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‘It’s like a cat and mouse game’: on the frontline of Belgium’s fight against drug smugglers

 

‘It’s like a cat and mouse game’: on the frontline of Belgium’s fight against drug smugglers

 

Antwerp port is stepping up scanning of goods amid warnings country risks becoming a narco-state

 

Jennifer Rankin

Jennifer Rankin in Antwerp

Sun 3 May 2026 09.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/03/belgium-drug-smugglers-antwerp-port

 

Sara Van Cotthem takes a safety knife and precisely slices open the side of a cardboard box to unpack its contents, an aluminium stepladder made in China. Working under harsh fluorescent lights at the border inspection post at the port of Antwerp, Van Cotthem checks the paperwork and taps the ladder with a magnet to check if it really is aluminium and not another metal.

 

It is an everyday operation for customs officers at Antwerp, one of Europe’s main commercial gateways, which handled the equivalent of 13.6m 20ft-long (6 metres) containers last year. Everything is in order and the lorry, jam-packed with identical boxed ladders, can get on its way to Germany.

 

But it’s not always so straightforward. Along with routine attempts to evade duties or import counterfeit goods, customs officers are grappling with relentless efforts by violent criminals to smuggle drugs, especially cocaine, into Europe.

 

Antwerp is one of Europe’s main entry points for cocaine: authorities seized 483 tonnes of the drug between January 2019 and June 2024, the largest amount among 17 ports reporting to the European Union Drugs Agency. The port, Europe’s second largest, has been the victim of a confluence of factors. Cocaine production in South America – above all, Colombia – has soared over the last decade, while Dutch drug gangs that had been prioritising the even larger Rotterdam port shifted their attention to Belgium.

 

Much of the cocaine arriving in Belgium is thought to be taken to the Netherlands for further distribution. But enough stays in Belgium to cause serious harm, while homegrown criminals have established a foothold in the lucrative trade. The power of the drug gangs has prompted judges to warn that Belgium risks becoming a narco-state, with international drug crime threatening social stability.

 

While cocaine seizures at Antwerp fell to 55 tonnes in 2025, from a record-breaking 121 tonnes in 2023, the problem remains formidable. “It is like a cat and mouse game,” says Van Cotthem, a communications officer for Belgium’s customs and excise. “Every time, the smugglers find new ways to smuggle the drugs.”

 

A few metres away from where she is speaking, six brand-new mobile scanners are parked, ready to check a suspect container any time of day or night. Customs authorities bought nine scanners (the other three are deployed elsewhere) to ensure suspect containers will be checked more quickly, minimising the risk of drug gangs extracting any drugs before a control point. In 2025, 65,000 risky containers were scanned at Antwerp, up on the previous year, and the goal eventually is scanning 350,000 to 400,000 containers along fixed conveyer-belt machines.

 

Scanning is getting more sophisticated in response to fiendishly inventive ways criminal gangs have found to disguise drugs. Cocaine was traditionally packed around fruit. In recent years, port authorities have discovered it mixed with orange juice or coal, disguised in fake pineapples, embedded in cardboard boxes and textiles or hidden inside wooden beams and paving stones.

 

Antwerp customs officers spend at least a year training to spot telltale marks on a scanned container – a break in a pattern, or “something off” in the spaces between the official goods.

 

Drug traffickers’ modus operandi is changing in other ways, says Kristian Vanderwaeren, the head of customs and excise in Belgium. Smugglers are shifting routes: for instance, sending South American cocaine to Europe via west Africa. The circuitous route is an attempt to outwit authorities’ risk protocols on whether to check a container, which are based partly on the country of origin. In 2025, Ghana became the third most significant country of origin for drug seizures in Belgium, behind Ecuador and Costa Rica, while Colombia – the traditional source – slipped to fifth place.

 

 

Smugglers are also trying to avoid major ports altogether by dropping illegal cargo at sea. “Mother vessels” from South America transfer cocaine to smaller boats or toss waterproof bundles with floats and GPS trackers into the sea to be recovered later. Police have identified these practices as far south as the Canary Islands and up to the Kattegat, the strait separating Denmark and Sweden.

 

It may be only a matter of time before drugs can be sent across the Atlantic without any crew. Europol reported this year that semi-submersible vessels equipped with antennas and modems “are likely already capable of crossing the Atlantic without a crew onboard”. Drug traffickers have also been known to take to the skies: Vanderwaeren recalled Brazilian authorities a few years ago intercepting a cocaine-laden private jet that was destined for Belgium. He says his agency is looking at how to intercept aircraft, drones and submarines. “But it’s not an easy job to do. Very often you need the military also to support or help us with this.”

