Armed detectives in Rotterdam seized their biggest haul of cocaine in a decade at the weekend when they found more than 3,500kg of the drug, with a conservative street value of about €120 million, hidden in a shipment of cassava root from Costa Rica.
Police said earlier this year that Rotterdam – the largest port in the EU and second-busiest globally after Shanghai – had overtaken Antwerp as the main European hub for the global cocaine trade, much of it routed on to central and western Europe, most likely including Ireland.
The drugs, divided into 3,003 separate packages hidden among the crates of cassava, were photographed on the dockside by officials from the public prosecutor’s office after the raid by drug squad detectives, port police and customs officers, before being destroyed.
Although there have been no arrests, raids on ships arriving in Rotterdam are invariably as a result of intelligence, and police sources say the size of the seizure means that substantial distribution networks across Europe have been disrupted.
This was the second-largest seizure of cocaine ever at Rotterdam. The biggest was 4,200kg found hidden in giant reels of steel cable, 12ft high by 6ft wide, in 2005.
Eleven men and two women were arrested in follow-up raids after that seizure, and a 45-year-old Colombian died after he fell from the window of an Amsterdam apartment while allegedly trying to escape.
European funnel
Seizures of cocaine in Rotterdam totalled about 10,000kg last year, while the total found in the Belgian port of Antwerp was just 4,800kg. It’s estimated that between 25-50 per cent of the cocaine destined for Europe flows through Rotterdam.
However, Dutch police privately acknowledge that their assessment of the scale of imports through the Netherlands’ second-largest city is far from exact and is probably an underestimate.
The problem is that only 50,000 of the 11 million containers that arrive in the port every year are scanned – and that scanning is done on the basis of risk profile, usually where the country of origin leads to suspicions or there’s been a tip-off.
By contrast, huge resources are concentrated on Schiphol airport where there’s “100 percent inspection” of all passengers arriving from the Dutch Antilles, Curaçao, Venezuela and Suriname, a route known popularly as the Netherlands’ “cocaine highway”.
Flights from Hato Airport on Curaçao are still famous in the Netherlands for the fact that in 2002, 99 smugglers were found on board the same flight as the then crown-prince Willem Alexander and his wife, princess Maxima – convinced that nobody would be searched.
Although this zero tolerance policy towards Caribbean flights has led to a 33 per cent drop in smuggling through Schiphol, some experts say it may have led to a substantial switch to Rotterdam, which has worked well for the international gangs behind the smuggling.
It’s a strategy that has been challenged by criminologist Damián Zaitch of Utrecht University who says the authorities have got their policing priorities wrong. “Just 5 per cent of cocaine smuggling is by air, so why do we pay so much attention to Schiphol?” he said. “On the face of it, it would be far more sensible to switch this effort to Rotterdam.”
