Massive flow of cocaine from Latin America roiling Europe

The Netherlands and Belgium, the main gateways, are seeing a rise in drug violence.

ANTWERP, Belgium — Each tiny plastic package was barely the size of a fingernail and weighed all of 0.2 of a gram. Still, the bags of white powder police seized in a Brussels cellar were yet another indication that a surge in cocaine and crack supply is hitting Europe hard.

And with it comes unprecedented drug violence in Belgium and the Netherlands, whose ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam, respectively, have become the main gateways for Latin American cocaine cartels into the continent.

In Belgium, the justice minister is forced to live in a safehouse, out of reach of drug gangs. In the Netherlands, killings hit ever more prominent people, and there are suspicions that the reason the heir to the Dutch throne had to quit her student life and return home was also linked to threats from drug lords.

“We almost have to see it as a war,” said Aukje de Vries, the Dutch state secretary for customs.

Officials in Antwerp on Tuesday announced yet another annual record in cocaine seizures in Belgium last year: 110 tons, up 23% compared with 2021 and more than twice the amount confiscated five years ago.

“It astounded us,” said Belgian Finance Minister Vincent Van Peteghem. “It also means the drugs that are entering Europe [undetected] through our ports are also rising. And that, of course, has a huge impact,” he told the Associated Press.

Because with cocaine comes not only addiction, decay and death, but also violence and gang warfare.

In the last three years, Antwerp has suffered dozens of grenade attacks, fires and bombings often linked to gangs trying to control the thriving cocaine trade.

On Monday evening, the city better known for painter Peter Paul Rubens and a famed fashion school saw the fatal shooting of a child, an innocent victim of the drug war.

“A girl of barely 11 that obviously has nothing to do with crime gangs is now the victim of narco terror that is turning ever more ruthless,” said Antwerp Prosecutor Franky De Keyzer.

The situation in Belgium has become so bad that even Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne is living in hiding after evidence emerged that drug gangs might be seeking to kidnap him, or worse.

In the Netherlands, murder and intimidation have become increasingly common as drug lords go to extreme lengths to protect their cut of the multibilliondollar market. And 50 tons of cocaine were seized at Rotterdam last year, which, combined with Antwerp, made for another record year.

Among high-profile murder victims in the Netherlands in recent years were a lawyer representing a witness in a drug gangsters’ trial and crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, who was a confidant to the same witness.

Unspecified threats to the heir to the Dutch throne, Princess Amalia, forced her to abandon student life in Amsterdam and return home last year. Security reportedly also has been beefed up around Prime Minister Mark Rutte. In both cases, it’s suspected that drug-related crime organizations are a factor.

And in places like Brussels, where the violence might be less spectacular, cocaine and crack are starting to have a chilling effect in areas such as the Marolles, a quaint neighborhood that figured in Tintin’s cartoon adventures.

The chief police inspector for the neighborhood, Kris Verborgh, said South American cocaine “seems to be — or seems to have become — the new normal.”

Verborgh says the cost of the base product in Colombia amounts to about $250 a pound. A pound of the finished product is worth about $35,000 on the street.

“It is a massive amount of money that you can earn relatively easily,” he said.