The Wall Street Journal: “Antwerp is now a drug economy, a copy of Miami in the 1980s” (Antwerp)
The port of Antwerp brought centuries to the city. Art, fashion and especially diamond. But another import product, one of which the city is not proud, has triggered much larger flows of money. White powder, read cocaine, has fueled corruption and violence in the city, the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
The newspaper compares the city of Bart De Wever to Miami in the 1980s. According to The Wall Street Journal, 88 containers of hidden coca from America will be seized in this year. A tenfold increase in the amount in the year 2014. Probably a multiple of this has still been noticed.
The port of Antwerp handles about 20,000 containers every day. Only 1 in 42 of these is checked, according to De Tijd newspaper earlier this year. He does note that this is an improvement compared to two years ago. Then customs checked 1 in every 100 containers.
No longer Spanish, but those of Antwerp and Rotterdam are now the main gateway for cocaine to the continent, according to a joint report by the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime and Europol.
Because smugglers flood the continent with cocaine, Europe would now have become a bigger market than the US, according to the US DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). A total of 4.3 million Europeans use coine, according to a report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) in 2019. The numbers will have risen further, driven by the pandemic.
The DEA compares the situation in Antwerp to Miami in the 1980s. The Miami drug war was developed through a series of armed conflicts between the United States government and several drug cartels, essentially the Medellín cartel. The war was fueled mainly by the illegal cocaine trade.
In a response, Mayor Bart de Wever (N-VA) says: “Bad money drives out good money. It drives honest people away.” According to him, every layer of society is infected.
Last year, during the largest drug investigation ever in our country, after deciphering the encrypted telephones of Sky ECC, it was discovered that officials, agents and port personnel were working together with the drug gangs.