 

Authorities have hired more police, including a specialised unit to fight smuggling in the port. “We are very tough, we have put in many more state capabilities in order to tackle the problem,” Vanderwaeren says. As Antwerp and nearby Rotterdam have tightened controls, he notes, smuggling had shifted to France and Spain, “a waterbed effect”. Spain reported a record 123 tonnes of seizures in 2024, while France reported a doubling of impounded cocaine from 2023 to 2024. “You see more seizures in Spain, you see more seizures in France, because it’s getting tougher and tougher for the Antwerp mob to enter their stuff into the port,” Vanderwaeren says.

 

Letizia Paoli, the chair of criminal law and criminology at KU Leuven, says nobody knows for sure how much cocaine is getting into Antwerp. She believes smugglers are now trying less-protected ports and have changed tactics when targeting Antwerp. “Traffickers more rarely send multiple tonnes in a shipment, but rather they send more shipments with small amounts in order to distribute the risk,” she says. That hypothesis is supported by data showing a rise in seizures of cocaine under 100g and decrease in big hauls between 2023 and 2025 at Antwerp.

 

Paoli considers claims that Belgium is becoming a “narco state” unfounded as drug-related corruption remains “quite rare” and “low-level”, she says, especially when compared with countries such as Mexico and Honduras, where very senior figures have been convicted of taking bribes from cartels. Moreover, she found a low level of drug-related violence in Belgium, while emphasising she had a lot of empathy with the warnings. But cocaine use is widespread.

 

“Cocaine remains widely available at a very high level of purity,” Paoli says. “The drug traffickers here do not even bother to cut the cocaine with other substances, they sell it almost pure at 80%, 90% purity, which didn’t happen in the past. So this suggests that there is really more cocaine that they can get rid of.”

 

With academic colleagues, she estimated in 2021 that EU consumers were using 160 tonnes of the drug, which she says police consider an underestimate. But even were it much higher – say, 250 tonnes – she suggests that could still easily blend into legal trade: 2.1bn tonnes of goods enter EU seaports each year from the rest of the world. Given this, she says: “You have to come to the conclusion that one way or another, the traffickers will find a way.”

The Port of Antwerp-Bruges is officially recognized as Europe’s primary entry point for cocaine, having surpassed Rotterdam in recent years for the highest volume of narcotics seized.

 

The Port of Antwerp-Bruges is officially recognized as Europe’s primary entry point for cocaine, having surpassed Rotterdam in recent years for the highest volume of narcotics seized. Spanning over 160 kilometers of quayside, the port’s massive scale and high container volume make it a preferred hub for South American cartels

Seizure Statistics & Trends

Authorities have seen a dramatic rise in intercepted drugs, though they admit these figures likely represent only 10% to 20% of the total volume entering the continent

• 2023: Interceptions reached a record-breaking 121 tonnes [27].
• 2024: Seizures remained high at approximately 110 tonnes [4, 18].
• 2025: Official reports noted a drop to 55 tonnes, which investigators attribute to a "waterbed effect"—where increased security at major ports pushes traffickers toward smaller, less-protected coastal entrances in France, Spain, and West Africa [24, 28]. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Why Antwerp is the Target

Criminal organizations, including the Clan del Golfo and Albanian gangs, exploit several factors unique to the port

• Massive Infrastructure: The port is Europe’s second-largest by cargo volume, processing millions of containers annually
• Perishable Goods: Smugglers often hide drugs in shipments of fresh fruit (especially bananas) because these containers must move through customs quickly to avoid spoilage
• Corruption & Hacking: Gangs have used purloined security codes and hacked port IT systems to locate and remove specific containers before they can be inspected

Social & Security Impact

The influx of cocaine has led to what some officials call a "national crisis," threatening to turn Belgium into a "narco-state"

• Rising Violence: The trade has brought unprecedented gang violence to Antwerp and nearby Brussels, including shootings, grenade attacks, and the accidental death of an 11-year-old girl in 2023
• Systemic Threats: High-level officials, including Belgium's former Justice Minister and the Dutch Prime Minister, have faced kidnapping threats and required safe-house protection due to their stances against the cartels
• Corruption: Gangs target port employees, often using threats or bribery to recruit "insiders" who facilitate the movement of drugs onto land

Enforcement Efforts

In response, the European Ports Alliance was launched in early 2024 to foster international cooperation [12]. Belgian authorities have also implemented the "Stroomplan" (Flow Plan), deploying nine new mobile scanners and hundreds of additional personnel to increase the scanning rate of high-risk containers

 

‘The tsunami just keeps coming’: Europe’s growing cocaine market

 

‘The tsunami just keeps coming’: Europe’s growing cocaine market

 

Customs officials face losing battle as €10bn cocaine trade leads to dramatic increase in violent crime in north-west Europe

 

Jon Henley

Jon Henley in Le Havre

@jonhenley

Wed 18 Oct 2023 06.00 CEST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/tsunami-keeps-coming-europe-growing-cocaine-market

 

Squeezed between the two channels of France’s biggest container port is a warren of narrow alleyways, blowsy 1950s bungalows and – along a windblown high road – a disheartening parade of shuttered shops.

