A multi-billion dollar operation involves cocaine and methamphetamines being packed into the hulls of sailing boats in the US and Latin America and transported to Australia via south Pacific islands more often thought of as holiday destinations than narcotics hubs.
In the past five years, there has been an explosion in the number of boats, sometimes carrying more than a tonne of cocaine, making the journey across the Pacific Ocean to feed Australia’s growing and very lucrative drug habit.
Caught in the middle are countries such as Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and New Caledonia, whose waters and beaches are being used as storage grounds for billions of dollars of illicit drugs.
Illustration: June Hsu
Hundreds of kilograms of cocaine have washed up on remote Pacific beaches, ships laden with drugs have run aground on far-flung coral reefs and locals have discovered huge caches of drugs stored in underwater nets attached to GPS beacons.
“Draw a direct line between Bogota and Canberra and it goes straight through the islands,” University of Queensland criminal law professor Andreas Schloenhardt said.
The Pacific has been a transit point in the drug route for decades, but law enforcement and security analysts said the route’s use appears to have increased dramatically in the past five years.
Since 2014, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) have been involved in the seizure of about 7.5 tonnes of cocaine shipped in small vessels such as yachts through the region and intended for Australia.
Police in 2004 seized 120kg of cocaine on a beach in Vanuatu, a bust that the AFP heralded as the “biggest such haul in the Pacific nation’s history.” Nine years later, police made a bust involving more than six times that amount.
Since 2016, there have been six major seizures of drugs in French Polynesia. In 2017, a yacht was intercepted near New Caledonia with 1.464 tonnes of cocaine hidden in its hull and another boat was stopped just off the Australian east coast with more than 1.4 tonnes of cocaine on board. Each of these shipments was worth more than US$200 million.
“Seizures are becoming larger — larger quantities are being trafficked,” Schloenhardt said.
The region is caught in a perfect storm. Cocaine production is at its highest-ever rate. At the same time, the appetite for cocaine consumption in Australia and New Zealand, which have the highest rates of per capita cocaine use in the world, has exploded.
Australians and New Zealanders also pay more for the drug (about A$300 or US$210 per gram) than people anywhere else in the world, making it a lucrative market.
Drugs come into Australia through a range of means, including cargo ships, cruise ships and air freight. A Fijian air steward was arrested in December last year for trying to export cocaine, and in March, the AFP arrested two men, one an employee at the Sydney Airport, for being part of a meth-smuggling operation.
Sailing the drugs through the Pacific has become an increasingly profitable and popular way for dealers to get drugs to the destination, given the tight security measures involved in air travel, the tightening of customs controls at airports in many Pacific nations and the fact that there are very few direct flights between Latin America and Australia.
“The unfortunate thing is that the Pacific is at the heart of this,” Oceanic Customs Organisation operations manager Tevita Tupou said.
Some of the larger Pacific nations are starting to see serious cocaine and methamphetamine addiction, as well as associated gang violence, crime and police corruption.
AFP Superintendent Brett Kidner, who served as senior liaison officer in the Pacific region from 2016 to the beginning of this year, said that during his time based in Suva, he noticed a “shift in attitudes” toward illicit drugs among Pacific nations.
“Whereas initially they considered it predominantly a problem for Australia and New Zealand, and they were merely transit points, at the end there they were starting to see a significant increase in their domestic use,” Kidner said. “I definitely saw an increase in use in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.”
The transnational shipment of drugs through the Pacific is not the only cause of Fiji’s burgeoning domestic drug problem, as a booming tourism industry and increasing wealth in the country also play a part, Fijian Police Commissioner Brigadier-General Sitiveni Qiliho told reporters on a police boat during a patrol along the west coast of Fiji’s main island.
“When [traffickers] get in drugs, they normally drop off a few kilos as payment and that is what goes into the market — so that increases the usage,” Qiliho said.
Ian Collingwood, who has lived in Fiji for most of his life and has fallen into drug addiction, told reporters that the nation’s drug problem could no longer be described as emerging, but as “well-emerged and sizeable.”
“A hundred meters from where we are, you can purchase methamphetamine and cocaine — just like that, no problem. Not a problem at all,” he said, speaking on a sunny afternoon at a popular cafe in Nadi.
With the drugs has come “terrible, terrible violence,” Collingwood said.
“Like in any country, at the top of the food chain, drug dealers here are dangerous men — very, very bad, phenomenally bad,” he added.
“They’ll have you kidnapped and dropped off in the bush somewhere. They’ll smash your kneecaps or worse. You’ll get acid poured on your face, and you’ll get killed. That’s a phenomenon which is recent. In the past 12 to 24 months, I’d suggest there’d be up to six, seven, eight deaths at least through this stuff,” Collingwood said.
It is a problem these Pacific nations are ill-equipped to handle.
In Fiji, there is no data collected about drug use or addiction. There is no rehabilitation center, no methadone clinic, no addiction specialists, not even a Narcotics Anonymous meeting to be found.
There is also no understanding of addiction as an illness, Collingwood said.
If addicts want or need treatment, they end up at Saint Giles, the psychiatric hospital in Suva, which reported that nearly 20 percent of its patients in the year from May 2017 to April last year were treated for substance abuse issues, mostly for addiction to methamphetamines.
“No one has recovered here. There’s no such thing,” Collingwood said. “I know heaps of people here who want to do it. They just don’t know what to do.”
One wall of the Oceanic Customs Organisation office in downtown Suva is taken up by a huge colorful map of the Pacific, from Australia and Palau in the west through to French Polynesia in the east.
Tevita Tupou walked over to it to show the extent of the challenge facing law enforcement through the region, who he said are engaged in a “David and Goliath” battle against a creative, well-funded and constantly innovating criminal enemy.
“We cover one-third of the world’s mass,” he said, waving toward the map.
Tupou checked off challenges on his fingers: “Porous borders, maritime borders, geographical spread, limited resources. That’s our operating environment.”
“Where do you start?” he added, laughing. “This is probably the fight of our generation. We lose this now, we are gone.”
Tupou said he believes that Fiji and its Pacific neighbors can never return to a time before hard drugs were a domestic problem — the genie is out of the bottle.
“You cannot eradicate the issue of drugs, because there will always be a demand. There’s always money to be made out of it, but we can make it hard for them,” he said. “That’s our endgame. The only thing we can do is just make crime random.”
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