A global boom in cocaine trafficking defies decades of anti-drug efforts

The drug lord had already escaped the law in three countries, and he planned to do it again.

In less than a decade, Dritan Rexhepi had built a smuggling business that ran from the fields of Colombia to the ports of Ecuador and on to the streets of Europe, Italian and Latin American investigators said, rivaling the influence of Mexicoâ ™s powerful cartels. His brand, carved into cocaine packages,was beautiful.

The Albanianâs rise from gunman in his home country to transatlantic kingpin is part of a global explosion in the cocaine industry, a trade that is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history. South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Cultivation of coca crops in Colombia, the origin of most of the world’s cocaine, has tripled, according to U.S. figures, and the amount of land used to grow the drug is more than five times what it was when the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993.

And production keeps soaring. A record 2,757 tons of cocaine was produced worldwide in 2022, a 20 percent increase over 2021, according to the most recent global drug report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

For decades, cocaine consumers were primarily Americans, and interdiction was a U.S. government priority. But despite the tens of billions of dollars spent in the U.S. war on drugs in Latin America, the industry has not only grown, it has globalized, with new routes, new markets and new criminal enterprises.

Nearly every one of Latin Americaâ ™s mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug, with Ecuador now one of the most important cocaine transit points in the world. Demand is soaring in Europe, which rivals the United States as the world’s top cocaine destination. Cocaine seizures in E.U. countries grew fivefold between 2011 and 2021, and exceeded those in the United States in 2022. While the United States remains a huge market, cocaine use has declined by about 20 percent since 2006, according to UNODC. As cocaine production was exploding, investigators said, Albanian criminal networks rode the opportunity it presented. They were critical to getting the drug to Europe and fueling consumption across the continent.

Rexhepi, 44, built much of his empire from an Ecuadorian prison cell, fostering connections with Latin American gangs and turning his cellblock into an executive suite…The new networks, investigators say, are often criminal coalitions of disparate and independent groups, rather than hierarchical, violently competitive cartels…The January seizure at the pig farm also illustrated the Albanian trafficking model, intelligence officials said, with third-party associates contracted for each link in the cocaine supply chain. Colombian armed groups handle the production and transport across the border, and Ecuadorian gangs take it from there. In a 2015 appeal, Rexhepi  ” using the fake name Murataj Lulezim  ” accused Ecuadorian authorities of confusing him with another man and depriving him of his freedom in an unjust way, without a single piece of evidence against me or a single photo that proves any trace of participation…My only sin, so to speak, is that I am an Albanian citizen, and I came to this country because of the publicity abroad, promoting investment…The cocaine lords continue to adapt, diversify and flourish.As law enforcement authorities in Europe have intensified interdiction operations, particularly at major ports in Northern Europe, drug traffickers appear to be shifting to other points of entry. The Netherlands and Belgium, home to the largest ports in Europe, seized about half as much cocaine in the first half of 2024 as they did in the same period last year.Spain, which has continued to seize record amounts of cocaine, appears to be surpassing Belgium and the Netherlands as Europe’s most important gateway for cocaine. Sweden and Norway also reported record cocaine seizures at ports in 2023, according to the E.U. Drugs Agency. Germany saw its cocaine seizures more than double between 2022 and 2023, according to the UNODC.  Traffickers are increasingly using labs in Europe to process cocaine or to separate it from other materials used to conceal it. The E.U. reported dismantling 39 cocaine laboratories across member states in 2022, up from at least 16 in 2019; one lab, discovered by authorities in Spain in 2023, was turning out 200 kilograms (almost 450 pounds) of cocaine every day.

New markets beyond Europe continue to open up in response to the surfeit of cocaine...While data for Asia is limited, cocaine consumption and seizures are rising in China and Japan, the UNODC reports. It has also noted increases in seizures in India, Malaysia and the Philippines, suggesting they could emerge as growth centers for traffickers…Cocaine seizures have also reached record levels in Africa, where the Brazilian criminal group Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) has expanded its presence and used several countries, including Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde, as stopovers for shipping cocaine to Europe, according to the UNODC…Some analysts speculate that Turkey, where officials reported a 45 percent increase in cocaine seizures between 2020 and 2021, could become a crucial corridor for moving the drug east.That’s where authorities found Rexhepi in November 2023, two years after he was released from prison in Ecuador. He was arrested in response to extradition requests from Italy and Albania.

The kingpin had traded one life of luxury for another, after arriving in Turkey on a Colombian passport under the alias Benjamin Omar Perez Garcia and settling into a white villa in a seaside suburb of Istanbul, authorities said.

He remains behind bars in Turkey  for now.

Faiola reported from Tirana, Albania, and Rome. Fjori Sinoruka in Tirana and Stefano Pitrelli in Rome contributed to this report. Graphics by Júlia Ledur