Tag: Drug-trafficking

Diana Salazar, the prosecutor spearheading Ecuador’s fight against ‘narcopolitics’

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Attorney General Diana Salazar is the leading figure in Ecuador’s fight against “narcopolitics”. As the country’s top prosecutor, her revelations have already led to the arrest of several high-level officials, including judges and other prosecutors accused of involvement in organised crime linked to drug trafficking. 

Ecuador is waging a war against the rise of “narcopolitics” and the powerful drug gangs who have infiltrated the country’s political system. Leading the fight is Attorney General Diana Salazar, who has launched what she described as the country’s “largest operation against corruption and drug trafficking in history”. 

Nicknamed the “Ecuadorian Loretta Lynch” after the US attorney general who served under Barack Obama, Salazar launched “Caso Metastasis” – a vast investigation into collusion between drug traffickers and government officials – following the October 2022 death in prison of powerful drug lord Leandro Norero.


More than 900 people took part in the investigation, which resulted in more than 75 raids and 30 arrests in mid-December. 

Ecuador has descended into chaos in recent weeks, with drug gangs going on a violent rampage. Hundreds of prison staff were taken hostage, a TV station was attacked live on air and explosions were reported in several cities. The latest violence erupted soon after the escape from prison of notorious crime boss Jose Adolfo Macias, known as “Fito”, the leader of Los Choneros, the country’s biggest gang. Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa said earlier this month that the country was in a “state of war” against the drug cartels behind the violence.

Most recently, a prosecutor investigating the brief siege of the TV station was shot dead on Wednesday in the port city of Guayaquil. 

In a statement on X following the murder, Salazar vowed to continue Ecuador’s fight against drug gangs, saying “organised crime groups, criminals, terrorists will not stop our commitment to Ecuadoran society”. 

Ecuador’s first Black, female attorney general 

A well-known figure on Ecuador’s anti-corruption scene, Salazar, 42, is the country’s first Black woman to hold the position of attorney general.  

She comes from the northern Andean city of Ibarra, where local media says she grew up in a modest family, raised by a single mother of four. 

Salazar moved to Quito when she was 16 for high school. At the age of 20, while still a law student at the Central University of Ecuador, Salazar began working as an assistant prosecutor in the Pichincha provincial prosecutor’s office. By 2011 she had become the public prosecutor for the southern part of the province. 

Salazar, who later started handling cases involving organised crime and corruption, came to prominence when she led the investigation into the “Fifa Gate” affair in 2015, resulting in a 10-year prison sentence for Ecuador’s former football chief Luis Chiriboga for money laundering.   

Salazar also helped prosecute Ecuador’s former vice president Jorge Glas, who was implicated in a corruption case against Brazilian construction company Odebrecht. 

Led by Salazar, the investigation revealed that Glas, who was sentenced to six years in prison in 2017, received $13.5 million in bribes from Odebrecht. 

“The Odebrecht affair was a real test for Diana Salazar,” said Sunniva Labarthe, a doctor in political sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. “A lot of people thought she would be quickly removed from office as a consequence, but she’s managed to hold her ground … It shows that she is a credible and stable figure.” 

Salazar was elected attorney general for the first time in 2019. “In Ecuador, the attorney general position – known as ‘the fiscal’ – has become extremely important and scrutinised since the ministry of justice was abolished in 2018,” Labarthe said.  

Salazar even went after former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017) who in 2020 was sentenced to eight years in absentia for corruption and who later fled to Belgium. 

In 2021 Salazar was given an Anti-Corruption Champions Award by the US State Department, which said her “courageous actions in tackling these cases have made immense contributions to transparency and the rule of law in Ecuador”. 

Operation Metastasis

In a video message addressed to the public in December 2023, Salazar said that her office had uncovered a “criminal structure” that involves judges, prosecutors, prison officials and police officers, following the investigation into Norero’s death.

Salazar’s team scoured chats and call logs from Norero’s cellphone and found links to high-ranking state officials who handed out favours in exchange for money, gold, prostitutes, apartments and other luxuries.  

The operation revealed the extent of the corruption and infiltration of drug trafficking into the highest levels of government in Ecuador. 

“Salazar deserves credit for having carried out her operation in the utmost secrecy, so as to prevent the drug traffickers from being informed of the arrests,” said Emmanuelle Sinardet, professor of Latin American civilisations at Paris Nanterre University.  

