Reuters World News - Uruguay’s cocaine problem

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Join journalists Lucinda Elliott and Gabriel Stargardter as they speak to host Christopher Walljasper about their journey to trace a surge in cocaine shipments from Uruguay. The small, affluent nation is desperate from help from the U.S., but the DEA has shuttered its offices in the capital, according to sources. And the European countries that receive the majority of the cocaine also have little law enforcement presence.          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

long known for its beautiful beaches and being the South American country with the highest average income per capita. Uruguay largely stayed out of the trafficking of narcotics from places like Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. But that's beginning to change. On this special episode, we explore how this nation, nestled between Brazil and Argentina on South America's Atlantic coast, has found itself in the middle of a changing narco pipeline. How the increase in drugs flowing through the country has increased violence that local authorities are struggling to combat and how the U.S. and Europe are responding.

I'm your host, Christopher Waljesper, in Chicago. Lucinda Elliott has reported across South America for more than a decade. She now covers a variety of countries, including Uruguay for Reuters. For months, Lucinda and one of our colleagues, Gabriel Stargarter, have been digging into how this relatively quiet country has become a key stop on the flow of drugs out of South America into Europe. The most recent stats show that more than two metric tons of cocaine

was seized coming through Uruguay in 2021. that's, it's like 14 times the amount that was seized in the country just five years earlier. Now, a lot of that is smuggled out of the country through commercial shipping. So Lucinda visited the port to help us get a better sense of what's really happening. So I'm standing at the port terminal of Montevideo that looks over the wide riverplate estuary. On the other side is Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, and miles and miles of soybean crops are cultivated along this fertile riverbank that make up some of the biggest exports for both countries.

And those soybeans make their way out of here in containers. I walk roughly two kilometres worth of containers on the outside of the port, some that are stacked three or four or five stories high. And I've not quite reached the end. and it was from this port that a cargo ship of soybean set off for Germany in 2019 and a record one billion euros worth of cocaine was uncovered by German officials at the time. Now what caught the attention from international security agency and was a surprise to the Uruguayans at the time

was that the drugs not only went undetected, but that with a growing share of cocaine heading to Europe, Uruguay does provide the perfect pit stock for drugs heading east, something that international criminal organisations were taking advantage of. And this port does appear, you know, a relatively easy target. As I say, I wasn't allowed in myself. On my right is the port authority that says an estimated million containers annually move through the port, some that I've seen that are up to 14 metres long. And there are complaints and concerns that there just aren't enough safeguards in place.

And this is not just about stopping cocaine smuggling. Lucinda's reporting also delved into the violence that's affecting a lot of the people who live there. I was actually up by the market opposite the port earlier

speaking to a police officer who she said that there was a sort of a bigger police presence in recent weeks, partly because of the rates of tourism and that it's a summer season, but she warned me to really take care of belongings and that they would only be on duty till around 8 p.m., sort of a nod to be saying that I shouldn't be lingering anywhere near the port past that hour.

I wanted to find out whether those living near the port felt that things were shifting when it came to crime and levels of security. Yolanda lives directly opposite the port and runs a soup kitchen every Saturday. She said that over the past year, things had got a lot worse, which she attributed more broadly to drugs and trafficking. She was noticing how the neighborhood was being flooded with unfamiliar faces, she described. Possibly low-level drug dealers who had a reason to be there near the port. And what about the police presence that I'd noticed?

Was it helping? I said, if we've got the police, or when there's crucerer, it's full. But if no, no. She explained that they're only really around, when the cruise ships arrive in the southern hemisphere summer to protect tourists. Let's jump on it. It's going to get pretty hot. Lucinda teamed up with one of our reporters in Rio de Janeiro, Gabriel Stargarner, for this story.

Gabriel's been covering the drug trade in various parts of Latin America for more than a decade. I called him up in a very warm Rio. Thanks for jumping on with me here. I know it's hot there. My pleasure. How is this influx of cocaine and the cartels that are. moving them, how's that impacting the Uruguayan's everyday lives? So in 2013, Uruguay was announced as the Economist magazine's inaugural country of the year.

Five years later, a record 426 people were murdered and violence has remained sky high ever since. It's now a major political football and it's going to be a major factor in the upcoming presidential elections later this year. So this is a country which was, you know, byword for safety and success. And now they're getting used to grizzly gangland murders, which is something that they've never really seen before. So there's been a rapid deterioration. This is not a country on a par with, say, some of the more violent Latin American countries in Central America, Mexico, Colombia. But certainly within Uruguay, government officials, lawmakers, they've been seeing what's happening in Ecuador, for example,

which was also for a long time seen as a kind of tranquil nation in South America. And it certainly has not gone and noticed how quickly the situation in Europe in Ecuador deteriorated. How did Uruguay evade getting wrapped up in the drug trade for so long? So I think it's various different factors. But firstly, the cocaine production, which is pretty much entirely based around Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, has just exploded over the last few years, and particularly, during the pandemic. Concurrently, the world's premier market for the drug, which was the United States, is no longer the top destination and Europe has kind of taken its place. So as a result

of that, you've got a continent literally splitting at the seams with cocaine, and it's no longer finding its way up north quite as easily, and it's finding its way across the Atlantic to European markets. And Europe has itself become a kind of clearinghouse for the world's cocaine market. So, you know, loads in Asia or in the Middle East or even Australia are sort of brokered down there. And so countries like Uruguay, which has this Atlantic-facing port, relatively like inexperienced police, and it just became an easy target. And so it's kind of an accident of geography to a certain extent. And then just the timing. That's interesting. So a lot of this cocaine in previous years would be traveling

north into the US, but talk to me about why that market, I guess, dried up. Well, I don't know if it's necessarily that it dried up, but, you know, the drug trade is cyclical or it tends to be. So consumption patterns run for a few years and then another drug comes in. Obviously, states has been struggling really badly for quite a few years now with opiates and synthetic opiates. And obviously now in the midst of this fentanyl crisis, which is killing, you know, tens of thousands of Americans each year. So, As a result of that, cocaine is being consumed less, whereas in Europe, which traditionally had lower cocaine consumption than the United States' uses just exploding.