 

Les Neiges is Le Havre’s dockers’ district. At the end of each side street stands a 3-metre, steel-and-concrete fence topped with razor wire; beyond that, dipping and swivelling, the cranes and gantries that process more than 3m containers a year.

 

Hidden away in those shipping containers, stashed among the bananas, frozen prawns, cane sugar and canned fruit, is an ever-increasing quantity of cocaine. Of the record 27 tonnes of the drug seized in France last year, more than a third was intercepted in the Normandy port.

 

“What we’re actually seeing,” said Laurent Laniel of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), “is a concerted, ongoing attempt to flood Europe with cocaine. It’s an expanding market, and it shows no sign of slowing.”

 

Each year since 2017, Laniel said, EU police and customs officers have seized more of the drug than the last. In 2021, the most recent year for which full data is available, it was 303 tonnes – five times more than a decade ago. “And that’s just what we intercepted,” he said. “Right now, it doesn’t seem like a battle we’re winning.”

 

The consequences, within and beyond the continent’s key north-western gateways of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Le Havre, are spiralling corruption as the drug cartels bid to co-opt port logistics firms, local union officials and politicians, even the judicial system – and a dramatic increase in violent crime.

 

 

As South American traffickers link up with European organised crime gangs to share the spoils of a €10bn market, the Netherlands, Belgium and France have witnessed drug-related contract killings, torture, bombings, shootouts and deaths. Credible plans have been uncovered to kidnap senior government ministers.

 

In Les Neiges, unsurprisingly, it’s not something people much want to talk about. “Seriously?” asked one longtime resident, standing foursquare on her doorstep and declining to give her name. “You don’t seriously expect to find anyone round here who’ll be happy to tell you about that?”

 

With reason. Last year, a few hundred metres from here, police opened fire on a group of men unloading cellophane-wrapped bricks of cocaine from a container. In another incident reminiscent of Mexico or Colombia, heavily armed criminals stormed a high-security warehouse to liberate their stash.

 

This February, six local men, all of whom grew up in or operated out of Les Neiges – including Louis Bellahcène, alias “Doudou” or the “King of the Port” – were handed prison sentences totalling more than 100 years for helping to smuggle 1.3 tonnes of South American cocaine out of the terminal.

 

Unable to resist the temptation – as one said at his trial – of “earning a year’s salary in a couple of hours”, dozens of Le Havre’s 2,200 dockers, as well as port agents, truck drivers and other port workers, have been arrested over the past five years.

 

For those who hesitate, the cocaine cartels have other, more forceful methods. More than 30 port workers have been kidnapped or held hostage since 2017. In 2020, one – a 40-year-old union leader and father of four – was beaten to death and dumped behind a local school; two years earlier, another was found alive but horribly tortured, his calves repeatedly stabbed with a screwdriver.

 

Some give way to the coercion. “Guys will come up to them at the school gates, or in a cafe, and show them smartphone photos of their wife and kids,” says Valérie Giard, a lawyer who has defended several. “They say: do what we say, or they get it.”

 

 

Many, though, need little encouragement: according to a list of tariffs found by police, the going rate for helping to extract a container from the port is €75,000. Moving it out of CCTV range or closer to a fence will earn you €50,000, while a loan of your security badge is worth €10,000. Recruiters can earn €100,000 per operation.

 

The sums are tiny compared with the drug gangs’ staggering profits: a kilo of cocaine bought for $1,000 in Colombia is worth more than €35,000 in Europe and, once smuggled out of port and cut – or diluted with other substances – can be sold on the street (or, more likely, ordered by WhatsApp or Signal) for €50 to €70 a gram.

 

Cultivation of coca leaves in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru has been rising since 2014, according to a report this year by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and surged by 35% from 2020 to 2021. Meanwhile, global cocaine manufacture has surpassed 2,000 tonnes, double the 2014 figure. The drug is also 40% purer now than in 2010.

 

In Europe the drug sells at up to twice the price in the US, where the market is now saturated. With an estimated 3.5 million Europeans using cocaine in 2021, four times more than 20 years ago, Europol puts the total street-level value of the European cocaine market at somewhere between €7.6bn and €10.5bn.

