First more than half a tonne of cocaine was seized from a plane at a French airport. Then a shipping container with 4.2 tonnes of the drug was found in Hamburg, Germany, where authorities estimated its street value at a staggering US$1.1 billion.
The departure point of both shipments: Uruguay, South America’s smallest Spanish-speaking country — one that seldom makes the headlines for international drug trafficking.
The shipments in May and July set off alarms in the country and led its customs director to resign. Then German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that Uruguay had become a world drug trafficking hub in recent years.
Photo: German Custom via AP
Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic said they had noticed a change in cocaine trafficking patterns from Uruguay.
Secretly, senior government officials met with customs agents and exporters to find out what was happening.
One participant said it appears that in Uruguay’s bid to speed up trade and lower export costs, customs controls have been neglected and the roving eye of the global drug trade — always searching for weak points — found an easy shipment point in this country of just 3.4 million people, where exports represent 12.6 percent of its gross domestic product.
“We are a route, as are many other” countries, “but it is true that certain controls have been weakened or are not at the level they should be,” Uruguayan Attorney General Jorge Diaz said.
Uruguayan Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance Pablo Ferreri told reporterd that the drug seizures in Europe came as a shock, but said that “we are working very hard to quickly improve what must be improved.”
Customs officials say Uruguay’s controls focus on imports, not exports, which are important to the economy and which no one wants to threaten, said Leonardo Couto, a customs broker who participated in meetings seeking to improve the export control system.
In the port of Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital, the customs terminal has a single scanner that is operated by officials who work only during office hours, never at night. Additionally, the machine is used solely to check imports.
Inspecting all the containers leaving the country is impossible because of the costs and delays that would entail. A computer program analyzes what the merchandise is, its destination and who is moving it to determine which containers are inspected.
Less than 3 percent of containers are examined.
“Everyone in the chain has failed to pay attention to this phenomenon. In the desire to lower and lower costs, we began to relegate controls. Not only the state, everyone,” said Couto, who as a dispatcher sends between 300 and 400 containers from Uruguay to other parts of the world every month.
The shipment with cocaine seized in Hamburg was greenlighted in Uruguay without inspection despite its unusual nature: It had four containers of soybeans, a much smaller quantity than a normal shipment would contain.
“Soybeans are usually exported in full boats, without containers. That should have attracted attention,” Couto said. “Risk assessment failed. It was not handled well.”
Diaz said he has seen everything: drugs hidden in shipments of meat and wool, half a tonne of cocaine concealed in fishing nets and 1.8 tonnes in a yacht that was preparing to travel to Serbia.
Those seizures happened in 2003-2010. That era was followed by years of calm and Uruguayan authorities thought the drug route through their country had been closed.
However, the latest events suggest the route has reopened, maybe because Uruguay let its guard down, Diaz said
“Since 2009 there has been no plan to combat drug trafficking,” he said in an interview on the FM Ocean station.
Laurent Laniel, principal scientific analyst at the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, said the center began noticing drug shipments from Uruguay this year, although still in smaller quantities than from other South American nations.
The center’s most recent report is from 2017, when 127 tonnes of cocaine were seized, with Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador the main countries from which the drugs departed, Laniel said.
Yet the growing role Uruguay could be playing in the trade, he said, can be seen at Antwerp, Belgium, Europe’s main port for seizures of drugs from Latin America.
Between January and July, authorities made two seizures of cocaine from Uruguay destined for Antwerp, including the mega-seizure in Hamburg, which was headed to the Belgian city, and one tonne more on July 23 in a container that was already in the port.
In comparison, only 120kg of cocaine from Uruguay en route to Antwerp were seized last year.
No authority has pointed to a specific cartel or group as being behind the Uruguay shipments.
For Laniel, drug trafficking cannot be understood without corruption.
“The bribes detected are just the tip of the iceberg,” Diaz said. “To reach that level of shamelessness there have to be many others.”
Claire Georges, a spokesperson for the European police agency Europol, said the agency is seeing more reports in open sources about the increasing use of Uruguay by organized crime groups for cocaine shipments headings to Europe, although she said it has received little reporting directly from EU member states about it.
Laniel said Uruguay is still far from being the epicenter of drug trafficking from Latin America to Europe.
Its presence in the world drug trade is “a little thing that has just emerged,” he said. “Let’s see if it gains more breadth.”
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