Could Maduro's capture affect cocaine trafficking in Germany?

Europe is becoming a top destination for cocaine smugglers. What accounts for the rise of the hard drug, and does disgraced Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro play any role?

When employees at a discount supermarket in the northern German harbour city of Lübeck opened a box of bananas in November, they didn’t just find fruit. Buried beneath the produce shipped from South America were blocks of cocaine. By the end of the week, more than 500 kilograms of the drug had surfaced in banana cartons delivered to supermarkets across several nearby seaside towns.

The discovery was not an outlier, but the latest sign of a hard drug market that has expanded rapidly across Germany and Europe over the past decade — by some estimates surpassing demand in the US. Over the past five years, the volume of cocaine entering Germany, as measured by seizures alone, has shot up by roughly 45 percent, part of a broader shift in global trafficking patterns. Cocaine is now “almost all destined for Europe,” a narcotics expert recently told NBC News, largely through ports in Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp.

Hamburg’s port has become one of the major entryways for cocaine. Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

This reality sits uneasily with political narratives which frame smuggling of the illicit narcotic as primarily a US problem — and one that can be stymied by targeting a single supposed leader. If the latter is to be believed, US President Donald Trump would have been doing Europe an even greater service by capturing alleged cartel facilitator and Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, who US authorities accuse of enabling cocaine shipments bound for North America.

But the structure of today’s cocaine trade makes that logic increasingly outdated.

“The era of dominant drug lords such as Pablo Escobar and El Chapo is over. Criminal groups have fragmented and now operate through partnerships, organising logistics hubs for transporting drugs,” from producer countries to Europe, Janaina Maldonado, a sociologist at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg, told us in a phone interview.

“When one route is cracked by the authorities, what happens is not a decrease but a re-regimenting of the route,” Maldonado said, referring to what researchers call the balloon effect — the idea that squeezing trafficking in one place only makes it bulge elsewhere.

“The routes are only changing, and we don’t see any decrease in the amount of cocaine to Europe.”

Why is cocaine trafficking growing in Europe and Germany?