 

“With those kinds of sums involved, the logistics chain has become very efficient,” Laniel said. “It uses mostly containers, but also yachts, fishing boats, private jets, now manned semi-submersibles or submarine drones. And once it gets here, there’s a veritable European army to distribute it – we estimate at least 100,000 people.”

 

The business is largely controlled by Mexican mafia gangs, police say, who once served as middlemen for the Colombian Cali and Medellín cartels but are now in command of much of the chain, from financing production to organising the smuggling into Europe.

 

The main entry point for cocaine remains Antwerp, about 450km north-east of Le Havre, where police and customs officials intercepted more than 43 tonnes of cocaine in the first half of this year alone. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA

 

Shipments are separated to reduce cost and risk, and sold to pan-European crime syndicates including the Moroccan “Mocro maffia” active in Belgium and the Netherlands, Serb, Albanian and Kosovan gangs, and Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta.

 

The main entry point remains Antwerp, about 450km north-east of Le Havre, where police and customs officials – who, as in most ports, have the resources to check only between 1% and 2% of all containers – intercepted more than 43 tonnes of cocaine in the first half of this year alone, after 110 tonnes in 2022.

 

“The tsunami,” said the Belgian port’s customs chief, Kristian Vanderwaeren, “just keeps coming.” Brussels’ chief public prosecutor, Johan Delmulle, this year warned that with molotov cocktails, car bombings and gun battles regularly rocking the streets of Antwerp, the country could soon “come to be seen as a narco state”.

 

Antwerp has witnessed more than 200 drug-related violent incidents over the last five years, including 81 last year alone. In January, an 11-year-old girl – the niece of two of Belgium’s top accused drug smugglers, the El Ballouti brothers – died after five bullets from a Kalashnikov assault rifle were fired into the family kitchen.

 

A retired Belgian police officer, who asked not to be named because he still advises government agencies, said the hidden share of the drug business in Antwerp, Europe’s second busiest port, was “just huge.”

 

About 100km further up the coast, in Europe’s largest port of Rotterdam, a reinforced customs operation – including the full automisation of the port’s cargo terminals – has made things “significantly more difficult” for the smugglers and helped reduce seizures from 70 to 47 tonnes last year, according to a senior customs official, Ger Scheringa.

 

But drug-related violence has reached unimagined heights in the Netherlands. In July 2021, the investigative TV journalist Peter R de Vries was gunned down in a car park in Amsterdam and died nine days later. A crime specialist, one of his sources was the key state witness against alleged drug baron Ridouan Taghi, arrested in Dubai in 2019.

 

A lawyer involved in the same case, Derk Wiersum, was also shot dead in 2019, prompting – along with incidents such as the discovery of a shipping container transformed into a torture chamber – the mayors of Amsterdam and Rotterdam to warn of a “culture of crime and violence … taking on Italian traits”.

 

Everywhere, police and customs investigations are being heavily ramped up. Le Havre brought in 25 new officers this year, while Antwerp has a new drug commissioner and aims to ensure all containers coming from South America are automatically scanned within the next five years.

 

Police have made breakthroughs: in 2021, Sky ECC, a messaging service seen as uncrackable by its users, was broken, leading to thousands of new drug cases. But the overall impact on Europe’s ballooning cocaine trade was minimal. “You take one out, another just replaces him,” said a French investigator.

 

Increasingly, too, the traffickers are spreading their bets. As seizures in Rotterdam have shrunk, those in nearby Vlissingen have doubled. Smaller, less well-guarded ports are being targeted: fishing harbours in Spain and Portugal, minor Swedish ports. Last year, for the first time, 600kg of cocaine was seized in Montoir-de-Bretagne, a small roll-on, roll-off dock in the Loire estuary.

 

Equally alarmingly, instead of making cocaine in South America and shipping the finished product to Europe, the gangs are also setting up sophisticated factories on the continent to extract cocaine paste hidden in maritime cargos ranging from plastic polymers to asphalt products, and then transform it into powder, Laniel said.

 

More than 30 such labs were dismantled on the continent in 2021, according to the EMCDDA. In May, a police raid on a remote cottage in Galicia, north-west Spain, allegedly found eight “cooks” working around the clock. Once fully operational, the new production line could have turned out 200kg of cocaine a day, Spanish police said.

 

“Cocaine kills people slowly,” Laniel said. “It also brings with it unprecedented violence, and corruption. A lot of bad people are making huge amounts of money. It’s being taken seriously now. But it’s a massive challenge.”

 

 This article was amended on 18 October 2023. An earlier version said that Antwerp was about 450km north-west of Le Havre instead of north-east.

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