Near the port, where much of this cocaine is suspected to be shipped out, Lucinda also visited a bar that became a flashpoint between U.S. drug enforcers and Uruguay's authorities. So I've crossed the two-lane carriageway from the port entrance. It's a rather windy day, and I'm at a bar a few blocks up. The former DEA boss in Montevideo said that this used to be a narco hangout. Its former owner, who's known as El Turco, had long been suspected of drug trafficking by the Uruguayans. And a DEA informant came down here to the bar, pretending to be a fake buyer back in 2018. It's called El Perocquefuma.

It's actually closed. The sign is still there. As you can hear from the people around me, this is kind of a bustling port market where there are kind of restaurants, ice cream parl, a few souvenir shops. I'm told that the bar used to sell pretty simple fare, beers, Coca-Cola's, beef schnitzel sandwiches,

or Milanesses, as they're known. And the owner, Turko, also had a fishing business that gave him access to the port directly opposite. And he was surprisingly open with the informant outlining his whole operation

according to the ex-D-A agent. And the Americans were shocked to see that this was going on right in front of the port authority, as you can hear from the people around me. This is a fairly open space. So they passed on all of this information to the Uruguayan authorities. Now what happened next is open to interpretation.

The DEA claims that their informant was pushed out of the country and that the Uruguayans failed to tell them when El Tulco was finally arrested despite using the intelligence that they were handed. The Uruguayans say that he was arrested and know very little about the confusion over the informant but regardless, it seems whatever unfolded at this bar with this particular trafficker

scupper the relationship between the agency and the Uruguay and the Urulyne government and the office closed a year later. El Turco received a seven-year prison sentence in 2018. He declined to comment for this story. Lucinda and Gabriel also reached out to the DEA for comment on their departure from Uruguay, but the agency also declined to comment.

But Gabriel, what do we know about their departure? So the DEA, they ended up leaving in late 2019, and it was the result of kind of worsening counter-narcotics ties with their local Uruguayan counterparts, who they're accused of not sharing information on drug operations, and basically not being cooperative in terms of working together to take down this threat. But, you know, there were also concerns about, for example, them being in denial about the cocaine problem. And I think there were also historical hang-ups.

The Uruguay was run by leftist administrations for 15 years up until 2020. And some of the people involved in those administrations had a sort of traditionally, unfriendly view of traditional US meddling in Latin America and also US support for Uruguay's dictatorship. So there were all these kind of like hangups from which of like, there were all these like problems which dated back a long time to use politics. But then also more, there were also. issues just related to kind of, you know, the everyday, like, how the sausage gets made of police

work, which was just not working in terms of cooperation with the Americans. So they shut the office down and the final member of the team left in December 2019. And the new government is begging for them to return. But as you mentioned before, in the U.S., fentanyl has become such a focus. How has that added to maybe the lack of attention given to Uruguay? So I don't think Uruguay was ever a priority for the DA at any point in time. But I think in the last few years, that's become even more the case. The country is inundated with cocaine, but very little of it is headed towards the United States going to Europe. So obviously, you know, in the battle for resources, that's another sort of point that goes against Uruguay. But more generally, that focus

on fentanyl, and you see this in public remarks by senior DA officials, by senior US government officials, the focus on fentanyl now is so central to US policy that cocaine has really fallen by the wayside. So that really, according to what the people we spoke to said, and that's really kind of banished any hopes of a DA office opening anytime soon in Uruguay. So you mentioned that a lot of the cocaine is actually going to Europe. What are the authorities they're doing to address this? So one thing that both the Uruguay and the Americans could agree on was that European counter-narcotics authorities are just not doing anywhere near enough, given the amount of cocaine that's going to Europe.

There's very little policing of European police forces presence in the southern cone of South America and more generally across South America. The DEA has these huge legacy outfits, whereas sometimes Britain, for example, has just one police officer to cover Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and Uruguay. So, you know, there's just this massive disconnect between the amount of resources that European nations are putting at this problem and the amount of coke that they're receiving. Now, Europol, the EU's police agency, said it lacks investigative powers and can only support EU member police forces. Gabe, you reported that Spain is the only EU member state with a full-time police attaché in Uruguay. is there any indication that this flow of drugs through Uruguay will slow anytime soon?

I think Uruguayan authorities are very clear-eyed that this is a problem that they kind of need to get a handle on. I think that Uruguay is blessed with a certain degree by the fact that it does have stronger institutions than some of its Latin American peers. So they have every reason to kind of not let this get out of hand. but they're coming at it from not a very strong position, not very well prepared. And these invading drug gangs, they're just very destabilizing. The corruption eats away at your politics, it eats away at your court system. And once they get a foothold, they can be hard to remove. So, you know, Uruguay should be able to manage, but there are plenty of examples of countries,

one being, for example, Costa Rica in Central America, another byword for regional success, which is now facing similar problems. and these are very tough problems. That's it for this special episode. Thanks to Lucinda Elliott and Gabriel Stargarter for their reporting. Reuters World News is produced by Jonah Green, Gail Issa, Tara Oaks, David Spencer, and myself, Christopher Waljester. Our regular host is Kim Vennel. Our senior producer is Carmel Crimmons.

Lillita Kretzer is our executive producer. Engineering, sound design, and music composition by Josh Summer. To be sure you know what's going on in your world, listen in for 10 minutes each weekday. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or download the Reuters app.