Latin American trafficker’s expanding route into lucrative European drug market

Cocaine production and use are at record levels worldwide. West Africa has become a major transit hub, where traffickers exploit weak states, under-resourced enforcement and high-level corruption.

Vast quantities of cocaine are increasingly being seized off the coast of West Africa. In March 2024 the French navy, which is active in the region as part of the joint maritime security mission Operation Corymbe. captured 10.7 tonnes of the drug from a fishing boat from Brazil sailing in international waters in the Gulf of Guinea. In September 2025 the navy intercepted a shipment of 9.6 tonnes in the same area. Long before that, in 2019, authorities in Cape Verde captured 9.5 tonnes from a cargo ship from South America bound for the Moroccan port of Tangier. The value of each of these shipments is estimated at over $580m.

The volume of South American cocaine being transported to Europe via West Africa has skyrocketed since trafficking began in the late 1990s. While seizures reflect the number and effectiveness of surveillance operations more than the actual volumes trafficked, the figures highlight a trend: between 2012 and 2018, less than two tonnes of cocaine was found across West Africa each year. Between 2019 and 2025 ten times that quantity was seized.

This increase reflects a global trend, and the unprecedently high levels of trafficking. In South America, and especially Colombia, which is by far the world’s leading producer of coca, output has been growing for roughly a decade. The potential output of refined cocaine has increased from less than 900 tonnes a year in 2013 to almost 4,000 tonnes today, driven primarily by an uptick in global consumption.

If the flow of the drug from producers to consumers is increasing, the percentage which passes through West Africa is growing even faster. Experts estimate that at least a third of the cocaine destined for Europe passes through this region. But why has West Africa become such a major transit hub?

In a recent report, the NGO Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC) put forward several explanations. First, European and Latin American states have boosted (…)

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(7) See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Schocken Books, 1951.