port of Rotterdam, where 52.5 tons of cocaine were seized in 2022.

Before the crackdown on cocaine, Belgian authorities warned last year that existing facilities were insufficient to incinerate all the seized drugs.

However, it is estimated that the seized cargo is only about 10th of the total drugs arriving at the port. The goods arrive on ships from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and, more recently, Panama and Costa Rica.

But what makes Antwerp the perfect haven for illegal drug gangs?

One of the reasons is that the port of Antwerp is so large, according to Florence Inglese, a spokeswoman for Belgium's government finance service.

It is not an ordinary port but an area spread over about 130 square kilometres which are bigger than the city of Paris in France. It is smaller than Rotterdam in the Netherlands in terms of cargo weight. However, Antwerp has a wide range. It has 160 km of shipping docks, compared to 70 in the Dutch port.

"Roads pass under it, even the inner areas are populated because the port is so spread out and it's difficult to monitor," English told BBC Mundo.

As the entry and exit points of a port like this city are not monitored, the area has become a haven for people involved in the illegal drug trade. They somehow get the drugs out of the port by gathering information and making connections there. Paul Mayer is among those who know this well. In 2007, he was jailed for 12 years for drug smuggling in Europe. But now they are trying to make amends and make Antwerp drug-free.

In the past, he and his gang have tried to smuggle drugs through the ports of Hamburg in Germany and Marseille in France. But he believes that it is much easier in Antwerp. "The port is open," the mayor told the BBC's European correspondent Nick Beck. You can go in and get all the information to get started. You can also meet the truck drivers and people working there. You can also see the name of the ship.

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So far only 350 customs agents monitor incoming goods. According to a spokesperson of the Government Finance Service, this number is insufficient and 108 more people will be deployed for drug prevention.

Smuggling cocaine in the name of fruits

According to English, these routes are difficult to monitor. It is the historical route of fruit transport from Latin America to Europe.

"The port has refrigerated terminals and adequate arrangements have been made to receive these fruits."

It is one of the scheduled transatlantic routes through which millions of containers pass each year. Criminal gangs take advantage of this. They fill containers with cocaine and ship it to Europe.Drug dealers have adopted a creative approach to this strategy. Belgian customs officials have also uncovered new ways to hide drugs.

"For example, they use bananas and other fruits and fill the boxes with cocaine," Anglais said. They also use pineapples and cut a hole in it and put cocaine inside the fruit.

They say that refrigerators are installed in such containers and spaces in the cooling system are also used to hide drugs.
Bags of drugs were also hidden in wooden trunks and liquid cocaine was even smeared on clothes, the spokesman said.

"When the customs agents opened the boxes, they found only clothes, but when they investigated further, they realized that cocaine was embedded in the threads of these clothes."

However, due to deficiencies in port supervision, it is often the case that cocaine is loaded directly into containers without major management.In this case, the criminal gangs keep the cocaine in the form of packets inside the container without hiding it. Sports bags are used for this purpose which are easy to transport.

In many cases, companies are unaware that their cargo has been intercepted en route by drug-trafficking gangs."When these containers arrive at the port, some people at the terminal are already there waiting for it and ready to take maybe 100 to 200 kilograms of cocaine with them," Anglais said.

Sometimes these people do not take the cocaine out of the port but transfer it to another container to avoid being caught. They know which containers will not be inspected or which containers have already been inspected.In Europe, certain containers of goods are not inspected because they are coming from one country to another. Thus, it becomes easier to deliver cocaine from Antwerp, located in the heart of Europe, to countries like France or Germany.

According to Europol, cocaine is often shipped from the Netherlands, from where organized crime groups spread it across Europe.