“Managing to keep an investigation confidential is no mean feat in a country where corruption and the influence of drug trafficking are deeply rooted in state institutions,” she said. 

Regularly receiving death threats, Salazar has since largely kept out of the public eye, only appearing on occasion in a bullet-proof vest or surrounded by security.  

Ecuador’s top prosecutor, however, remains undaunted.  

“Now come and kill me,” she taunted her enemies at a recent hearing requesting prison terms for eight suspects. 

“Salazar’s courage, knowing full well that she is risking her life to fight corruption, makes her popular and appreciated by Ecuadoreans,” according to Sinardet. 

While Salazar has been criticised for her ambition and her alleged connections to powerful interests, “in the face of the threats to her and her family, the public sees her as a figure of integrity and dedication to the common good”, Sinardet says. “She is seen as the judicial arm of the state’s fight to restore authority and order to the streets.”  

Labarthe said the threats against those battling drugs and corruption are real, and widespread.

“We must not forget that all the other people involved in the fight against corruption – including lawyers, judges, investigators and journalists – are also under threat,” Labarthe said, adding: “We can only hope that Diana Salazar stays alive.” 

This article was translated from the original in French.



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Fentanyl has devastated America. Why is Europe being spared?

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While fentanyl continues ravaging the US, the European illegal drug market has remained somehow shielded from the deadly synthetic opioid. Is that about to change?

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin, the downtown neighbourhood infamously known for its rampant homelessness, crime, and drug abuse, fentanyl users are scattered along the streets, their numb bodies abandoned in unlikely positions on park benches and sidewalks.

These are the scenes that Gen-Z activist Darren Stallcup, who has lived in the Tenderloin all his life, regularly records with his phone camera and then shares with the world on Twitter.

Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, is killing Americans – and San Francisco residents – at an alarming rate. Between January and March of 2023, 200 people died of overdose in the Tenderloin, with 159 deaths being caused by fentanyl – more than during the same time frame the year before. On a national level, the number of Americans dying of drug overdose has risen from more than 70,000 in 2019 to over 100,000 in 2021. Most of these deaths are due to fentanyl.

Stallcup told Euronews that he has seen so many people dying of an overdose in the streets of his neighbourhood that he feels “absolutely traumatised.”

When the 25-year-old activist travelled to London for a holiday recently, he said he felt refreshed. Nobody was dying of fentanyl in the streets of the European capital, nobody was using the drug in plain sight. “The most important thing,” Stallcup said, “is to make sure fentanyl doesn’t find its way into the UK, and Europe.”

But fentanyl has already been found to circulate in Europe – even though it often slips in under false pretences.

In December 2016, an 18-year-old boy died after buying what he thought was a pill of morphine at a fun fair in Cannes. He died of overdose later that same evening after consuming the pill which contained fentanyl – a few milligrams of which can be lethal. Fentanyl is similar to morphine, but it’s 50 to 100 times more potent.

Fentanyl kills in Europe too – but much less than in the US

Similar tragedies as that of the 18-year-old in Cannes are common in the US, where the powerful synthetic opioid painkiller has killed tens of thousands of Americans in the last few years, becoming the most lethal drug in the history of the country. But they’re unusual in Europe, a continent which has remained widely shielded from the spread of the killer drug.

There were an estimated 5,800 overdose deaths in the EU in 2020, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – an underestimate, EMCDDA’s Scientific Director Paul Griffiths told Euronews. Opioids were present in three-quarters of all these deaths, while fentanyl accounted for “probably a couple of hundreds,” Griffiths said.

By comparison, in the same year, the US reported 53,480 fentanyl-induced deaths.

In the US, fentanyl used to be available under prescription as a painkiller. Thousands of people got addicted to it after having been prescribed the drug by their doctors since the 1990s.

Once the country’s authorities realised the gravity of the situation, it was already too late. Though pharmaceutical companies stopped producing and selling fentanyl, the production of the drug and its supply has been taken over by criminal gangs, with manufacturing reportedly taking place illegally in countries like China and Mexico.

Because of how easy it is to produce it, fentanyl is often laced by drug dealers with other drugs like heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and MDMA. That means that often drug users end up consuming fentanyl without knowing they’re doing so.

According to a recent analysis by the Washington Post, fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 49.

A fentanyl epidemic in Estonia

Europe has a precedent with fentanyl that long precedes the incident involving 18-year-old Joseph in Cannes in 2016.

