Illegal drug trade adapts to pandemic challenges
Unlike most companies that still struggle because of the pandemic, the illegal drug trade seems to have adapted much faster to the new normal.Drug-dealing groups in Brazil have created new routes and made use of their structure to keep cocaine flowing both to the local retail and to the lucrative European market.
One of the main actors in this type of crime in Brazil is Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), a large criminal organization based in São Paulo that has many of its members in prison.
Last month, the Prosecution Service of São Paulo estimated that the group had $100 million in gross sales only with drug sales.
In addition to PCC, Comando Vermelho, of Rio de Janeiro, and Família do Norte, in Amazonas, are important forces of the organized crime in the country's drug trade.
Right in the beginning of the pandemic, cocaine's global supply chain underwent adjustments. The drug, produced in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, is sent to the US via Central America and to Europe via Brazil - in the latter case, often with scales in Africa. In April, for example, 555 kilos of cocaine about to depart to the Port of Abidjan, in Ivory Coast, were found at the Port of Paranaguá, in Paraná state."Even before the imposition of lockdowns, the prices of cocaine, as well as of heroin, soared because of the expectation that the supply would be affected," says Robert Muggah, a specialist in security and co-founder of the renowned think tank Instituto Igarapé.
A recent report by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said the pandemic created transportation difficulties to suppliers to the American market, and that retail prices in some cities of the country doubled. Yet not all drug dealers had problems.
"Some Latin American dealers acted ahead of a reduction in global trade [which could reduce the movement of ships and planes, always used as clandestine transport of the drug] and sent big loads and also increased their inventories before the effects of the pandemic began appearing," Mr. Muggah says.
He says cocaine prices may have risen more than 30% in the streets of European cities over the last few months, which led to an increase of consumption of marijuana produced at home or imported.
"But cocaine and other drugs continue going from Mexico and South America to North America and Europe," he says.
In Brazil, the Federal Police has already confiscated this year a total of 45.2 tonnes of cocaine. In the full 2019, it seized 104,581 kilos. Marijuana...
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