Back in the early 2000s, Estonia experienced a shortage of heroin which led to a sudden rise in fentanyl use, with the synthetic drug quickly becoming the most used opioid among drug addicts.

For almost two decades the Baltic country battled a fentanyl epidemic, until police choked off supply in 2017 by shutting down a clandestine laboratory, and fentanyl finally seemed to disappear from Estonia.

But fentanyl left a trail of death in the country. According to figures estimated by the EMCDDA, some 1,600 people have died of overdose in the Baltic state between 2001 and 2020, the majority of which due to the use of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

A Taliban-made opioid shortage is looming over Europe

The story of Estonia’s very own fentanyl epidemic should be a warning for the present – especially as a shortage of opioids could soon hit the continent. In Afghanistan, where most of Europe’s heroin supply comes from, the Taliban imposed a ban on poppy cultivation in April 2022 whose impact is likely to be felt in the continent next year, as last year’s harvest was exempt from the ban.

Almost all opium in Afghanistan is harvested between April and July, and it takes about one to one and a half years from harvest to heroin markets, according to 2022 estimates by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The sudden lack of opioids might open up an opportunity for criminals to manufacture and sell synthetic drugs like fentanyl, which is far more profitable than heroin. According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, one kilogram of fentanyl bought in China for a sum between $3,000 and $5,000 (between €2,768 and €4.613) can be resold for more than $1.5 million €1.38 million). Because of its potency, which is 30 times more than that of heroin, fentanyl could quickly replace other drugs and take over the European local drug scene.

“It will be interesting to see what happens with the reported Taliban’s ban and whether that actually has a long-term impact,” Griffiths said. “At the moment what we’ve seen looks like a very, very slight contraction in the area of poppy cultivation, but it’s still quite high by historical standards. A little less is being produced compared to now, and we would expect at least a year – because of the existence of stocks, because of the time it takes to bring the drugs to market – to have an impact on the drug market in Europe.”

But Griffiths is sceptical of the ban, saying that it’s more likely that the move is aimed at manipulating the price of opioids by reducing their availability on the market.

Could fentanyl take over Europe?

While there’s no current market for fentanyl in Europe, the risk that the drug might eventually take over in Europe is real, and it’s been recognised by the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), the EU’s law enforcement agency assisting law enforcement authorities in EU member countries.

In a recent report, Europol writes that the same Mexican drug cartels which are flooding the US illicit drug market with fentanyl are cooperating with EU-based criminal networks to traffick and smuggle cocaine and methamphetamine in Europe. The agency warns that these Mexican criminal groups might “attempt to broaden the portfolio of drugs trafficked to the EU by either trafficking them to the EU drug market or by assisting in the production of those drugs, like fentanyl, in the EU.”

“Despite no current indications of a fentanyl market in the EU, the discovery of fentanyl production facilities and seizures of the substance in the EU raises concerns over the development of a fentanyl market,” the agency writes.

On its side in the battle against fentanyl, Europe has time, Griffiths said – as well as a completely different attitude towards medicinal drugs and painkillers. “We don’t have the same dynamics as most in terms of attitude to painkiller prescribing, and we tend to have treatment available for people with lifelong conditions,” Griffiths said.

Prescription opioids are rarely given to patients in Europe, though consumption of prescribed fentanyl has grown from 1.66 to 2.77 DDD/1000 inhabitants/day in Spain between 2010 and 2021, according to the Spanish medicine agency.

The illegal drug market is also different in Europe. “The ground [in the US] was prepared for the illicit drug market, and then you had some Mexican drug trafficking organisations getting into fentanyl production because of the advantages linked to it,” Griffiths said.

But this doesn’t mean we should be complacent. “There might in the future be the possibility of seeing more synthetic opioids in the European illicit drug markets,” Griffiths said. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl are easy to produce and they’re highly profitable.

“There are lots of reasons why these might be attractive to organised crime groups and gangs if there was a sufficient market, if the market dynamics changed,” Griffiths concluded.

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Cocaine production hits record high as post-Covid demand picks up in Europe

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Global production of cocaine has jumped dramatically over the past two years following an initial slowdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the first report dedicated to the global cocaine market from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

Cultivation of coca, the leaves of which are used to make the drug, reached a record high by soaring 35% from 2020 to 2021, the report released on Wednesday said. 

Bolivia, Colombia and Peru – which have historically dominated the production of coca leaves – altogether cultivated an area of more than 300,000 hectares in 2021, UNODC said.

Once harvested, a paste obtained by mixing chopped leaves with lime, cement, gasoline, and ammonium sulfate, is usually taken elsewhere to be turned into cocaine. 

“The surge in the global cocaine supply should put all of us on high alert,” says UNODC Executive Director Ghada Waly.  

New trafficking routes 

The steep growth in supply has been matched by increase in global demand for the drug over the past decade. 

The world’s largest cocaine markets are traditionally concentrated among the wealthy populations of the Americas and parts of Europe. Cocaine is the second most commonly used illicit drug in Europe, behind cannabis, with an estimated 3.5 million adults in Europe using the drug in 2021.  

During the Covid pandemic, wastewater analysis suggested that there was a slight reduction in cocaine use that correlated with restrictions that closed nightlife and entertainment settings.  

However, an annual report from the UNODC in 2022 found that use has largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, and is expected to increase. “There are currently no signs that the upward trend in the availability of this drug, observed over the last few years, has changed,” it says. 

Increasing cocaine shipments to Europe to meet surging demand has created new trafficking routes around the world.  

Traffickers are becoming less reliant on Columbia as a point of departure and are increasingly transiting product through Central America and other countries in South America. Meanwhile, Africa and southeastern Europe are emerging as new trafficking hubs for supplies in transit to Western Europe, the UNODC report found. 

And cocaine is increasingly arriving directly from trafficking hubs to northern European ports. Cities such as Rotterdam and Hamburg “have eclipsed traditional entry points in Spain and Portugal for cocaine” arriving in Western Europe, it says. 

>> Dutch PM under protection as the ‘Mocro Mafia’ drug cartel sows fear in the Netherlands 

Seizures, ‘narco-tourism’ 

Interceptions of cocaine shipments by law enforcement agencies around the world have also risen sharply, with seizures reaching a record high of nearly 2,000 tons in 2021.  

In France, the government said in March that it had seized 27 tonnes of cocaine last year, a five-fold increase over the past 10 years. 

In 2022, seizures went up 5% compared with 2021, according to Interior Ministry figures, with more than half of the narcotic coming from the West Indies and French Guiana in South America. 

In a large-scale seizure on November 20, the French navy intercepted a Brazilian vessel carrying more than 4.6 tonnes of cocaine in international waters off the coast of Sierra Leone.  

In early March, sealed bags containing 2.3 tonnes of cocaine, worth an estimated 150 million euros, washed up on the northern French coast. 

Police were uncertain whether traffickers threw the drugs overboard deliberately to avoid arrest, or whether it came loose from their boats in heavy weather. 

As residents of villages along the Normandy coast described an influx of unfamiliar people in luxury cars and 4x4s scouring the sand, local authorities issued a public warning about the risks of taking part in what they described as “narco-tourism”. 

“The act of taking possession of one of these bundles and transporting it is a crime that carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison,” local prosecutor Philippe Astruc told reporters. 

Crime networks 

Global cocaine manufacture reached an estimated 2,000 tons in 2020, continuing a “dramatic uptick” in production that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels, the report said. 

Growth of the global amount of cocaine available for consumption has been contained as interceptions by law enforcement have increased. 

Yet increasing purity levels of the drug remain a concern, as the availability of stronger and more dangerous product was found to be a driving factor in an increase in deaths and hospitalisations in Europe pre-pandemic. 

The purity of cocaine available on the European market has increased sharply in the past decade, and in 2020 reached a level 40% higher than the index year of 2010.  

Although global law enforcement efforts are mitigating consumption overall, they are still failing to cut off a complex, global network of criminality stretching from international groups to individual actors. 

In Columbia, improved efficiency of production is thought to be due to the growing presence of Mexican and Balkan criminal groups since the demobilisation of the guerrilla group FARC.  

Willing groups of port workers, transport companies and customs officials in Central and South America are as essential as Nigerian networks made up of interconnected cells that dominate smuggling activities in northwest Africa. 

In Belgium, motorcycle gangs are hired as transport providers, and in France, more than a sixth of the cocaine consumed is smuggled inside the bodies of drug mules, often lured into the trade through poverty. 

>> Cocaine routes: French Guiana’s drug mules  

There is still room for this complex criminal network to grow. While the cocaine market remains quite concentrated in the Americas and parts of Europe, the report warns that there is a strong potential for a large expansion in Africa and Asia.  

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